Sleeping with the enemy

To say that Secretary Teresita Deles and Miriam Coronel-Ferrer are afflicted with Stockholm Syndrome – the affinity formed by kidnap victims with their captors – is to be charitable to them. For Deles and Ferrer are no victims by any stretch of the word and the imagination. They are as complicit and have as bloody a hand as the MILF and the BIFF in the massacre of 44 SAF troopers in Mamasapano, Maguindanao.

Deles and Ferrer deserve whatever tirades and condemnation from a public highly agitated by the cold-blooded killing of the SAF troopers who, when cut down by the torrents of bullets and mortar fire for 12 long hours, were merely doing their duty in serving a warrant for the arrest of two terrorists coddled by the MILF and BIFF, the Bali bomber Marwan and his protégée Usman.

The fact is that and Deles Ferrer have been sleeping with the enemy, the MILF, from day one as the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process and as the chair of the Philippine government panel brokering a peace deal with the MILF, respectively. That Deles and Ferrer are serving as the  de factospokespersons of the MILF in the Senate and House hearings and in their media pronouncements merely confirms their being in cahoots with the MILF.

High treason

If not for Mamasapano,  Deles and Ferrer would have gotten away with murder as ghastly as that which snuffed out the lives of the fallen SAF 44, the murder of Philippine sovereignty. Deles’ and Ferrer’s high treason and treachery lie in their pushing to carve out of Philippine territory a Moro sub-state for the MILF to rule upon and for Malaysia to treat as its vassal. In any other times, such duplicity by Deles and Ferrer would have earned for them a trip before a firing squad.

Malaysia’s hand in this attempt to sever Muslim Mindanao from the Philippines has been too obvious with no less than the top leadership of the MILF, like its chair Ibrahim Murad and MILF panel head Mohagher Iqbal, reported to be holders of Malaysian passports and, consequently, are Malaysian citizens. It’s no wonder then that Iqbal has been caught on tape professing allegiance to the Malaysian government, aside from being exposed as having so many aliases, a crime in this country.

The sins of Deles and of Ferrer are in playing under the baton of the MILF in signing a peace deal in 2014 that left out of the peace talks all the other parties in Mindanao to be affected by the proposed Bangsamoro region – the lumads, the MNLF, the many other armed groups, as well as the Christians who form the majority in many parts of Mindanao that may well fall under the rule of the MILF.

Naïve

Deles and Ferrer are naïve in committing the same mistake the government did when it forged a peace deal with Nur Misuari’s MNLF in the 1980s to the exclusion of all the other stakeholders in Mindanao. With the MNLF in control at ARMM, war in Mindanao only worsened because the parties left out in the peace talks like the MILF and the tribal warlords merely continued with their violence. Meanwhile, the first thing Misuari did as ARMM governor was to buy several luxury cars for his many wives.

Under the Bangsamoro Basic Law being pushed by the MILF and their pals Deles and Ferrer, the MILF leadership would have bigger and automatic funding allocation from the national government compared to that of the ARMM. This largesse would surely be used by the MILF to procure more powerful arms to replace whatever rusted old rifles they would “decommission” under the BBL. We are being fried in our own lard by the MILF and their co-conspirators Deles and Ferrer.

Mamasapano would not have happened without the peace deal brokered by Deles and Ferrer. In that deal, the two tied the hands of the government, and especially the armed forces, in going after criminals and terrorists like Marwan and Usman in MILF-controlled areas. In a provision that no self-respecting government would agree to, the government no thanks to Deles and Ferrer agreed to first inform the MILF before a police operation is to take place in MILF areas.

ISIS-like

The MILF has yet to get the sub-state it salivates for and yet it already displayed the savagery and wanton disregard for lives and international humanitarian law when its forces killed the SAF 44. Imagine what the MILF would do to national law enforcement units that would dare venture in the future to arrest terrorists and criminals being coddled by MILF in their sub-state.

The MILF says that not to pass the BBL is to entice ISIS-like activities in Mindanao, the brutality of which is seen in Syria and Iraq. But to give in to the MILF is to invite an ISIS-like government in Mindanao because how does one characterize finishing off the wounded SAF troopers with point-blank shots to the head but ISIS-inspired?

And Ferrer and Deles are asking police officials to “man-up” for the Mamasapano bloodbath? The massacre is Ferrer’s and Deles’ own doing. The attempt to sever Mindanao from the rest of the Philippines is their greatest crime. What gall they have to belittle the death of the SAF 44 in their delusional thinking that they could bring peace to Mindanao by sleeping and supping with and  prostituting themselves to the MILF.-end-