Time to call for a Bangsa Cebu movement?

If there is anything that I really look forward to with our invitation to Globe Telecom's annual stockholder's meeting, it is that it is only once a year that we are able to meet up with our media counterparts from the Visayas and Mindanao so we could compare notes with them especially on many vital issues on the economy, the power problems that they are having and the biggest news of all, the Framework Agreement on the Bangsamoro that apparently, not a single Mindanao journalist was happy about.

Most of our Mindanao media counterparts hail from either Davao City or Cagayan de Oro, so it was just perfect for me that I was just in Zamboanga del Norte over the weekend for our annual Big Bike convention in places like Dapitan, Dipolog, and Ozamis City which is the least covered by those Mindanao scribes. So all in all, I got a pretty picture of how the media thinks about the FAB and yes, their complaints about the Laguindingan Airport and the pesky unscheduled brownouts affecting all of Mindanao.

We already wrote that the FAB was unconstitutional to start with because first of all, it isn't a law done by Congress, where its unconstitutionality is considered "assumed." We learned about this recently from Atty. Romulo Macalintal's analysis of the Supreme Court's decision that ruled that the Reproductive Health  Law was "not unconstitutional."

If there is anything that is truly worrisome about the FAB, it is the issue on who controls the military or who can possess high-powered weapons? The FAB clearly points out that "The police system shall be responsible to the central government and the Bangsamoro government." But what makes the whole shebang curiouser is a statement that says, "In a phased and gradual manner, all law-enforcement functions shall be transferred from the Armed Forces of the Philippines to the police force for the Bangsamoro."

This is what scares our friends from Mindanao… that a police force under the Bangsamoro may have full control of areas where the presence of the AFP would no longer be allowed because as the agreement states clearly and allow me to repeat this for the sake of emphasis, "In a phased and gradual manner, all law-enforcement functions shall be transferred from the  to the police force for the Bangsamoro." No wonder people in Mindanao are scared that the Bangsamoro agreement would truly become a separate entity from the rest of the Philippines.

If you ask me, the FAB is giving away Philippine Territory to an ethnic group and if we used the logic of Pres. Benigno "PNoy" Aquino, III and his peace panel, it brings us to the question, "What is stopping us Cebuanos from making our own Bangsa Cebuano? If the Muslims can do this to the Philippines, what difference does it make if we Cebuanos do the same thing?

If this agreement is considered Constitutional (but please remember Sen. Miriam Defensor Santiago already and unequivocally declared that it is unconstitutional) then I dare us Cebuanos to start a Bangsa Cebu Movement so we Cebuanos can also decide the future of Cebu and finally get away from the clutches of the Tagalogan Republic that has ruled this nation since the Americans granted us Independence in July 4, 1946.

Last March 18th, Nestor Mata (he is the oldest Filipino journalist I have ever known… he was the only survivor of the crash in Mt. Manunggal that took the life of Pres. Ramon Magsaysay) wrote in his column in Malaya called "Balkanization of Mindanao," "Pres. Noynoy Aquino, after his recent official visit to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia seems determined to formalize the proposed Bangsamoro Basic Law. And, if he succeeds it would cause the balkanization of Mindanao, the southern region of the Philippines populated by both Christian and Muslim Filipinos."

Mata continues, "Balkanization is a geopolitical term used to describe the process of fragmentation or division of a region into smaller regions or states, it goes back to the division of the Balkan Peninsula, which was then ruled by the Ottoman Empire, into smaller states between 1817 and 1912. And it came into common use in the aftermath of World War I following the collapse of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire. So, unless Pres. Aquino is stopped from doing that, we shall see Mindanao and Sulu carved out into a separate state for the benefit of not only the MILF but also Malaysia."

Do not ever forget that on Oct.14, 2009, on a vote of 9-6, the Supreme Court struck down the Memorandum of Agreement on the Muslim Ancestral Domain or the "Bangsamoro Juridical Entity" as unconstitutional, penned by Justice Conchita Carpio-Morales who is now the Ombudsman. So if under the Aquino regime, with the Congress and the Judiciary in its pockets, if it gets this agreement approved then I dare say that we in Cebu should begin our own process for self-determination. Bangsa Cebuano, anyone?

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