A peace agreement is supposed to come after the conflict. It is supposed to avoid any further violence. Leave it to our very wonderful Ms. Arroyo to mess up even that basic premise. After a series of national issues centering on the legitimacy of her presidency and the integrity of her administration comes yet another mind blowing matter - the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD). Indeed, she never fails to shock the public. The MOA-AD is the result of the peace talks held between the negotiators of the Arroyo adminitration and the MILF leaders. Almost all of us are aware of what this group has always been after - an independent Moro Islamic state. It seems that the current adinistration agreed to many of the MILF's demands without considering it's legal implications. And now that it's out in the open (the Supreme Court issued a temporary restraining order to stop it's signing which was supposed to take place in Malaysia), it's constitutional flaws and objectionable provisions have also become quite a sensation.
Let's take a closer look at why the MOA-AD is unconstitutional. Firstly, it commits to the MILF that Congress and the Filipino people will ammend the 1987 Constitution to conform to the MOA-AD. Bad, bad move. The Executive branch has no legislative power, it has no power to propose ammendments to the Constitution, much less, commit ammendments to it. Also, there was never any consultation made with the significant publics and the stakeholders. Everything was done in a series of closed-door meetings. This number one flaw of this memorandum makes you wonder if it was really created in good faith or simply meant to be a means for some hidden self-serving, selfish agenda of the President. Cha-Cha (or Charter Change) would, afterall, allow her to remain in power beyond 2010.
Another flaw of the MOA-AD is that it creates a state called the Bangsamoro Juridical Entity with all sovereign powers and institutions. It will have it's "own" courts, "own" legislature, "own" institutions and it's "own" police and internal security force. That goes against our Constitution which states that the "State shall establish and maintain one Police Force, which shall be national in scope and civilian incharacter, to be administered and controlled by a National Police Commission." That's Section 6, Article XVI. Section 18, Article VII of the Constitution mandates that the "President shall be the Commander-in-Chief of all armed forces of the Philippines. These provisions clearly do not allow the existence of armed forces like that of BJE's own internal secutiy force that are not under the control and command of the President through the chain of command.
Now let's talk about the Lumads. The Lumads are not and have never been Muslims but they are included into the Bangsamoro without their knowledge and consent. Imagine their surprise when they learned about this MOA-AD from the newspaper last Aug4, 2008. Given that individual Lumads are given freedom of choice to join the Bangsamoro, their ancestral domain will remain with the Bangsamoro whether or not they join it anyway. I'm having a hard time looking for anything fair in that.
What was supposed to end a period of truce has provoked even more conflicts. How bad can it get? Randy David, my favorite columnist, wrote "because the negotiations slid into a routine of closed-door technical meetings that tended to minimize the need for consultations with significant publics, the whole affair and the document resulting from it acquired the stima of something sneaky and conspirational. Instead of welcoming it as a breakthrough, nearly everyone took the MOA-AD as an intriguing clue to undisclosed script. This doesn't do justice at all to the painstaking and substantive work that went into the crafting of the document." I love Randy David to the core but I really do not see any painstaking and substantive work that went into the memorandum. If anything, it is badly-crafted and self-serving to the poeple that that worked on it. That is clearly shown by the fact that even the administration (who started this whole problem in the first place) is now calling for a review of it's provisions. They say they're not signing it in it's present form because of the "terrorist activities" of Moro rebels in parts of Midnanao? Oh, come on. Who are they fooling? They know bloody well that those "terrorist activities" are not the main reson they had a change of heart. It's simply because the MOA-AD's constitutional flaws have now been thoroughly exposed and the public would have thrown them balls of fury had they continued their quest to make us accept it.
I know that at this point in time, blaming and pointing fingers wouldn't really do us any good anymore but I still can't help saying that much of this mess is the adminitrative's own making. Just what did they have in mind while they were drawing the provisions of the MOA-AD? Really, you have to be blind as a bat to design a memorandum as bad as that and not see this bloodymess of a situation coming.
I am thoroughly disgusted.
