32 kids are taken hostage by the owner of a day-care center in downtown Manila.
I turned on the TV as I started making breakfast, and they were showing a man holding a grenade in his hand, inside the bus where the kids were being held. As it turned out, it was the governor, and he had taken one of the grenades that the kidnapper had removed the pins. The governor then managed to talk the kidnapper into replacing the pins in both grenades, and turning himself into the authorities who were waiting just outside the bus.
What struck me was, all the adults waiting for the kids stayed right there, no matter that the grenades could have exploded.
I thank God that these children were saved.
Apparently, Mr. Ducat has a history of hostage-taking. Plus, he’s known as an eccentric in his area, which is something the ABS-CBN story you link to hints at.
Wretchard at the Belmont Club blog – he’s Filippino, in case you or any other readers here didn’t know that – also has this to add:
“I made a call and apparently the hostage taker is a crackpot from Negros, the owner of a daycare center, who has pulled this stunt before. Former Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim, who handled him back when he was mayor, is leading the negotiations.
Link
Up until the incident previous to this, where he kidnapped some priests (CNN story here), he came off as being annoying but fairly harmless. But resorting to a gun and a grenade, even though no one was hurt, removes the “harmless” label from this person, no matter what his stated intentions were. Reasonable advocacy for better education is a laudable thing. Confusing armed hostage taking for reasonable advocacy is not. Regardless of what he was working towards, this man belongs in jail. Other methods of publicity are available that don’t resort to sequestering small children with firearms and explosives.
And I’ve been on those buses before in the Philippines. I do not joke when I say they’re simultaneously hot (due to the environment; the Philippines is tropic and therefore sweltering) and freezing (due to the few air conditioning vents, which are turned on full blast). Because of that, you’re either sweating buckets in the intensely humid air or, if you’re in the path of a vent, painfully frozen on the part of the body the vent’s aimed at. But you’re not comfortable. My point being that Mr. Ducat, for all his “concern” about the children, subjected them to abuse above and beyond the firearms and sequestering. He also kept them in a poor temperature controlled environment, which ran the risk of causing real health issues like sunstroke if you’re in a hot part of the bus that the A/C isn’t affecting. Or to put it real bluntly: It’s hypocritical for him to proclaim concern for children while he was abusing children. What the hell was he thinking?
I hope they put him away for life. This was beyond the pale.
Huh… interesting attitude from my mom. She understands Ducat’s frustration with the Filippino government.
Before I go any further, I need to state unequivocably that mom vehemently disagree’s with the man’s act. She also invoked the “jail for life” opinion you did, and said more than once “nothing justifies what he did”. But… having experienced that government personally, and after relating some of her stories of life in the Philippines, it’s obvious she understands his motives, even though she condemns his acts.
Oh, man, the stories she told! Mostly, she spoke of the contrast between the poor and the rich (she mentioned a story about seeing a mother and her children digging through the big garbage dump in Manila and eating what they found), the uncaring of the rich there (she talked about how popular charity is among the rich here in America, and how the rich in the Philippines practically never give to the community), the corruption of the government (didn’t know until last night that one of my uncles had lost a business, had in fact been forced to just abaondon it wholesale to communist rebels, but couldn’t get any police help because the local government had been paid off to ignore the ursurpation), and just story after story of how insanely difficult it was to tolerate the abuse on the part of the government, the shocking poverty, and the inability to do anything about it. Ducat’s utter frustration with getting the government to do anything positive is entirely understandable, apparently.
Wretchard’s also opined about corruption he’s personally witnessed. It’s just simply a common theme among expat Filippinos.
Anyway, Mom thought that if Ducat really cared about his charges, he should’ve staged a protest by getting all the kids and their parents from the Tondo area (that’s a notoriously poor area of Manila; it was that way even back in the 70’s, which was the last time we lived there) to demonstrate in front of City Hall. There are enough folks in Tondo to make it a sizeable protest, it’d still get the media and public attention, and the high road of threatened violence wouldn’t have been sacrified. But taking hostages at gunpoint was simply inexcusable, regardless of whatever motive was behind it.
Mom condemned Ducat, but understood where he was coming from. Given life in the Philippines, that’s a sadly possible stance to have.