Rear Window | Rumor-mongers on the watch list

Severo Portela

Here we go again heading into normal peak typhoon season! From July all the way to September, people and government departments are keen to prevent the dire consequences of a tropical storm slowly gathering strength in the waters off the Pacific and the South China Sea to hit the coast sometimes hard, sometimes harder before weakening in the Chinese hinterland sometimes softly, sometimes not so softly.

This 2018, the community and the government should be more watchful and at a higher degree of alertness this one year after Hato, the strongest typhoon to have hit Macau in half a century. Hato brought to the MSAR unprecedented loss of life and damage to infrastructure, and more than that, it exposed inadmissible failings in the emergency services and inopportune flaws in fundamental facilities. Definitively not in line with the standards of the international city Macau wants and deserves to be, but perhaps acceptable for a gambling capital.

Besides some regrettable episodes in the blame game, indeed, buck passing, what is truly important to everybody in a civil society is the hope that government and relevant departments work hastily to upgrade its apparatus to answer to a threat of the dimension of a typhoon like Hato. Maybe there is a lot of silent tasking and behind-the-curtains work going on to ready a state of preparedness that can be challenged by a typhoon season, maybe.

However, the common perception is one of an unbalanced importance given in favor of a controversial if not poisonous civil protection law to the detriment of the substantive collection of assets that are necessary to a structure of civil protection.

The introduction of an exceptional measure such as the crime of false social alarm is twice redundant, if we take as good the presumption it will only be applicable to serious stuff: MSAR civil law and in very specific situations, the security law (art. 23).

If the crime of social alarm is void of criteria just so to limit anyone who bona fide spreads information to be then declared rumor, we are in the realm of the rumor-mongers, scuttlebutts. The local Portuguese have a colorful term, Xuxumequa – but forgive us for the light note because this is serious stuff for the journalists working in all kinds of media outlets with the constraint to be correct and precise: They do, they do each day, don’t they?

Secretary for Security, Wong Sio Chak somewhat answers the posed rhetorical question by recommending that private media organizations should defer to the official narrative in times of crisis: Wong describes the information provided by the government as “correct, precise and simple”.  Anyway, the consultation period on the proposal to draft a Civil Protection Law will be over by 11th August.

On another note we have to say that typhoon season seems to encourage some creativity – no offence intended in the Pearl River Delta, especially in the Macau Special Administrative Region. The mess brought to the political agenda by the sudden report drafted by the Commission against Corruption on IPIM’s alleged irregularities regarding the investment residency scheme is amazing… since IPIM does not have the capacity for inspection. Add to that the handling of wanted businessman Malaysian Jho Low who reportedly entered Macau merely to vanish to an undisclosed destination… and you have your share of…simple news.