When is war not a war? Pt 2 When the media say's it's a truce.

Like the "truce" amid "peace talks" in Sri Lanka, the "truce" in the Phiippines with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front is largely paper. In an ongoing war since the 1960s, where 120,000 have died, Manila and the MLF and Manila have been, as Reuters (via The Scotsman) points, "talking for nearly a decade". Which ought to, if you think about it, be the point of the story. Forty years of talks and 120,000 dead.

That ought to be the headline instead of the silliness of a demand to have charges dropped against a terrorist leader.

But, then, the media, our own and international media, has no interest in solutions. No interest in the innocent victims of such eternal violence. T he media story is never the story of the victims, whether in Columbia, where the death toll is over 300,000 in their 40-year war with the Marxist FARC, or in Nepal where Marxist "rebels" as the media endearingly calls cold blooded killers are waging a Marxist war against the government. To the leftwing media, FARC is a "rebel army"

These are not "rebels" or "guerillas" or "insurgents" as the media likes to call them. They are murderers who work outside a democratic process in which they would never be granted authority by an electorate. They are anti-government. Calling them "rebels" is to endow them with respectability they do not deserve.