Triggering A Crisis: The BJE Land Grab

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is back from the Games and so it is most likely that as she scans the ’sunrise news and opinion summary’ prepared by the Office of the Press Secretary the chief executive will confirm what she already has a sinking feeling of: a maelstrom has erupted over the piecemeal revelations about the details of the Bangsamoro Juridical Entity Deal.
Of course chief palace spokesma, Secretary Jesus Dureza, erstwhile pointman for the Mindanao peace negotiations has facetisoudly dismissed the criticisms about the MoA-AD as “noise..”
“The President has approved the way forward and there’s no question about it. If she has the political will to do it she has to muster political will in spite of all these noises.”
It may be that indeed there is political will, but is there a mandate from the Filipino people to proceed with what highly respected news analyst Amando Doronila calls a “begotiated land grab:
“If the MOA had not been revealed in time, no one would have had the slightest idea that the area awarded by the memorandum to the expanded homeland represented the biggest negotiated land grab of national territory to a separatist group in the country’s history.”
Doronila further says:
“The unrest unleashed by the MOA over the territorial grab, the grant of sweeping powers that have the main elements of a sovereign state outside the compass of the Philippine Constitution has undermined the capacity of the Arroyo administration to deliver a peace pact.”
Former constitutional commissioner, Father Joaquin Bernas, for his part, has finally weighed in with a deeper insight beyond the earlier report remark of his that the MoA-AD was “just a piece of paper.”
Now Bernas properly chastises the government of the day from failing to directly mention the fundamental law, the Constitution, in the MoA-AD:
Toward the end of the document I find this passage: “Any provisions of the MOA on Ancestral Domain requiring amendments to the existing legal framework shall come into force upon the signing of a comprehensive compact and upon effecting the necessary changes to the legal framework with due regard to non derogation of prior agreements and within the stipulated timeframe contained in the comprehensive compact.”
The paragraph is highly loaded and will need a lot of exegesis. I take it that the “legal framework” referred to are the existing Organic Act and the 1987 Constitution, but for some reason the document is reluctant to even mention the Constitution. Which is being given greater weight, the “legal framework” or the “comprehensive compact” or the “prior agreements”?
Add to what Malacanang calls “noises” , two senators, the Liberal Party’s presdent and presumptive standard bearer in the 2010 elections, Senator Mar Roxas and former senate president Franklin Drilon are both asking that they be allowed to participate in Friday’s oral arguments at the Supreme Court’s en banc session.
The two gentlemen are denouncing the MoA-AD as a “dangerous precedent” (Drilon) and “traitorous product of coercion and deceit” (Roxas).
In the meantime, yesterday the MILF attacked and briefly took over Tipo-tipo Basilan before being forces to withdraw.
But this was clearly an ominous sign of the rebels’ readiness to open up another front line in the worsening situation, with the flashpoint in Midsayap, North Cotabato still smouldering.
There is now undeniably a refugee crisis that is developing with the civilian evacuees rising to some 130,000.
Now tell us, is this simply “noise”?

Trigerring A Cris