Damage control

Foreign Affairs secretary Albert del Rosario is a good and loyal soldier who has shown a lack of hesitation to take the fall for his principal. It is sad for these sterling qualities to get squandered in the service of a poor leader.

Last Wednesday, del Rosario owned responsibility for a missing letter the Kirams sent President Aquino in 2010, shortly after he took office. The Kirams of the Sultanate of Sulu tried to raise with Aquino two points that could have saved us all these ongoing troubles in Sabah.

In that letter, Aquino was asked to revive the Philippine claim to Sabah, as well as to provide a role for Kiram and his followers in the peace negotiations the government had with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

When the Kirams brought up the matter of the letter and how it was ignored, early on in the Sabah crisis, Aquino snidely and cavalierly dismissed it as probably having gotten lost in “the bureaucratic maze” in the Palace.

How pieces of official communication dealing with such vital matters as sovereignty claims and peace talks could get lost in “the bureaucratic maze” at the Palace does not speak well of the sense of order the president keeps in his office.

That two days had to pass after the crisis broke before the president decided to admit he may have “lost” the letter provided another clue the Sabah crisis never got his interest. The other clue was that he had to finish campaigning before taking on the issue.

Now it seems the president was clueless about the letter after all, and was not exactly forthright when he said it may have gotten lost. Apparently it did not, if we are to believe the feeble attempts of del Rosario to save his boss.

By del Rosario’s account, he had the letter all along and would be writing the Sultan of Sulu to apologize. This would have been believable if both Aquino and del Rosario both came out early with the whereabouts of the letter.

Now it is clear Aquino did not tell the truth about it when first asked, and del Rosario is owning up to the negligence in order to save his boss. The problem with damage control is that if you do not tell the truth, the falsity becomes even more obvious.

Aside from making a scapegoat out of del Rosario, the Palace has other tricks up its sleeve on the matter of damage control. To further stem the bleeding, the Palace hastily produced the results of the probe into the Atimonan shooting.

What made the timing of the release of the probe results suspect is that it came a day after Edwin Lacierda was placed on the spot about it during a press con. Lacierda was asked in a press conference if he did not fear the Sabah crisis will bury the importance of Atimonan.

Lacierda coughed up the explanation that it was still being looked into and assured that it will not get snowed under by recent events. Actually, Lacierda just got a great idea, and the following day, lo and behold, the Atimonan shooting probe results were out.

Clearly, Atimonan was used as a diversion in the hope that public attention would move somewhere else instead of being focused on Sabah alone. But you cannot really fool all of the people all of the time.

All of these instances show a leadership, if not in panic, at least in a serious state of uncontrol. When damage control is duplicitous, everything breaks. Aquino is getting so confused he even brought China into the picture.

In an apparent attempt to put the Sabah intruders in a bad light, Aquino called attention to himself and how he never tried to use violence against China in connection with our dispute with that country. What? And what if we did? Did Aquino think China will countenance violence?