The administration of “Boy Sisi” Aquino can look around for someone to blame for its failure to get its heart’s desire. But it will have no one to blame this time but itself and itself alone.
If there was something that was doomed to fail from the very beginning, it’s the palace-backed proposed Bangsamoro Basic Law. And what was conceived in subterfuge and hubris in Tokyo will, by tomorrow, the last session day of the 16th Congress, be declared officially dead in the Batasan.
I’m aware that there are still, at this late date, some members of the House of Representatives who are still holding out the hope that BBL will pass, like Malacañang, the government peace negotiating panel and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front want. And theoretically, it’s possible for the House to pass (after huge infusions of funds and projects to the usual lawmaker-suspects—even on third and final reading) the pet law of President Noynoy Aquino.
But that’s as far as BBL will go. For all intents and purposes, the draft law is as dead as Aquino’s topmost follicles.
My apologies to Senate Franklin Drilon (who also still insists that BBL is not yet dead), but the Senate will simply not be able to pass any version of the law. Not the House-backed version, not the version—way different from that first one— proposed by Senator Bongbong Marcos.
Now that Congress is closing shop to plunge headlong into the elections 97 days from now, there is simply no more time. BBL is as defunct as the 44 members of the Special Action Force butchered by Muslim rebels in Mamasapano—a reference that Drilon himself made, when he called the draft law “the 45th fatality” in the massacre.
But the Mamasapano killings only dealt the death blow, what they used to call the proximate cause, to the BBL. The draft law was dying from the beginning and has been dying ever since.
And the remote cause—or the root of the BBL’s failure to pass—is the unmitigated and totally unjustified pride of Aquino and his men that they (and only they) held the final solution to war in Mindanao. Now, if only the spectacular failure of the BBL to pass could instill some humility in this most prideful of presidents, maybe they could learn something from this debacle.
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The original sin, of course, is the belief of Aquino that only he and only through his BBL could peace be attained in Mindanao. This is what led him to call the Organic Act on the Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao “a failed experiment,” what made him repudiate both the Tripoli Agreement and the Jakarta Accords and what brought him to a hotel near Tokyo’s Narita airport to make a deal with the MILF.
That’s where it all began: When Aquino surreptitiously, with the help of the Japanese government, met with the head honchos of the dominant rebel group in 2011 in order to sell his peace deal—or, to be more precise, to offer the MILF the exclusive peace franchise.
Then, upon his return, Aquino proposed his MILF-approved BBL to the House, knowing full well that that craven chamber could be bribed into passing practically anything. And Aquino’s confidence was not limited to the Lower House; he was certain that he had the Senate (the well-larded majority there, in any case) in the palm of his hand.
Congress would soon show just how subservient it was to Malacañang when, a year after Tokyo, it impeached and convicted Chief Justice Renato Corona simply because Aquino wanted to terrorize the entire Judiciary. BBL, Aquino was assured, would be a walk in the park.
But Aquino didn’t count on the stiff opposition his pet law would encounter from local governments like Zamboanga City and from advocates like that city’s congressman, Celso Lobregat. Because the MILF had become too greedy, it pushed for the expansion of the old ARMM territory by plebiscite, which would make new areas by simply corralling a minuscule percentage of the vote.
Until Mamasapano happened, the once-small anti-BBL faction in the House soon grew, in volume, if not in number. The debates delayed the law’s passage, hounded as it was by questions of constitutionality.
Then, the 55th SAF company wandered into a cornfield in Tukanalipao, Mamasapano, to meet their death at the hands of the MILF and their doppelganger, the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters. It was game over for the BBL—and Aquino’s supposed ambition to top his mother by getting the Nobel Peace Prize that she never got.
Pride comes before the fall, the Good Book says. In this case, pride was compounded by incompetence and a virtual act of God in the form of a massacre that Aquino allowed, so blinded was he by his allegiance to those who wanted Marwan caught.
“Bingo,” as they said back then. BBL is dead now—and Aquino couldn’t have killed it more effectively if he had shot it himself.