I. BANGSAMORO BASIC LAW

For me, I take considerations about the Bangsamoro Basic Law. Once the proposed Bangsamoro Basic Law comes before Congress, we can expect its key provisions to be challenged on constitutional grounds.Its critics will assail these provisions as tantamount to a de facto recognition of a dual-state situation. Constitutionality is also bound to be raised at the Supreme Court, which not too long ago, struck down a previous initiative of more or less similar import.We don’t know exactly how members of the Moro community will react to a failure to pass the proposed law, but we can be certain they will not take it sitting down. If the matter is not resolved before the end of President Aquino’s term, it will become a thorny talking point in the 2016 national elections. The challenge to the Bangsamoro law will be cast in the emotionally-laden vocabulary of “dismemberment” and “fragmentation,” mobilizing prejudices rooted in what one might call, with apologies to Freud, the narcissism of presumed wholeness.

While these skirmishes will happen on the political and legal fronts, the more decisive battle for a just and lasting peace must be waged in the hearts and minds of the Filipino people. And this demands from all of us not only the patience to understand a law that lies outside our everyday concerns, but also the readiness to examine our entrenched beliefs and biases about Muslims and Muslim Mindanao.

In what way has this region been a meaningful part of the Philippines? Its history has been marked by unremitting resistance to subjugation by external powers, including those representing the Filipino nation-state. Culturally, it has amazingly kept its coherence as a distinct entity in a predominantly Christianized society. Politically and economically, it has remained in the last 68 years of Philippine independence nothing more than a neglected and exploited periphery of a sovereign Filipino state. Its fierce sense of self-understanding revolves around the image of a community that is fighting to free itself from internal colonialism. It is safe to say that the average Filipino has always viewed this region with a mix of fascination and suspicion.

Because Muslim Mindanao has never felt the hand of an effective central political authority, it has spawned rival warlords who perform the basic functions of government. The republic itself has not been able to govern Mindanao except tenuously and indirectly—by integrating its Manila-sponsored strongmen into the circuits of the nation-state. The political history of the Ampatuan clan that ruled the province of Maguindanao for decades is a classic illustration of this arrangement. There are people like them in almost every town in Muslim Mindanao—armed tyrants who rule by intimidation and coercion. They signal their presence and their territorial claims by the multiple road checkpoints they maintain and the clan wars they now and then wage against one another.

The formation of an elected Bangsamoro political authority, whose rule, hopefully, will be free from the dysfunctions that have hobbled the existing regional government of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, is surely a step in the right direction.

If the Moro Islamic Liberation Front thought it was ready to create a separate Bangsamoro state, it would not bother to sit down for negotiations. It would simply announce its secession from the Republic of the Philippines and fight for international recognition. Indeed, this is a vision that many thoughtful Moros have not completely given up, seeing in it the only meaningful route they can take to ensure the survival and growth of the Moro nation. What deters them from pursuing this path is the awareness that wars of secession are open-ended events marked by protracted violence that can put in peril the very survival of their people.

There are many forms of regional autonomy, differing in the degrees to which the autonomous unit can effectively exercise self-direction and sustain itself over time. For political observers like former University of the Philippines president Jose Abueva, the Bangsamoro project could well be a template for a more comprehensive federal system of government in the future.

To me, real autonomy is an evolutionary achievement of society. No law can completely underwrite an autonomy whose conditions of possibility have not been previously established in the political arena. In the long term, even political authority will be empty without economic growth. And stable economic activity is not possible without functioning social institutions like schools and civil society organizations. None of these aspirations can be realized anymore within narrow ethnolinguistic or sectarian lines. That is why the case of the Bangsamoro may strike some, at first glance, as a retreat to premodern segmentary societies. But, when one considers that what is being consolidated under a single political authority here is a region that hitherto has been ruled by tribal fiefdoms, warlords, and local kingpins, it is difficult not to see it as a modest step toward political modernity.

The viability of an autonomous system lies ultimately in its ability to define its own environment. Autonomy is not isolation. It means, rather, being able to determine one’s own points of connection to the world. This is something that is not acquired overnight, but is developed only in the course of a cognitive openness to the possibilities that a complex world has to offer.

II. CALLS FOR PRESIDENT PNOY RESIGNATION

The administration of President Benigno Simeon ‘BS’ Aquino III should end now. But it should end in accordance with the due process now upheld by the admittedly strong institutional frameworks the Philippines now enjoys. Within these institutionalized processes are mechanisms for removing a president that like President BS Aquino today, has evidently suffered a catastrophic loss of public confidence.

The key issue here is the on-going wellbeing of the country. Obviously, the Philippines is now locked in an untenable paralysis thanks to President BS Aquino’s glaring ineptitude in the fields of statesmanship and people relations. This is not a good time to be suffering a lame duck government, considering that there are Chinese warships delivering building materials to construction sites on Philippine territory, a succession crisis that leaves Filipinos with very little options around decent leaders to lead them after 2016, and a cornered and increasingly restless Islamic terrorist infestation in Mindanao. A landscape like this would severely challenge the best of presidents. An incompetent one like BS Aquino will simply implode — which seems to be what is happening now.

President BS Aquino seems to be headed towards a personal collapse that could bring the entire Executive Branch down with him. He is now completely isolated from the people he is supposed to lead, those he once regarded as his “bosses”. Despite spending what was reported to be 12 hours of expensive presidential time schmoozing with the grieving families of the 44 massacred Special Action Force police officers, he still failed to issue categorical statements about (1) his role in the chain of command involved in the tragedy, (2) approaches to hold the perpetrators accountable for their involvement, and (3) steps being taken by his office to expedite delivery of swift justice to the victims.

Instead of being on the right side of the argument from the perspective of the interests of the state, his government dithers on crucial debates that demand absolute positions to be taken by the Chief Executive. His top “peace” negotiators have issued embarrassing statements that show a bizarre bias towards the interests of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) whom they’ve evidently cozied up to over the years they’ve been in talks with. Some observers have raised the possibility that head negotiator Miriam Coronel-Ferrer who continues to refer to these bandits as “brothers and sisters” may already be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending and identifying with the captors. It seems that beyond holding all of Mindanao hostage, the MILF have also all but captured Coronel-Ferrer’s sensibilities as well!

How much more abuse can Filipinos take from their demented government?

There is no reason to continue tolerating the leadership of an inutile president. Fear of an equally-detested Vice President taking over should not be an issue either. These are all just imaginary problems put into Filipinos’ heads by unscrupulous and opportunistic king-makers exploiting the now-chaotic political landscape.

The only sound argument provided by people who do not want the government of Philippine President Benigno Simeon ‘BS’ Aquino III to prematurely end is that a handful of “movements” to “oust” him lack credibility. I cannot really disagree with that argument seeing there are really just two key instigators in this circus — (1) commies and (2) agenda-driven shady characters. Commies who seek to remove the president using their classic tried-tested-and-failed “mass actions” are so last century (and so embarrassingly consistent in the use of their tired old slogans) simply can’t be trusted. As for calls for an ouster and establishment of some sort of “transition council” coming from circles backed by old-fetish disgruntled oligarchs, well, that’s just gonna be a repeat of the 1986 “revolution” that has now been reduced to a sad joke.

Quite a quaint sight to see people banding together into “movements” and alliances of convenience when, the fact is, said people really do not have anything in common in the way of shared philosophies. Then again, that’s pretty much Opposition 101 in Philippine politics.

The thing that ultimately makes such oust-[insert president’s name here] “movements” rather lame is that the arguments that underlie them are based on primitive tribal motivations rather than modern ethical principles. Commies, like their Islamic terrorist kin, for example, are, by nature, opposed to any government that applies ideas that fall outside of the scope of their little manifestos and bibles. And shady agenda-driven characters, for their part, are worse. For them, the issue is simply just personal.

The key to a more credible movement is to underlie it with sound principles that are scalable and timeless and not dogmatic (like those of the you-know-whos) in nature. This is the more modern more innovative and more intelligent way of undertaking an advocacy. Rather than attract a following by insulting Filipinos’ intelligence with tired hollow slogans, moronic demagoguery, ‘activist’ spectacles with a cast of clownish costumed characters, directives from creepy pastors and cult leaders, and has-been celebrities singing corny acoustic ballads, movements should be constituted around the same pillars of modern free societies — critical thinking, free inquiry, and continuous evolution.

III. REWARD FOR THE CAPTURE OF MARWAN MUST GO TO MILF It sure looks like the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) is laying the groundwork for the collection of the $6-million bounty (approximately P250 million) being offered by the US government for the capture -dead or alive - of Malaysian terrorist Zulkifli bin Hir aka “Marwan.”

Reports have surfaced that the MILF, which has been waging a decades-long secessionist war in Mindanao with the Philippine government, allegedly has in its custody two men who had earlier tipped off to authorities the whereabouts of the wanted man which is why a huge contingent of Special Action Force (SAF) police commandos was sent to get him last Jan. 25 in Mamasapano, Maguindanao.

However, it would be the height of irony if the MILF winds up with the huge reward after it was the “Fallen 44” SAF members who ended up paying the ultimate price in the top-secret but pyrrhic operation.

They were massacred in an ambush by MILF guerrillas and other allied armed groups while trying to flee Mamasamano where they had surprised Marwan in his lair, shot him to death after a brief struggle and cut off his finger for DNA sampling.The two tipsters, alleged to be members of the MILF, are now being closely guarded as they could be up for a huge cash bonanza from the US State Department’s Rewards for Justice (RFJ) program, which gives rewards to person/s who may provide details leading to the arrest of terrorists named in the most wanted list of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), if it can be established that the finger provided by the Philippine government truly belongs to Marwan.

Curiously, Philippine officials have never formally explained how the severed finger ended up with lightning speed in the possession of the US, but unverified reports say it was personally delivered by a high-ranking functionary of the Aquino government to FBI agents who were waiting in General Santos City, or wherever.The FBI will have to stamp “Deceased” on Marwan’s folder before the release of the reward to the two tipsters can be considered by the US government.FBI officials in Los Angeles were quoted as saying that while DNA examinations do not provide “absolute identification,” lab tests conducted on the finger taken from a cadaver in the Mamasapano raid indicate that it was Marwan’s.

The RFJ was the source of the $2-million reward to the fellow who led lawmen to Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and 1994 bombing of Philippine Airlines Flight 434. A nephew of al-Qaeda’s former No. 2 man Khalid Sheikh

Mohammed, Yousef was also behind the plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II while he was visiting Manila in 1995. He is currently serving a life term in a maximum security facility in Colorado.Anyway, the two Marwan tipsters suddenly gained VIP status when it was disclosed that only they stand to benefit directly from the multi-million dollar bounty offered by the US.US Embassy Assistant Information Officer Anna Richey explained in a recent story which came out in The Philippine Star that government employees aren’t eligible for the RFJ as it is their job to go after such criminals.Under federal law, only individuals who have furnished information resulting in the arrest of wanted persons are entitled to a reward under the RFJ. Since 1984, the RFJ has paid out more than $100 million to various informants.What this means is that neither the Philippine government nor the families of the slain SAF troopers would get a single cent of the $6-million reward money from the RFJ, which has turned out to be one of the US government’s most important tools in fighting global terrorism.

If MILF officials play their cards right with the two supposed tipsters, they could actually get hold of the cash windfall from the RFJ because of their close ties with Washington.This unique US-MILF relationship was disclosed a few years ago by whistleblower WikiLeaks in the computer files pinched from the National Security Agency’s data base that were then sent to international publications such as The New York Times and London’s The Guardian.

Recall that in September 2011, there was this front-page photograph in the papers showing US Ambassador Kristie Kenney strolling side by side with MILF chief Murad Ebrahim in Camp Darapanan in Maguindanao after a one-on-one meeting (which actually took place months earlier).WikiLeaks betrayed the fact that Washington —which had been itching to establish a base in strategically-positioned Mindanao after the US military was kicked out of Subic and Clark — was already working behind the back of the Philippines in helping the MILF attain its goal of a Bangsamoro homeland that critical lawmakers said would ultimately lead to the break-up of the country.

American intervention kicked in after the late MILF chief Hashim Salamat sent a letter to US President George Bush in 2003 seeking help in forging an agreement with Malacañang, which was the ill-fated memorandum of agreement on Ancestral Domain that the Supreme Court later ruled as unconstitutional.

Republic of the PhilippinesUNIVERSITY OF EASTERN PHILIPPINES

University Town, Catarman, N. Samar

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MARIE NELLE E. LIMPOCOBSN-II