On August 23, 2010, a terrible tragedy happened. An enraged former police officer took some innocent Hongkong Nationals and 3 Filipinos Hostage that resulted to a more than 10 hours standoff and ended bloodily with 9 dead bodies including the hostage taker, Former Senior Inspector Rolando Mendoza.
There was so many theories behind the failure of the rescue operations but one so obvious as the apparent lack of training and special weapons of the special task force and the police. Everybody is an expert that they should have done this and that and I know most of us were bitter because of the outcome.
Media was also blamed for allegedly not being responsible enough to delay they news broadcasting and giving Mendoza a mode of having "eyes" outside the bus and because of his rage at seeing his brother arrested, he started killing the hostages.
Because of this, many Chinese people had come to hate the Philippines, websites like "www.chinasmack.com" have expressed their disgrunt over our people as to how we handled things here. Who could blame them? They were just showing the love they had for their countrymen. We could have afforded them more respect. If it were the other way around, the Filipinos would have reacted the same way as a natural result of our sympathy to our own.
To make matters worst, there were pictures coming out that there were students and members of SOCO (scene of the crime operatives) that emerged and they apparently were treating the site if the bus where the hostage taking happened as a "tourist spot" which angered the Chinese more.
In behalf of my people I would like to apologize. Not all of the Filipino people condoned this event, we too had a lost. I'm not trying to make excuses but Filipino culture entails respect and we have that value called "hiya" which means shame on what we have done and we do feel ashamed for the mistakes of everyone involved in this event up until now. They're mistakes were not just their own but also ours as one people. We do hope the Chinese can forgive us and yes, we forgive you too, starting myself, for calling all of us "monkeys" for the hate you showed to us and how some Filipinos showed hate back to you. I'm sorry, we all are. We understand that you only said that because of your grief. When your anger is gone, we hope you realize that it is not right to judge us as a whole. Our country has already suffered a lot because of corruption that it is the Filipino people that are also victims here. We elected another president hoping he will change the course of our country's fate but we have yet to see the results. As for the smiles you saw on the pictures of the students and SOCO, all I can say is that it did not mean all of us has forgotten to respect the victims, some of us are also still grieving and praying for their souls.
We cannot start pointing fingers now because we need to be united if we ever want to make progress. To start, we must accept our own mistakes. HongKong and the Philippines has had a very close relationship and it would be a shame to have a feeling of awkwardness between the two countries and their citizens just because of one event. I hope and pray we can move forward. We can never take back the lives Mendoza took and no amount of words of apology could probably heal the families of the victims who lost a lot when they lost them. We can also not undo the mistakes of everyone involved but someday, we will do better that's the only thing we can do right now but promise to do better.
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