Left Flank

There are complementary perspectives about how to view the Arroyo administration's Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). It's both a shoddy piece of diplomacy, and a ill-disguised grab for power. Perhaps it's best the RP Supreme Court killed it.

Luis Teodoro takes aim at others beside the negotiating parties.

The bottom line is that the government, most specially Gloria Arroyo and Hermogenes Esperon, wanted an agreement ※ any agreement ※ signed, sealed and delivered ASAP, meaning before 2010.

Not in heaven’s name, but in that of the United States, the 800-pound gorilla in our midst. Since 2003 the US has been “expediting” the making of a peace agreement between the Philippine government and the MILF through its Institute for Peace. Supposedly an independent, nonpartisan institution, USIP was established and funded by the US Congress to prevent Mindanao’s turning into that horror of horrors, a terrorist haven ※ and not incidentally to open its vast resources to exploitation by various business groups including, and most especially, US multinationals.

In the meantime, those Filipinos who do want lasting peace in Mindanao, and who do recognize the Bangsamoro right to ancestral domain and autonomy, would have had to put their money where their mouths are by agreeing to Constitutional amendments via a constituent assembly.

Once begun, that process will create a parliamentary form of government under a federal system, under the terms of which Mrs. Arroyo and cohort can stay on beyond 2010. But it will not stop there, and will go on to repeal those provisions in the 1987 Constitution that protect the media and the country’s natural resources from foreign ownership, and even allow foreign professionals to practice in these shores.

Does this sound too devious and too convoluted a plot to be anything but the stuff of which Hollywood films are made? Not in a country where you have a former general as peace adviser it doesn’t.

Yet, the planned MOA has angered Mindanao Muslims and Christians, as well as Filipinos, and, unfortunately embarrassed RP when it was set to sign the deal in Kuala Lumpur.

When the Supreme Court stepped in and prevented the signing of the agreement, the Philippine, Malaysian, American, Japanese and Australian governments ended up red-faced in the company of the MILF (which neither recognizes nor has any loyalty to the Philippine Constitution). Opposite them are those against the deal because they believe it fundamentally subverts the existing provisions of the Philippine Constitution. Their voices reflect majority opinion in our country. They are waiting to see if the Supreme Court ends up deciding the case with dispatch merely to beat Malaysia’s announced Aug. 21 resumption of talks. The country is watching whether the Court will decide based on the real merits of the case, or on what the President wants. In a word: since no one, including the nations of the world, cares for our Constitution, then it remains for our Supreme Court to decide the matter with true integrity and the utmost fidelity to constitutional precepts. As Jose P. Laurel famously declared, “No one can love the Filipinos better than the Filipinos themselves.”

It's a small matter of one interpretation of constitutional principles, which just happens to be the majority opinion, opposing both a very unpopular president and her perceived hunger for political power, a region, and the US. I say, affirm the MOA, and deal with the aftermath later.