IN the 1992 US presidential election, Ross Perot liked to ridicule politicians who go on television, talk about doing something and then feel they have done it. If he thinks America is bad, he should try the Philippines, where politicians are unabashed at announcing solutions to an improbable array of problems, where military men will repeatedly say they have the communists on the run and police will say kidnapping is under control.
The police make people believe kidnapping in the Philippines is under control. (The communists have been ''on the run'' for so long that they must have done a circuit of each of the 7,000 islands in the archipelago.) But the families and friends of kidnap victims do not share in the apparent pleasure that the surrounding publicity affords such publicity-seekers as Vice-President Joseph Estrada. People suffer in kidnappings, and victims die, as happened at the weekend to So Kim Cheng, 67, whose body was found in Davao, with gunshot wounds to the head and chest.
The kidnap victims and their loved ones are not the only people who suffer. From the jeepney driver in Luzon to the poor peasant in Mindanao, ordinary hard-working Filipinos are all victims when it comes to kidnappings. Pervasive lawlessness and corruption are a direct blight on the everyday lives of Filipinos and frighten away foreign investors who could provide the country with real hope after the moral and economic bankruptcy of the Marcos era, and the wasted presidency of Corazon Aquino.
The politicians, law enforcement officials and columnists who colluded in the calumny of the Marcos years like to portray any attack on their inadequacies as an attack on the Philippines. They would do better keeping their mouths shut, and focusing on what can be done to improve the plight of their people, attract foreign investors and atone for their misdeeds.