Statement on filing candidacy for the Senate of the Republic of the Philippines

Nov 12, 2015

When I resigned from the House of Representatives last March in protest against President Aquino’s double standards in his good governance policy and his refusal to accept command responsibility for the Mamasapano tragedy, I thought I was saying “goodbye to all that.” I was looking forward to a quieter life devoted to researching and writing a book on one of my favorite subjects: the current crisis of the global capitalist economy.

Over the last three months, however, an ever widening network of groups and individuals has snowballed into a movement to get me to run either for the presidency or the Senate. That draft has proven to be implacable and irresistible.

I have accepted their challenge to run for the Senate.

I am running to promote an electoral insurgency against politics-as-usual, injustice, inequality, and corruption. I am running because people demand a representative with high ethical standards, who’ll go to hell for them, and who won’t bullshit them like most politicians do. I am running because because I hate power and the only ones you can trust with power are those who hate power.

I am running because I can no longer stand by and allow our people to be constantly fooled, betrayed, and devoured by the very people they elect to public office. I am running because we need to dismantle this awful system of traditional politics in which our people are trapped.

I am running to oppose a foreign policy that makes our poor country hostage to the machinations of aggressive superpowers. I am running to help liberate our economy from neoliberal policies imposed by a global capitalist system that has condemned our people to greater poverty and inequality even as it enriches our greedy elite and foreign corporations. I am running to end the criminal debt slavery, to which our sellout elite is complicit, that turns over 34 per cent of the annual government budget to insatiable foreign and domestic banks and creditors.

I am running on a platform that will, among others, promote security of tenure for workers; complete agrarian reform; promote and protect the rights of women, indigenous peoples, and the LGBT community; protect the rights and advance the interests of our millions of OFWs; create jobs and expand housing for the urban poor; expand educational opportunities for our youth instead of enriching the country’s greedy creditors; and provide decent, adequate, and functioning mass transit for commuters victimized by plundering private monopolies and bungling technocrats.
I am running as an independent because I am my own man.

What makes me different from most of the others running for the Senate and the presidency? My record. I have promised and delivered. I have been arrested and imprisoned. I have been consistent in my advocacies. I have called a spade a spade. I have gone to the extent of breaking the law in order to expose and destroy those forces that oppress our people. I have gone after those who sexually exploit and traffic our women. I broke publicly with a hypocritical president who refused to dismiss his corrupt cronies. I resigned from Congress rather than support an administration that had ceased to live up to the reform agenda for which it was voted to office and turned itself into a self-serving college fraternity.

My bid is supported by a broad civil society network, progressive organizations, and individuals, including OFWs, that came together over the last three months to convince me to run. I said I would not run unless I had proof they would go to hell, 24/7, for my candidacy against politics-as-usual. The reason I took so long to decide is I was waiting for proof they were willing to do this. I am now convinced they are. I am confident their their enthusiastic support will infect the electorate and carry this candidacy to victory. The conventional wisdom is that this independent candidacy has little chance of winning. We are out to disprove the conventional wisdom by revolutionizing electoral campaigning in the Philippines. The guiding slogan of our campaign is: “Never, never underestimate the Filipino people.”

Upon hearing of my candidacy, a friend from the media said, “May the force be with you.” Yes, I will definitely need all the Force I can get from the Filipino people in this uphill struggle against the Darth Vader of money, ambition, and brazen power that is traditional politics. But like Luke Skywalker, I am not one to walk away from a challenge.

To those who today control politics with their money, power, and ambition, this campaign says, “May you rot in hell.” We will prevail.

Walden Bello

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 Platform of Walden Bello for Senator Campaign

In 2016, we mark the 30^th anniversary of the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship and the return of formal democratic processes to the Philippines. Unfortunately, there is little to celebrate. Instead of a truly democratic system responsive to the needs, interests, and aspirations of the people, we are trapped in a corrupt system run by and for the country’s rich and powerful families.

Corruption reigns supreme. The opposition is led by a man who has come to symbolize the use of public office to enrich oneself and one’s family. The president, for his part, deploys anti-corruption rhetoric to go after his political enemies while protecting and coddling cronies who are equally guilty of wrongly appropriating and using public funds.

Double standards in governance is just one of the problems besetting our country today. Poverty continues to afflict 28 per cent of our people and the inequality index is one of the highest in Southeast Asia. Agrarian reform has ground to a halt despite the existence of a strong land reform extension law. Close to 35 per cent of the national budget goes into the pockets of the banks as interest payments while education, health, and other public services deteriorate owing to lack of funds. Many have departed as economic refugees, leading to a situation where 10 million Filipinos, some 10 per cent of the population, are either migrants or residents of other countries.

US troops are back in force, at the invitation of the current administration, allegedly to protect us from China but actually to re-impose Washington’s hegemony, over 20 years after our people, in a historic act of asserting our national sovereignty, shut down Subic and Clark.

To the younger generation that grew up after Marcos’ overthrow, the so-called EDSA Republic is perceived as a failure. This is the reason that many of them have been seduced by the false narrative propagated by the Marcoses that life was better under martial law. This deodorized version of history is being used to engineer a comeback of the Marcos family.

Is there hope for our country? My answer is a definitive yes. Yes, if those who seek a different future come together.

My candidacy is an insurgent candidacy supported by a broad network of civil society organizations, political parties, political movements, and individuals. It is an electoral crusade against politics-as-usual. It is aimed at mobilizing our people to rise up and destroy and replace this perverted democracy in the grip of corrupt dynasties and economic interests that has brought the country to the sad state in which it now finds itself.

This electoral insurgency offers our people the following program of action. It is a program that is intended to bring into reality the vision of government that moved the masses in EDSA 30 years ago: a system of genuine democracy dedicated to ending poverty, institutionalizing good governance, bringing about participatory politicis, doing away with inequality, expanding human rights, and protecting our national sovereignty.

The salient points of the program are the following:

Good governance

Restore trust in government by abandoning the double standards of Aquino administration and prosecuting and punishing all those who have engaged in corruption or other criminal acts, irrespective of their political affiliation. This will involve pushing for the investigation and prosecution of the officials responsible for the Disbursement Acceleration Program and for criminal and administrative violations related to the Mamasapano mission, including President Benigno Aquino III and Secretary of the Budget Florencio Abad, Jr.

Prioritize passage of the Freedom of Information Law and a strong Anti-Dynasty Law.
Promote participation of citizens’ groups and sectoral organizations in local government.

Labor

Stop exploitation of labor by capital by passing the Security of Tenure Act and phasing out all contractual labor by 2022.

Tighten up occupational safety regime and pass legislation that would dissolve companies engaged in serious violations of occupational safety, starting with prosecution and dissolution of Kentex.

Grant full trade union rights to the public sector.

Institutionalize collective bargaining by industry.

Support the unionization of domestic workers.

Agrarian Reform and Fisheries Reform

Pass a new comprehensive Agrarian Reform law that would, among other things, complete land redistribution to farmer beneficiaries; stop all land conversions to ensure food sovereignty; prevent private land reconcentration, and promote climate resiliency; and restitution of lands to those denied their lands rights, through forcible, deceitful and illegal conversions and land transfers.

Provide sufficient and effective support services to assist tenant farmers and farm workers to transition to productive owner-cultivators or cooperative partners.
Provide scholarships to children of farmers and fisherfolk as well as improved health services for these sectors.

Provide compensation to farmers or the families of farmers who were killed or injured while defending their rights to land.

Retain but thoroughly reform the Department of Agrarian Reform.

Establish large-scale program to promote cooperatives practicing organic farming among land reform beneficiaries, with farmer-controlled Hacienda Luisita cooperative serving as pilot program.

Strengthen the implementation of Community-Based Forest Management Program for settlers and occupants of timber/forest areas.

Revoke Aquino’s privatization of Coco Levy Fund, establish a Coconut Modernization and Social Justice Fund controlled by small-scale farmers, and work to bring all the Coco Levy funds under this fund.

Establish a Department of the Department of Oceans, Fisheries and Aquatic Resources separate from the Department of Agriculture ro more effectively develop and regulate fisheries in the interest of small fisherfolk.

Protect the land rights of fishing communities by punishing developers and other landgrabbers taking advantage of natural calamities to take over their land.

Establish housing programs for fishing communities.

Raise penalties for violating the ban on fishing in municipal waters by large fishing boats and take criminal action against them and local officials who abet their acts.

Women and LGBT’s

Aggressively implement the Reproductive Health law, including undertaking criminal prosecution of organizations seeking to slow or prevent implementation. Allocate at least P15 billion yearly for the implementation of RH law.

Fully implement the Magna Carta of Women.

Pass the Divorce Law.

Pass the Anti-Prostitution Law, which will protect the bought and sold, and shift the accountability to the business and buyers. This strengthens the fight against violence and objectification of women.

Pass the Anti-Discrimination Act, with strong penalties imposed on those who discriminate and commit violence against the LGBT community.

OFWs

Expand the budget for legal services and reintegration of overseas workers. Aggressively negotiate bilateral labor agreements with all countries that host Filipino workers that would give them decent wages and provide legal protection and unionization rights for them.

Establish a Department of Overseas Workers Affairs to more effectively respond to the welfare and interests of our OFWs.

Prosecute officials who engaged in sexually exploiting or trafficking OFWs.

Work closely with “sending countries” to increase their collective power vis-vis “receiving countries” so as to eventually set the terms of deployment of migrant workers and come up with a transnational regulatory framework that would protect them from abuse and promote their interests.

Devise a national economic strategy that would produce decent jobs and wages at home and thus reduce the pressure to seek work overseas.

Informal settlers

Pass legislation strengthening in-city, on-site relocation for urban poor communities and institutionalize socialized housing for poor, allocating 30 per cent of housing estates and high rise development projects for this purpose.

Pass legislation that of law that will establish the Right to the City of all residents who settled in their respective communities for the last 15 years with in-city, on-site relocation of those near rivers and waterways as the only option.

Universal Social Protection

Transform the CCT program to guaranteed basic income/guaranteed employment for the poor, to be funded from savings derived from reductions in debt service payments.

Promote primary health care to ensure that all Filipino have access to quality health service and eliminate the practice of immediate hospitalization for even simple cases.

Create a health delivery program that would encourage medical professionals to spend a year in poor urban and rural areas with decent pay before they go abroad and attract returning or retired medical professionals to render service in these areas.

Regularize Barangay Health Workers (BHWs) as parts of the civil service and raise their wages.

Oppose the privatization of public hospitals, promoting instead the upgrading of the quality of their services.

Ensure availability of medicines in public hospitals through a more aggressive subsidy program.

Monitor implementation of the Cheaper Medicines Act, and raise penalties for pharmaceutical firms violating the law.

Moro and indigenous peoples

Support passage of a Bangsa Moro Basic Law that effectively advances the rights and interests of the Moro people as well as fully recognizes indigenous peoples’ rights over their identity and territory.

End the state of martial law in Lumad areas in Mindanao. Withdrawal of military units from all Lumad areas and restoration of civilian control. Prosecution of all military and administration officials involved in the killing and repression of Lumads.

Push for a more effective implementation of the Indigenous People’s Rights Act (IPRA), raising its budget to at least P 10 billion from the current less than a billion a year budget.

Human rights

Establish an Office of the Special Prosecutor for Extra-Judicial killings at the Department of Justice that will have special and extraordinary powers to prosecute members of security and military agencies implicated in extra-judicial killings.

Complete the documentation of human rights abuses during the Marcos era and immediately compensate victims and their families in line with the provisions of the Human Rights Victims Reparation and Recognition Act of 2013.

Also ensure that, as provided in that Act, human rights education is institutionalized at all levels to prevent citizens from being seduced by the Marcos family’s attempt to whitewash the record of repression and suffering under Ferdinand Marcos’ rule.
Support an international binding treaty committing TNCs and other business enterprises to respect social, economic, and political rights of peoples.

Push for the development of a national human rights action plan.

Mining

Pass a new Mining Act that will ban mining by big local and foreign corporations, promote cooperative ventures in mining, radically upgrade environmental and safety standards in mining communities, and ensure that 75 per cent of mining revenues go to the community.

Debt

Repeal the Automatic Appropriations Act.

Through negotiations or unilateral action, bring the national down debt to 25 per cent of its current value. While these negotiations are going on, ensure that no more than 10 per cent of national budget goes out as debt service (compared to 35 per cent at present).

Cease contracting loans from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and Asian Development Bank.

Constitution

Prosecute corporations and individuals that violate the nationalist provisions of the Philippine Constitution through manipulation of the 60-40 rule to gain control of key areas of economy and strengthening of the Competition Act to cover monopolistic control by conglomerate groupings, starting with Indonesian Pangilinan-Liem conglomerate.

Oppose all efforts to eliminate or weaken the nationalist provisions of the Constitution.
Pass new Competition Law that will have a strong section covering activities of conglomerates.

Energy

Repeal Epira and bring back a strong role for government in the electric power industry from generation to transmission to retail. This will include nationalization of Meralco and Transco and democratization of the entire power sector.

Push for a moratorium on coal-fired power plants and coal mining projects and decisively shift to renewable energy in line with the international commitment of the government to reduce its carbon emissions 70 per cent.

Agriculture and food security sovereignty

Set the achievement of Food Sovereignty and the Right to Food as the principal goals of agricultural development.

Pass pending legislation that addresses hunger, including the Right to Adequate Food Bill.

Allocate adequate funds for the implementation and realization of the right to food in the general budget of the government.

Rejuvenate the agricultural economy as a foundation for economic growth through the adoption of “rural-centric” policies that aim to improve on agricultural production.
Maintain rice quota while bringing back quotas on all other vital agricultural imports.
Ban import of GMO’s and farming using GMO seeds.

Promote organic farming.

Ban leasing of lands to foreign agribusiness corporations or their dummies.

Phase out agricultural trade liberalization schemes and provide support and safety nets for local producers.

Improve resilience of small producers through greater access to support services such as crop insurance, credit support, seed subsidies, and mechanization.

Disaster Management, Climate Change, Environment

Establish a Department of Climate Change and Disaster Management that will establish mitigation and adaptation standards for the country, secure adaptation funds, and proactively respond with state-of-the-art measures to threats of disaster deriving from climate change, typhoons, earthquakes and other catastrophes.

Push for a climate proofing of the Philippine Development Plan and a review of the National Climate Change Action Plan in relation to the Philippines’ “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDCs) and push for the implementation of local climate change action plans.

Strictly implement the total log ban.

Adopt legislation to ban all environmentally destructive methods of fishing in Philippine waters, including our 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zone, especially industrial fishing methods employed by foreign fishing boats.

Macroeconomic Strategy

Dismantle neoliberal policies and adopt a macroeconomic strategy that has agricultural development the centerpiece, reinvigorates manufacturing and industry, links economic growth to domestic consumption, higher wages, and greater equality, and does not sacrifice the environment to rapid economic growth.

Reintroduce quotas for agricultural imports to strengthen local agriculture.

Revise manufacturing and other industrial tariff upwards, provide government subsidies for firms suffering from unfair competition from imports, and institute an industrial policy.

Undertake a Citizens Audit or Review of all bilateral and regional free trade and investment agreements; and develop a rights-based tool for assessing future agreements.

Education and Culture

Ensure that spending for education is top item in national budget, as mandated in the constitution. Spending for education at all levels must be increased by 100 per cent over 2015 levels, with added funds taken from savings from reduction of debt service payments.

Move towards free and universal access to education at all levels.

Provide adequate budget to address the growing shortages in public school system.

Provide a just compensation and positive incentives to public school teachers and other government employees.

Apportion budget to fully implement the welfare provisions of the Magna Carta for Public School Teachers.

Provide an immediate resolution to GSIS-related problems of public school teachers and government employees.

Enact Magna Carta for Private School teachers to protect the innate rights and ensure the welfare of the teachers in private schools.

Ensure an appropriate teacher to student ratio.

Relieve teachers from hazardous non-teaching related assignments, i.e., compulsory election duties and census enumeration.

End contractualization of public school teachers and ensure that LGUs hiring them will provide decent remuneration and positive incentives.

Pass the Artists’ Welfare Protection bill that will protect and promote the social and economic rights of artists as cultural workers.

Mass Transit

Speed up expansion of the MRT-LRT system.

Nationalize the MRT and fully integrate it to the state-owned and operated LRT system.

Prosecute MRTC management for failure to comply with terms of MRT agreement.

Devise an effective vehicle decongestion plan for EDSA, the centerpiece of which will be the radically reduced registration of new private cars.

Foreign policy

Follow a foreign policy based on the principle of non-alignment and independence of the superpowers.

Repeal VFA and EDCA.

Reject China’s Nine-Dash-Line claim to 90 per cent of the West Philippine Sea and promote the concept of regional commons for the seas shared by Southeast Asian countries.

Press Asean and China to begin negotiations on Code of Conduct in the West Philippine Sea.

Continue to pursue legal track to Spratly claims in the HaguRenegotiate ASEAN Economic Community to promote true regionalism, not neoliberal regionalism that will only benefit transnational corporationsPromote South-South regional and international agreements.

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 Profile of Dr. Walden Bello, candidate for the Senate of the Republic of the Philippines

Released by the Walden Bello for Senator Movement

Rep. Walden Bello resigned from Congress on March 19, 2015, because he could no longer support a hypocritical good governance policy under which President Aquino went after his political enemies but protected his corrupt cronies. His resignation was also an act of protest at the president’s refusal to accept command responsibility for the Mamasapano tragedy. He felt that his voluntary stepping down was the ethical thing to do since his party Akbayan, of which he was the principal representative in the House of Representatives, maintained its support for Aquino.

He is probably the only person in the legislative history of the Philippines to resign his seat out of principle.

Walden was one of the founders and served as the first chairperson of Akbayan, the Citizens’ Action Party.

Effective Legislator

During his six years in the House of Representatives as representative of Akbayan (2009-2015), Walden was a principal author of many laws and bills promoting the welfare of diverse groups of citizens and the citizenry as a whole, the most important being the Reproductive Health Law, Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program Extension with Reforms (CARPER) law, Amendment to the Overseas Voting Act, Martial Law Human Rights Compensation Law, and the Fair Competition Act. His bill institutionalizing the right of OFWs to full money claims for unfinished contracts was approved by the House and awaits approval in the Senate. He was also one of the foremost champions of the Security of Tenure Bill and the Freedom of Information Bill. Pushing the private sector to respect rights established by law, Walden, together with Rep. Arthur Robes, successfully forced Mercury Drug to follow the law and give a 20 per cent discount on medicines purchased by people with disabilities.

He served as chairman of the Committee on Overseas Workers’ Affairs, in which capacity he participated in the rescue of OFWs from war zones in Syria, investigated and pushed for the prosecution of government officials engaged in sexual exploitation and trafficking of women workers, relentlessly criticized countries such as Saudi Arabia for their toleration of abuses of OFWs, and led missions to investigate labor trafficking and labor conditions of OFWs in the United States, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Hong Kong.

Concerned about the country’s foreign relations, Walden authored the House resolution renaming the South China Sea the West Philippines Sea, an initiative that was supported and adopted by the Department of Foreign Affairs and, eventually Malacanang. He also assembled a legislators’ mission that made the first visit by a civilian airplane to Pag-Asa Island in the Spratlys, an initiative bitterly condemned by China. At the same time, Walden has strongly criticized the Aquino administration’s opening up of the Philippines to the large-scale and uncontrolled entry of US troops via the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, ostensibly to counter China. He has twice co-authored a joint resolution seeking abrogation of the Visiting Forces Agreement with Senator Miriam Santiago. Because of his advocacy for a policy independent of the superpowers, President Aquino criticized him as “mas oposisyon kaysa sa oposisyon.”

Anti-Marcos Activist

Prior to serving in Congress, Walden led a life of consistent activism. Upon completion of his PhD in sociology in Princeton University in the early seventies, he gave up an academic career to become, over the next decade, one of the leaders of the anti-dictatorship movement in the United States in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Granted political asylum during the Reagan administration, he founded the Washington-based Congress Task Force of the Philippine Solidarity Network and was active in the Anti-Martial Law Coalition, Friends of the Filipino People, and Union of Democratic Filipinos (KDP). Together with his associates, Walden broke into the World Bank in Washington, DC, and stole over 3000 pages of confidential documents, which provided the raw material for the expose Development Debacle: the World Bank in the Philippines that, many say, contributed to the downfall of the Marcos regime.

Walden was arrested several times for civil disobedience by US police, his first arrest being for obstructing the operation of the Institute for Defense Analysis of Princeton University during Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia in 1970. He led the takeover of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School during Nixon’s invasion of Laos in 1972. He was also later arrested for acts of civil disobedience against the Marcos regime, the International Monetary Fund, and World Bank. Among these acts was the disruption of a concert at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, in 1980 to protest the presence of Imelda Marcos. He was incarcerated in the San Francisco County Jail for leading the non-violent takeover of the Philippine Consulate General in San Francisco in 1978, an act of protest that was brutally repressed by the city’s SWAT team. Walden spearheaded a week-long hunger strike that led to the release of the protesters from jail.

During the collapse of the Marcos regime in Feb 1986, Walden led the occupation of the Philippine Embassy in Washington in the name of the Filipino people, dismissed the personnel of the defunct dictatorship, and handed the building to the representatives of the new government.

One of the leading global activists present during the historic mass protest that triggered the collapse of the Third Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in Dec 1998, Walden was beaten up by police, though he was not resisting arrest. Owing to his arrest record for progressive causes during his years in the US, Walden was for a long time subjected to secondary screening by immigration officials every time he landed on American soil.

Activist against Corporate-driven Globalization

Walden has not only been concerned with conditions in the Philippines; he has also written studies, books, and hundreds of articles on the impact of globalization and US imperial hegemony in Chile, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, China, Japan, the Middle East, and Europe. Seeking to understand and throw light on the dynamics of the global economy, Walden served as Executive Director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First), based in the San Francisco Bay Area, from 1990 to 1994. He also co-founded the Bangkok-based research and advocacy think-tank Focus on the Global South and served as its executive director from 1995 to 2007. Currently, he is an associate of the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute, where he is looking into global financial reform.

For his critical work on corporate-driven globalization, Walden received the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize, in Stockholm in 2003. He was also named Outstanding Public Scholar by the International Studies Association during its annual conference in San Francisco in 2008.

Distinguished Teacher and Scholar

Walden has also had a distinguished academic career. He was Professor of Sociology at the University of the Philippines at Diliman from 1994 to 2009. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton and has served as a visiting professor, fellow, or lecturer at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada, UCLA, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of California at Riverside, and University of California at Berkeley. Currently, he is activist-in-residence at the A.E. Havens Center for Social Justice at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Walden is author or co-author of about 20 books, among which are State of Fragmentation: the Philippines in Transition (Bangkok: Focus on the Global South, 2014), Capitalism’s Last Stand? (London; Zed, 2013), Food Wars (London: Verso, 2009), Dilemmas of Domination (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), The Anti-Development State: the Political Economy of Permanent Crisis in the Philippines (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2004), A Siamese Tragedy (London: Zed, 1998), Dragons in Distress (New York: Penguin, 1990), American Lake: the Nuclear Peril in the Pacific (New York: Penguin, 1988), and Development Debacle: the World Bank in the Philippines (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1982). His first book, The Logistics of Repression (San Francisco: FFP, 1978) was a landmark expose of US military and economic aid to the Marcos regime.

Walden has a PhD in sociology from Princeton University (1975) and a Bachelor of Arts in the Humanities degree from Ateneo de Manila University (1966). He was also awarded doctoral degrees honoris causa by Murdoch University in Australia (2013) and Panteion University in Athens, Greece (2006).

Walden is married to Suranuch Thongsila Bello, a Thai national. He was born in Cardona, Rizal, in 1945, to Luz Flores Bello and Jesse Bello, two prominent members of the post-World War II art, entertainment, and journalistic communities originally from Ilocos Norte and Ilocos Sur. He is the nephew of Dr. Buenaventura Bello, of Vigan, Ilocos Sur, the World War II hero bayoneted by the Japanese for refusing to bring down the American flag who was immortalized in the Hollywood movie Back to Bataan.

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