Last Wednesday, we read a report that former Assemblyman and Immigration Commissioner Homobono Adaza and critic Herman Tiu Laurel filed a criminal complaint against Pres. Benigno Aquino III, together with Senate President Franklin Drilon and House Speaker Feliciano Belmonte, charging them with treason before the Office of the Ombudsman for conspiring in the approval of the controversial Bangsamoro Basic Law which the complainants described as "unconstitutional."
This criminal suit also included government peace panel negotiators Teresita Deles and Miriam Ferrer as well representatives of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, namely, Murad Ebrahim, Mohagher Iqbal, and Ghazali Jaafar. In filing the complaint, Adaza and Laurel cited the respondents as co-conspirators in promoting the approval of the BBL as well as granting the MILF more power and territory beyond the limits set by the Constitution.
These two charged that the BBL violates at least 11 provisions of the Constitution, including religion, equal protection rights and promoting social justice. I do share the very same sentiments with Adaza and Laurel. However I would like to believe that this suit is just too premature in the sense that they are giving the Office of the Ombudsman an excuse to throw out this suit because the BBL has not yet been approved by Congress nor has it been signed into law by Aquino. I do not know why these fellows could not wait until that criminal act has been committed.
To add to the woes of Aquino, last Thursday, Sen. Miriam Defensor Santiago asked this question that nobody in Congress dared to ask, "Who gave Pres. Aquino and the MILF the Authority to negotiate peace and propose a substate in Mindanao?" Sen. Santiago is one of the Senators that insist that the proposed BBL is unconstitutional. But in asking this simple question, "What's the constitutional basis for the authority to negotiate on the part of the Philippine government? The President merely assumed that he had the power to do so." Sen. Santiago insisted that the President does not have the sole power over the foreign policy of the Philippines.
Indeed the supposedly checks and balances that is guaranteed in the Philippine constitution indicates that foreign policy power must be equally shared between the President, the House of Representatives and the Senate. So Senator Miriam asks, "Now where is the Senate authorization for the President to conduct these negotiations sometimes the so called peace process? He does not have an instrument of that nature. He just assumed that he had the power but he does not."
If you ask me, this peace negotiation started early in the presidency of Pres. PNoy Aquino when on August 2011, he held a secret meeting with MILF Chairman Murad Ebrahim in Tokyo. For sure that meeting had no approval by the Legislative Branch. If I remember right, Pres. PNoy even gave Murad P5 million (certainly that money did not come from Mr. Aquino's pocket) And for what purpose, we still do not know. In fact because of the Mamasapano debacle, critics have been demanding him to ask the MILF an accounting of the P5 Million through the Commission on Audit. We await the COA's findings on this money.
Now that the majority of Filipinos already know that some P70 billion will be going to the MILF through the BBL, so if the MILF or Chairman Murad cannot even be trusted to account for the P5 million that Pres. PNoy gave him, how can we trust the MILF with P70 billion of the taxpayer's money? On this issue alone, we should be against the BBL.
In fact I do recall writing a column when we learned about that secret meeting with Pres. Aquino and Chairman Murad, that by giving him P5 million, he had already violated the Philippine constitution where aiding and abetting terrorists or known enemies of the state is considered high treason. But then, it is more fun in the Philippines where our political leaders are the first to break our laws with impunity.
Worse of all, this is a country where there is a double-standard in the application of our laws. A case in point are the teenage children of the MILF in Maguindanao who brandish high-powered firearms without being scared of getting arrested while a youth in Metro Manila or Cebu who gets caught carrying a small caliber pistol gets arrested and thrown to jail.
This reminds me of what my good friend, Benjie Pepito wrote in the Defenders of Indigenous Languages of the Archipelago (DILA), "No one can say that the Philippines is a country of laws. It is a garbage dump of lousy laws that clueless and abusive politicians alike implement senselessly. This is why we have something as useless as Tagalog made the national language even as the past president who turned around the Philippine economy is detained as the political prisoner of the child of the so-called mother of democracy."