Expansion then secession

US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton giving Philippine peace panel chair Miriam Coronel-Ferrer an award was a cheap photo-ops publicity stunt intended to court the votes of Filipino-Americans. To say that the award is vacuous and meaningless is a big understatement. 

Back here in the Philippines, our House of Representatives is set to decapitate eight provisions of the proposed Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL) which are patently unconstitutional as to invite a declaration as such by the Supreme Court if the BBL is passed in its original form.

Not being a lawyer, Ferrer has proven to be a very bad choice to head the Philippine panel that forged last year a defective peace agreement with the secessionist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) to the exclusion of all other parties in Mindanao.

As Yogi Berra used to say, “it’s déjà vu all over again” with the Philippine government, no thanks to Ferrer and Peace Process Adviser Teresita Deles, committing the same mistake it did when it forged a peace agreement during the Cory years with Nur Misuari’s MNLF to form the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, again to the exclusion of all the other stakeholders in Mindanao.

However, since Ferrer did not lack any legal advice from the battery of lawyers provided her, the glaring defects of the peace agreement and the proposed BBL can only be blamed on her stubbornness, her being afflicted with tunnel vision and maybe her dogged determination to win this peace award.

Clinton’s peace award, however, falls way, way short of the Nobel Peace Award which  coffee shop talk says the administration has been targeting in talking with the MILF, and why the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) allegedly refused to fire artillery to save the 44 massacred Special Action Forces.

Why are the eight provisions unconstitutional? Simple, because they would turn the proposed Bangsamoro government into a veritable sub-state, with full control of its armed units, as well as its own electoral, civil service and audit bodies.

Another provision would also allow untrammeled expansion of the  Bangsamoro territory, with only 10 percent of the voting population needed to force a plebiscite for a particular province to join the sub-state. And then what follows that expansion?

Secession?                                                                                                                        -END-