By Datu Michael O. Mastura

Government is engaged in defensive gestures about the agreed text of the ancestral domain aspect of the peace negotiation. The Big fights have yet to enter the Big picture. The importance of ‘groupthink’ is one of those fashionable ideas Government has not caught up with in this Catholic country. To the MILF leadership, the originators of consensual thinking were the fuqaha or Islamic jurists of the post-caliphate era.

That is why it does not surprise us when the MILF try to set out the practical applications of the ‘new formula’ to resolve the conflict in Mindanao, it involves an act of ‘consultations’ with the Bangsamoro people and ‘free of any imposition’? These fundamentals are clearly embodied in the MOA-AD. Towards the closing preparatory work of the crafting of the agreed text, the Presidency (including Cluster E cabinet members and the GRP peace negotiators) focused much on parsing what Bangsamoro aspiration ‘for freedom’ meant and the phraseology of the ‘legal framework’.Â

The problem is that instead of defending the crafted document of the GRP-MILF peace deal, Government of the Philippines has disbanded its negotiating panel. They should be celebrating it as the mark of strength of ties and the triumph of diplomacy with the Government of Malaysia, and the member-states of the International Monitoring Team, not fretting about it in defeatism.Â

Our counterparts at the negotiating table informed us that one of President Arroyo’s final instructions was to nudge the GRP peace negotiators to drop the word “freedom�. That last pitch (exactly 30 days ago on the evening of August 25) was a compromise moment for vagueness in peace talks. Our chief negotiator Mohagher Iqbal and I know it was not an ‘appeasement’ of some sort. As it is worded, contextual ambiguity prevails in the initialed Agreed Text of the MOA-AD. By all account, we have not stolen here any quotes from the Opposition’s storyline such as ‘dismemberment’. This is not yet the space to rehearse the narrative argument: Treating the Constitution ‘as imperfect’ is not new (when we discuss it as separate issue.)

On reading in Newsbreak Online the interview of the Defense chief Gilberto Teodoro, I immediately sent an SMS, texting to the editor Marites Danguilan Vitug what is it that MILF needs to clarify. The piece “Some MOA critics not after the best interest of Mindanaoâ€� was written by freelance journalist Criselda Yabes, the author of a book that covers in prose the pathology of military careers and coups in the Philippines.Â

Excerpts from that interview in reality exposed the Government’s negatively coordinated defensive gestures leading to the aborted signing of the MOA-AD. It also seemed logical why this sitting President was perceived publicly as deficit in political capital.Â

Criticisms over the GRP-MILF peace deal hit home such that public figures nowadays appear not just weak—if not in a state of denial—and so cowed by a mea culpa syndrome. Teodoro’s main points form an argument at the expense of the MILF negotiating panel that goes roughly like this. “The negotiators were negotiating on a premise the MILF will tell their people that this is what they’re going to ask. However, they made concessions, [and] they agreed to take away the words freedom, self-determination.�

Government acted in good faith simply by complying with the terms of reference of their talks. GRP didn’t want the MILF to lose face. Would you really take his statements as evident truths? According to Defense Secretary Teodoro, in his own words: -

(1). “The MILF was saying: We’re defeated. We can’t fight. These are just our aspirations. If your political processes don’t agree to these, that’s okay. Don’t put it in the language that we’ve been defeated, it’s like you’re rubbing it in. Give us some dignity.â€�Â

(2) “As negotiators, they had to engineer the wording of the MOA so detractors within the MILF can’t take advantage of the situation to tell the people they were supposed to represent, ‘These people sold us out’.�

(3) “That is why there was a requirement for secrecy because they knew that had word come out as to what they had conceded to the government, their reliability as negotiators would be very precarious.�

How is that again, Mr. Secretary? If you are conservative just think of this twist in this simplistic view of the matter. Saying you are not bound by secrecy and not scared to talk about the MOA, to be sure, as newish defense chief you have “a right to talk about it.� In the same breath, this youthful warrior from central Luzon worked up his courage: “I really don’t appreciate the action of some people who went against the MOA for motives other than the best interest of Mindanao.�

The crisp yet incisive Cris Yabes probed who the DND boss was referring to—and so, the force posture of this Harvard Ivy Lifer had to stammer out something. It would be a stretch to think that a Cabinet man entrusted with the external security of this Country harbors an oblique enmity toward all for none: “They know who they are. They don’t have responsibility for the situation,� he retorted with a high public profile.

Didn’t the GRP distribute leaked drafts and comments days before the scheduled signing? What now, when all is said and done, of it? Why not sign the MOA-AD when, after all, Government does carry a ‘big stick’ rather than a ‘magic wand’ or some ‘yellow carrot’? True to say, the GRP peace panel has been going back and forth to their principal negotiating the obstacles. Civil society detects the hand of MOA foes posed by the Cabinet Cluster E on security against powerful business interest that own an island embraced in Category A, in the municipality of Balabac, Palawan and in Category B in the Zamboanga peninsula.

As a rule of law, private interest must yield to higher public interest. If there’s such as a thing as public interest then why not so name them, Mr. Secretary? You have provided a lame excuse—at the expense of the Bangsamoro people and the MILF peace panel—for Government’s reluctance to favor the ‘changement’ of the status quo.

If you wanted to discredit the MILF negotiating panel or your very own GRP negotiating panel why not ask the previous chief negotiator? State alibi, too, has worked equally for fretful Moro-haters and for pro-TRO intervenors. That was absurd. This wayward case logic has made it convenient for Solicitor General Agnes Devanadera to moot it by conceding to abandon the signature on the MOA-AD “in this form or any other form.â€�Â

[to be continued…]

END.