A YEAR after the government signed the so-called Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), its efforts to steer the enabling law through Congress are floundering on the shoals of official incompetence, obsequious appeasement and woefully inadequate leadership.
In a desperate attempt to resuscitate his flagging campaign to pass the Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL) before his term ends, President Benigno Aquino III called on “citizen leaders” to convene a national peace summit to review the bill now pending in Congress, and to discuss it “in a calm and reasonable manner that will not incite anger and hopelessness.”
In calling for the summit, the President said he was fully aware that the Jan. 25 Mamasapano incident in which 44 police commandos were killed by Muslim rebels, including fighters from the MILF, had sown doubts in the minds of Filipinos and pushed aside the objective evaluation of the BBL.
The implicit message was that Congress, which has the constitutionally vested mandate to debate and pass legislation, was not up to the task and needed help from Mr. Aquino’s hand-picked “citizen leaders” known for their wisdom and integrity.
A Palace spokesman said the summit was meant “to enrich the quality of democratic dialogue” that would lead Congress “to a deeper understanding of the imperative of promoting the peace process in Mindanao.”
To give his initiative added impetus, the President resorted to cheap rhetoric aimed at indiscriminately branding those who opposed the BBL as enemies of peace.
“This is the crossroads we face: we take pains to forge peace today, or we count body bags tomorrow,” Aquino said in his nationally televised address.
“Perhaps it is easy for you to push for all-out war,” he said, hitting out at critics who have condemned the peace deal with the MILF.
“But if the conflict grows, the number of Filipinos shooting at other Filipinos will grow, and it would not be out of the question that a friend or loved one be one of the people who will end up inside a body bag.”
It was a tried and tested “with us or against us” tactic that suggested that the only way forward for peace was his administration and the BBL, and that anyone who raised serious objections to the flawed legislation was somehow an advocate of all-out war.
This approach might have worked in the past, before Mamasapano exposed the President as a weak and incompetent leader, who foolishly relied on a suspended friend and ally to lead the covert police operation, then lied to the Filipino people to cover up his own role in the debacle. But 44 brave police commandos paid the price for Mr. Aquino’s folly, and the aftermath also exposed his negotiators as obsequious functionaries who were so eager to push the MILF agenda that they even neglected to express outrage over the killing of 44 of their colleagues in government service who were in Mamasapano simply to enforce the law.
Will Mr. Aquino’s “peace summit” cover up these facts and lead us all to rally behind the BBL simply on his say-so? The time for such blind faith has long passed; the President should know that.