Maria Ressa's Blog
April 26, 2013
FROM BIN LADEN TO FACEBOOK now on Kindle!
April 24, 2013
Sorry for being gone so long!
New Threats in a Peer-Networked World – From Chechnya to Boston
October 26, 2011
WHY THE FIASCO IN BASILAN
October 25, 2011
FIASCO IN BASILAN
November 27, 2010
LESSONS I LEARNED WHEN I WAS TEN
Family and friends are touchstones. They mark phases of our changing selves and mirror our past to to help us adapt to our future. Had a running conversation the past few days. We decided that our core selves were formed when we were much younger. Inspired me to dig out this speech I gave at a Beacon School Commencement in 2007. I hope you enjoy it.
Congratulations on your graduation! And thank you for asking me to think about some guiding principles moving forward.
When I was 10 years old, my family moved from the Philippines to the United States. I moved into a different world. The funny thing is that I remember everything I went through that time – and most of my life lessons came from 3 ideas that helped me in that transition – and continued to guide me as I made difficult personal and professional decisions in my life. That’s what I want to share with you today.
My first lesson is to always make the choice to learn – that means embracing change. That means having the courage to go in and try. More importantly, that means having the courage to fail – because really, success and failure are two sides of the same coin. You cannot succeed if at some point you haven’t failed. Most people, I realized, make the choice for comfort – to stay in what’s familiar, familiar friends, routines, habits.
Embrace and keep track of the changes around you. When I moved to the US, my instinct was to look for anything familiar. Good thing for me nothing was familiar. I moved into a completely new world –new language, new customs, taller and bigger kids. At one point, I didn’t want to leave the house, there was so much to deal with. And I learned to deal with all that change by quantifying what I was learning.
A few months after I moved to a public school, my teacher, Miss Ugland – whom I idolized – asked me if I wanted to move up one grade. I was afraid to move because I finally was starting to feel comfortable. That was when she told me, “Maria, don’t be afraid. Always push to learn, and you have nothing more to learn in my classroom.”
So mid-year, I moved from grade 3 to grade 4 and started all over again.
The second lesson I learned was to identify and embrace my fear. Again, I learned that when I was 10. Let me tell you about my first pajama party – something you will never repeat to another reporter!
How many here know what a pajama party is? A sleepover, right? Well, I didn’t know what that was, and when I got an invitation from the coolest kid in the class, Sharon Rokozny, to her “pajama party,” I asked my Mom. She said, “it’s a party you wear pajamas to!” So I thought, oh ok, cool. I can’t believe Sharon invited me. The invitation gave her address and said to be there at 4:30.
So on that day, I put on my pajamas and got in the car with my Dad and Mom. When we turned into the cul de sac I saw my classmates playing kickball on the lawn of Sharon’s house. BUT THEY WEREN’T WEARING PAJAMAS!
I turned in panic and asked my Mom, who sheepishly admitted she didn’t really know what a “pajama party” meant either! By that time, it was impossible to do anything else. Until today, one of the hardest things I’ve ever done is to find the courage to open the car door and step out.
When I did, my classmates stopped playing and looked at me. I didn’t know what to do. Until Sharon came to the car.
She said, “oh you’re wearing your pajamas.”
I said, “I thought we were supposed to.” I was about to cry.
Then she took my hand and grabbed my bag and said, “it’s ok. You can go inside and change.”
Good thing I had extra clothes.
You take a risk. You have to trust someone will come to your help. And when it’s your turn, you help someone else. That lesson stays with me to this day.
I learned that it is so much better to face your fear than it is to run away from it – because when you face it, you have the chance to conquer it. That is true courage.
My third lesson is connected to the idea of fear – except this time it’s about being in groups, gangs… being popular. Again a lesson from my ten year old self – because everything was foreign, I had no choice but to just observe. While there was pressure to do what everyone else was doing, I was too foreign. So I had the luxury to understand the crowd – but to not necessarily be part of it.
What stuck in my mind was the story of – well, I won’t tell you her real name – let’s call her Debbie – a quiet plain girl who was ridiculed because she wore polyester pants. Everyone made fun of her – although I really didn’t know why, I didn’t want to speak up and ask. God, what if they started making fun of me? You guys must know this. Better not to stand out than to say the wrong thing.
Well, I played the violin and one day after rehearsal, I found Debbie – who played the viola – crying in a corner. Part of me didn’t want to ask her why because I was afraid that people would notice. No one talks to Debbie except to make fun of her. Still, since there weren’t many around in the rehearsal room, I gave her a tissue and asked her why she was crying. She told me her father was dying, that he had been in the hospital for months and that her mother was desperate. We talked for hours and I invited her to sleep over that weekend. She wore polyester pants because that was all she could afford.
That was when I started standing up for Debbie. Somehow a few of my friends started helping me and slowly, Debbie’s life got better. It also taught me a crucial lesson about the cruelty of herd mentality. Here’s what I learned about popularity – people like you if you give them what they want. The question is – is it what you want? More importantly, is it what you want to be?
These lessons stay with me until today. I try to understand crowds and herd mentality but not to be part of them until and unless I believe in the things they stand for.
It sounds a little crazy to say these three ideas guide me today as head of ABS-CBN News & Current Affairs, but they do. The push is to learn, to embrace and conquer my fears, and to understand group dynamics and how that can test your ideas of right and wrong. I hope these ideas help you as much as they helped me.
Thank you.
November 18, 2010
BILL CLINTON: GHOSTS FROM THE PAST
For eight years, he was the world’s most powerful man, but wielding that power – at times – carried great personal costs. Now 64 years old, former US President Bill Clinton visibly aged since we last met – his face more lined and gaunt, his voice thinner. We were in front of an audience of leaders, which represented Philippine history – former presidents Fidel Ramos and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, former first lady Imelda Marcos and her son Bongbong Marcos, numerous politicians and top business executives.
“How did that much power affect you personally,” I asked.
“I think having that much power made me a lot more humble,” he responded. “You realize that you’re not quite as smart as you thought you were.” The audience laughed.
“I think people should use their power vigorously but humbly. Anybody who exercises power vigorously risks his or her own soul,” he added. “You might make a mistake. In fact, if you make a lot of decisions, you will make a mistake.”
I’ve interviewed Clinton several times: charming, expansive, he exudes power and confidence. What’s even more striking is that nearly each time, he admitted something he could’ve done better. In our 2001 interview at the birth of a new nation, he said he could’ve done more for East Timor – that the US could have gotten involved earlier to help prevent some of the 2,000 deaths from the Indonesian military’s scorched earth policy.
That came a few years after two mistakes he admitted: Rwanda, which he called his “worst failure,” and Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern who sparked a scandal that led to his impeachment by the House of Representatives in 1998.
During the November 10 forum in Manila, Clinton repeatedly mentioned Rwanda, where 800,000 people were methodically slaughtered in “about 90 days” of ethnic cleansing in 1994. His administration was accused of ignoring what many called the most horrific violence of the 20 th century. 16 years later, the man who could have stemmed the genocide seems to still be atoning for his government’s inaction.
He said, “I’ve been doing a lot of work in Rwanda. We helped them develop their health care system, and I’ve worked with farmers there. We’ve helped them double, in some cases, triple their incomes.”
He used Rwanda as an example for how the Philippines can move forward: “Their per capita income four years after the genocide was only $268/year, less than a dollar a day. They quadrupled their income in a decade. No other country in the world did it, and they did it with this relentless focus on the future. They developed this amazing capacity to abandon the grievance.”
In 2007 when he was campaigning for his wife, Hillary, he explained she wanted him to intervene in Rwanda. “I believe if I had moved, we might have saved at least a third of those lives,” he said.
Bill and Hillary Clinton have long campaigned for and defended each other. When allegations of the Lewinsky affair first erupted in 1998, Hillary defended her husband against what she called “a vast, right-wing conspiracy” – the latest, she added, in a long collaborative series of charges by his political enemies.
In his memoir published in 2004, Mr. Clinton said they had endured “lies and abuse … intensely personal attacks” during their very public lives, but he admitted that he lied to his wife and daughter about Monica Lewinsky. “I was ashamed of what I had done,” he wrote, “and that I had kept everything to myself in an effort to avoid hurting my family and undermining the presidency.”
The day after he told his wife and daughter the truth, their family went to their annual vacation in Martha’s Vineyard. He wrote: “I spent the first couple of days alternating between begging for forgiveness and planning the strikes on al Qaeda.”
That ability to handle intense personal pain and the pressure of the presidency intrigued me. Leadership has its costs: in our world today, it often means stripping away any notions of privacy. Anything can and will be used against you. No one knows this better than Bill and Hillary Clinton.
As we exited the stage of the forum, I asked him how he dealt with the personal attacks and his own uncertainty. How did he manage to lead and stay focused?
“I wish you had asked me that in front of the audience. You have to set up a system, and you have to work relentlessly on your own state of mind,” he answered animatedly. “I worked out a system, and I tried to train myself to take the criticism seriously but not personally.”
His eyes were sparkling, and I could see people on the side trying to catch his attention. The stage manager signaled for me to return onstage to close the forum. I asked him if he would go out again to answer the question, but he declined.
“People are already leaving,” he said. So I ran to the podium and thanked everyone for coming. When I returned backstage, I was surprised to see Clinton waiting for me. He picked up where we left off.
“Most great contests, even athletic contests, given a reasonable distribution of talent and resources, are head games,” he said. “I didn’t run for this job to sit around and worry about me and what people were saying about me, and every minute I spend doing that is a minute I am robbing from the American people. I am stealing from them and handing my adversaries a victory.”
“How did you do it,” I asked. “How did you not let it affect you?”
We moved away from the stage as he answered: “I set up a system. I told my staff, I said look, if someone’s just taking a personal cut out of me, I don’t want to read all this stuff. Don’t bother. If somebody’s disagreeing with our policy, I want to read it all because I will take it seriously and ask myself if I’m wrong.”
His hands gestured emphatically when he said his next words: “But don’t let me get into any of this disgusting self-pity where I’m basically paralyzed as President and robbing the American people of the service that I wanted to give. And it required RELENTLESS effort.” He jabbed the air for emphasis.
His words came from grueling experience: for more than a year, aides said Mr. Clinton was all but “paralyzed” after he parsed the truth about the intern half his age. The political firestorm nearly brought down his presidency.
“The Truth is whatever the Truth is. But whatever the Truth is or was, you can still do some good every day of your life, but not if you’re in a knot. You have to displace that, and the best formulation I ever heard of it was learn to take criticism seriously but not personally because if you take it personally, you’re almost unable to take it seriously.”
“You can’t,” I interjected. He emphasized his point.
“Once you take it personally, you can’t take it seriously. And some of your critics are right. You remember what Benjamin Franklin said? ‘Our critics are our friends; they show us our faults.’”
Twelve years after the Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton has left the past behind and remains engaged globally. He told Filipinos “it wasn’t a big advantage to have been colonized by Spain and the United States” because it did not develop “the mindset that exists in Rwanda” with its “relentless focus on the future.” He urged Filipinos overseas to come home and help create a climate that has the “big mental and emotional factors that build a nation’s greatness.”
He seems at ease with the mistakes he made, speaking about the lessons he learned and admitting he may no longer have much influence over the US government.
“When you are a former president, you can say what you want, but people don’t care what you say – unless you are the husband of the US Secretary of State!”
October 5, 2010
"O brave new world! That has such people in it!" – William Shakespeare
I love the way Shakespeare’s famous phrase – and irony – has been picked up by authors through the years – Voltaire in 1759, Emile Zola in 1885, Rudyard Kipling in 1919 and Aldous Huxley in 1939. It is the inspiration for this blog.
In each of these works, the characters somehow are idealistic (or naïve) and jump into a future world with wonder, expecting the best of human nature. Often, they’re disappointed. In Huxley’s Brave New World, the protagonist hangs himself.
We are living in a brave new world – in the midst of massive change triggered by technology. It is changing the world because it is changing us, our relationships, the way we think, the way we feel, the way we communicate and, ultimately, the way we act.
Convergence is often thrown around as a technical term – the flow of content across multiple media platforms, but convergence is actually very much about people. It occurs within each of our brains and changes the way we interact with each other in our daily lives. Each of us finds our meaning and creates our interpretations and personal myths from the information we consume.
For a long time, I’ve felt first-hand how technology has changed my profession – journalism. From the fax to the cellphone as large as a suitcase to blackberrys, it changed the way we report. The internet gradually demolished the old world. Globally, journalism is being redefined by the migration of print and broadcasting audiences to the internet and social media. People want their news on demand. NOW is not fast enough.
Citizen journalists can be as powerful as traditional journalists, particularly in breaking news situations. Gone are the days when traditional gatekeepers, professional news organizations, defined the news. They are still powerful, but Twitter and FaceBook spread news faster, often in a more authentic way. I want to understand and harness – if possible – this democratization of power. My last presentation to IMMAP last month was on “Social Media for Social Change.”
I remain optimistic and idealistic but am woefully aware of the dangers ahead. I’ve seen the wisdom of crowds turn into a lynching mob: Andrew Keen wasn’t wrong when he said our world is turning into “a cult of amateurs.”
Still, I don’t think we can hide behind barricaded doors. Our world has become more complex, and we have no choice but to embrace it.
We have to make sense of these developments, and be conscious of how it’s changing us.
This is my attempt to understand myself, my profession and our brave new world. Thank you in advance for reading and sharing your ideas!
October 4, 2010
Noynoy Flunks His First Test
Filipinos have high hopes for President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III, who took power two months ago with the largest margin of victory in two decades and an 85% approval rating. His popularity rested mostly on promises of good values and cleaner governance—promises his mother, democracy icon Cory Aquino, made too. Yet his first major test in office shows how early political compromises are exacerbating problems in the weak institutions he’s promised to reform.
On Aug. 23, a disgruntled former police officer took a tourist bus hostage and after a long stand-off, killed eight passengers, all Hong Kongers. The government’s response was an exercise in incompetence. In public hearings that began Friday, police and politicians admitted that untrained, ill-equipped forces were used while elite units were put on standby; that national leaders played no role in the crisis response despite foreigners’ involvement; and that ad hoc, unclear lines of communication between local politicians and local police complicated matters. To add insult to injury, the authorities in charge left the scene to eat in a nearby Chinese restaurant precisely when the killings began.
The incident sparked outrage in Hong Kong, where the government has called for an independent investigation and compensation for the victims’ families. But Mr. Aquino only belatedly realized the gravity of the situation. His first instinct was to blame the national media for covering the event live, a sentiment that citizens in the blogosphere and on Twitter quickly echoed. When the hearings did little to quell public anger on Friday—two weeks after the fiasco—he claimed responsibility “for everything that has transpired.”
There is truth in that assertion. The agencies tasked with resolving the hostage crisis—the Department of the Interior and Local Government and the Palace Communications group—are divided into two political factions, both of which are competing for political influence. Instead of choosing between them, Mr. Aquino rewarded both with high cabinet offices.
The first, the Samar faction, is named after the street where one of Mr. Aquino’s campaign headquarters was located, and includes former aides and officials with long personal ties to the president and his family. Many of them, like National Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin, served under Mr. Aquino’s mother’s government in 1986. The second, the Balay faction, is associated with the Liberal Party and former cabinet secretaries who publicly challenged Mr. Aquino’s predecessor, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Younger and perceived as more professional, the Balay group is also associated with Senator Mar Roxas, Mr. Aquino’s vice-presidential candidate who did not win election.
These factional splits played a big role in last month’s bungled response to the hostage crisis. The Department of the Interior and Local Government is in charge of both local government and security, and the secretary of the interior usually controls the Philippine National Police. But in July, President Aquino stripped Secretary Jesse Robredo, who belongs to the Balay faction, of his powers over the police.
Mr. Aquino handed leadership to an underqualified member of the Samar faction, his personal friend and “shooting” partner, Interior Undersecretary Rico E. Puno. During the crisis, Mr. Puno exerted almost no leadership, preferring to let the local police handle the situation. There was little crowd control, and a local radio station was allowed to speak to the hostage-taker in the final moments of the crisis. During the later hearings, Mr. Puno said, “I am not capable of handling hostage situations. . . I am not trained to do that.”
The factions also played a role in the management of public information and press coverage. The Palace Communications Group, which in the past was headed by one press secretary, now has three leaders with cabinet secretary rank: the Samar faction’s Sonny Coloma and the Balay faction’s Edwin Lacierda and Ricky Carandang, the latter of whom is a former television anchor for my news organization. Thus on the fateful day, the administration had trouble deciding what to say and how to say it. Local officials were left to handle messaging, focusing on the details rather than the broader substance and impact of the day’s events. Hong Kong’s chief executive Donald Tsang was even prevented from talking to Mr. Aquino.
For many Filipinos, this bungling is wearingly familiar. The country has a famously weak system of law and order which often sees criminals go unpunished. Mr. Aquino ran for office promising to clean up this culture of corruption. That’s why the hostage crisis was so disturbing: It was a disastrous example of incompetence, political factionalism and lack of national leadership.
All of which points back to the president’s office. Like his mother, President Aquino is easy-going, well-liked by his peers, and shies away from controversy and conflict. That manner of governance might have worked in the House and Senate, where he failed to initiate or pass any bill, but it doesn’t work in the president’s office. The Samar and Balay factional split represents a real test of Mr. Aquino’s leadership—between familiar, highly valued personal loyalty and generational change and professionalism.
The president’s indecisiveness has already indirectly led to one tragedy. The coming weeks will show whether he can learn from his mistakes, or whether the Philippines is in for another Aquino presidency that has good intentions but bungled outcomes.
Ms. Ressa is the head of news and current affairs at ABS-CBN Broadcasting and the author of “Seeds of Terror” (Free Press, 2003).
Reprinted from the Wall Street Journal Asia Copyright 2010 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. It was originally posted on September 6, 2010.
Blowback: The Massacre in Maguindanao
Editor’s note: Ressa, head of the ABS-CBN News and Current Affairs Group and former CNN Jakarta Bureau Chief, wrote this piece for the blog of the CNN show, AMANPOUR. It was originally posted on December 1, 2009 at 1:29 GMT.
You can’t escape the laws of physics. Newton’s third law of motion states: “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” In the world of governments and their security forces, it’s called blowback – a term first coined by the US Central Intelligence Agency in classified documents to describe US and British covert operations in Iran in 1953. They helped overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh, setting in motion a chain of events which inspired the revival of Islamic fundamentalism around the world.
Blowback happened again in Afghanistan in the late 80’s when the US funneled more than $3 billion, through Pakistan’s intelligence service, ISI, to build up the Afghan resistance against the Soviets. That sowed the seeds for 9/11 and the major terrorist attacks in Southeast Asia from 2001 to 2009. Among the key beneficiaries was Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who helped train Osama bin Laden and thousands of Southeast Asian militants including the founder of the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, some of the Bali and JW Marriott bombers.
Blowback happened in Maguindanao in the southern Philippines – where warlords with private armies funded by the state wield political power.
It’s a complex situation: the power structure of government is a thin overlay on top of a complex social hierarchy based on families or clans. These clans periodically clash – feuds known as rido, which can be ignited by the flimsiest of reasons – a quarrel over women or a verbal slight. Clans became the foundation of electoral politics and determined the distribution of power and resources.
Add the fight against Muslim insurgents, first the MNLF or Moro National Liberation Front. Now it’s the Moro Islamic Liberation Front of MILF, which provided training and sanctuary to numerous Islamic militants, including members of Jemaah Islamiyah, Al-Qaeda’s arm in Southeast Asia.
The Ampatuan family’s rise to power began in the Marcos era, when it closely allied with the military to fight the Moro National Liberation Front or MNLF. When the MNLF signed a peace agreement with the government in 1996, the enemy changed to the MILF, now the largest Muslim insurgency in the country.
In the late 1990’s, Andal Ampatuan, Sr., avowedly anti-MILF, was handpicked by the military to run as governor against a rival who was supportive of the MILF. Ampatuan won in 2001 in an election that was largely seen to have been manipulated by the military. He was described as a “military-sponsored warlord.”
He gained even greater power after he helped Gloria Macapagal- Arroyo win the 2004 presidential elections. She won by such a large margin in his areas of influence, including all the votes in three Maguindanao towns, that her victory became suspicious.
In exchange, the Ampatuan family asked for money, guns and power. In July 2006, President Arroyo overturned a clause in the Philippine Constitution that banned private armies. She issued Executive Order 546 giving local officials and the Philippine National Police or PNP the power to create “force multipliers” in the fight against the MILF. In reality, the Ampatuans converted their private armies to the legal and more elegant euphemism – CVO’s or civilian volunteer organizations.
The military has its own term for members of this private army: Civilian Armed Force Geographical Units or cafgus. These are men who are paid by the local government and trained by the military – all deployed under the command of Ampatuan. Unofficial estimates of the men under Ampatuan’s command reach 800, including cvo’s and cafgus.
Reports of violence, abuses of power, and murder increased through the years, but little was done. People were too afraid to speak. Shortly before the 2001 elections, one of his political rivals was murdered inside a restaurant. Ampatuan was the primary suspect and was even charged, but nothing happened. In another instance, police said the nephew of a rival was killed with a chainsaw. The body was never found. Another rival was burned alive. In every instance, suspicion fell on Ampatuan, who created and exploited a culture of impunity.
This is the story of how the government and its security forces used the Ampatuans and their private armies to fight a proxy war against the MILF, and how it all horrendously backfired. After the main suspect, Andal Ampatuan, Jr., was brought to a Manila jail cell, he protested his innocence. “I didn’t do it,” he said, “it was the MILF.”
Blowback. In biblical terms: “we reap what we sow.”
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