By Datu Michael O. Mastura

October 1, 2008

Government is now engaged in negatively correlated defense postures as part of pure propaganda. The culture of war grinds on: troops surge with aerial strikes support also. Meantime the effects of massive military presence in Muslim Mindanao remain more precarious. After all those bloodbaths and blunders, the Bangsamoro people have every reason to believe both Government and Opposition still don't get it. What is worst they don't have a handle on the mess they helped to create before the Supreme Court. Others blame the national media for over hyping ignorant distortions of the MOA-AD, depending on your viewpoint.

How can the unfolding humanitarian tragedy in the Autonomous region in Mindanao be denied by Secretary Eduardo Ermita after his Geneva speech? To be sure, ICRC and Oxfam have affirmed that the humanitarian needs as real. The Council of European Union is deeply concerned by the escalation of violence and growing number of civilian casualties and displaced persons. How can the Philippine authorities combat on-the-ground reality that disguised law enforcement and military operations have resorted to torching civilian houses?

Soldiering and police work are becoming undistinguishable. International-aid groups such as the ICRC, UNICEF, WFP and Medicin sans Frontier operating in the field should galvanize with the humanitarian NGOs to protect civilians. When calamity becomes unpreventable, it is appropriate for the UN system to intervene.

Popular perceptions were the first to get the message out to the international community about civilian casualties of the PAF air strikes. Last week the Commission on Human Rights (NCHR) chair revealed initial findings that the MILF fighters did not provoke the aerial strikes that killed 6 civilians, among them, two children and a pregnant teenager in of Datu Piang, Maguindanao. The message was carried across the world by new activism on the internationalization of the human conscience, and the challenge is posed to the UNCHR to protect people at risk in Mindanao under the concept of human security.

The judgment of all concerned is that the DND-AFP and DILG-PNP officials keep on waging their acoustic wars against the Moros despite the stalemate. War, Charles de Gaulle once said, brings things to light that otherwise remain hidden. There has been as much nativist prejudice against the Muslims in this Catholic country as there has been against the indigenous peoples. Our point is that media hypes bring out the worst in anti-Moro sentiment.

Yet there's more to be deplored in this ethnic bias. And truth to be told, Ronaldo Puno was one of the architects of the “all out-war� and later negotiated Erap pardon. Clearly some ambitious politicians take it as a form of “collective punishment against Muslim civilian populations who suffer monstrously (from a combat over suspicious codling of commanders Kato and Bravo?) General approbation was up beat that military pressures and police actions could be sustained during the fasting month of Ramadhan.

Government is posturing correlated defense forces as the coercive option for what, in the first place, the Opposition has helped to create. Gilbert Teodoro is politically incorrect about the MILF becoming irrelevant in the eyes of the public.� Whose publics? Which constituencies? At issue now are not simply fixated on two allegedly rogue commanders who create atrocities but the aspects of the personality of powerful public officials in Arroyo's cabinet Cluster E on security. Tough-talkers are those hardliners who are not necessarily the realists whom you trust to prevail to put blame Flips first on the responsibility for the surge of violence.

I know Flips as a political class, regardless of their political beliefs, have combined the bloggers and readers analyses about the big picture seconded by the op-ed pieces and critical cartoons. They heaped upon the Moro revolutionary leadership those atrocities. As long as the armed struggle continues however, there are those who believe, without violence the national government would not listen to them. If Flips political class fails to honor what is negotiated at peace talks, it can take enormous casualties or run out of scapegoats. All said they can take responsibility for the use of excessive force and the practice of disproportionate� line of defense.

Despite the storm of Flips public outrage, we still find public faces fronting the Moro legitimate armed struggle whose support rests in concentric clans as much as in wider international sympathy. They want to (de)construct the humanitarian-aid structure, which is almost embedded in the national government structure that is skewed to depend too much on foreign assistance. Apart from funding improvement projects, aid programs do invite Moro separatist violence when these are perceived as anti-insurgency resources. That because the approach brings up the paradigm of failed appeasement policy.

As the Moro homeland bleeds, can blood clots jell into a drop of justice in public life? Of course, it is all perfectly acceptable on the MILF side to turn its political demand for self-determination into an agreed territorial fix coupled with constitutional fix. This new formula written into the framework agreement allows for a transition process to build consent and popular consultation ending in a referendum. The outcome of self-determination is a matter for the Bangsamoro people alone, which is not merely some imagined entity for associative option to secede.

The European Union urges an early return to negotiating table because both GRP and MILF have invested heavily in the peace process. Now what we see increasingly is that there is no link to reality of DDR process in the war-torn areas. This means the Arroyo presidency is not serious about political negotiations in order to address the root-causes of the conflict. If you are reading this clue, on the part of GRP, it has agreed to introduce the necessary changes to the legal framework with due regard to non derogation of prior agreements�. Ask what is so repugnant to the Constitution about the MOA-AD when the charter recognizes the principle of self-determination as part of the law of the land?

The petitioners and the intervenors misread the MILF political purpose. There's a good way forward to listen to better informed and more reflective voices. Negotiators of the MOA-AD have done something entirely new and wholly salutary. Those deliberations of the GRP-MILF negotiating panels in the presence of the third party Malaysian Facilitator are immense in the context of cracking a window for change in the written imperfect Constitution. The public benchmark of MILF inward shift in position to the outward design is that enabling negotiated Comprehensive Compact for the political settlement of the Mindanao conflict.

Whether or not our 2008 MOA-AD survives the Court scrutiny, the fact will remain that it was initialed� and so no matter how it is rewritten it has already more than earned its place in the Bangsamoro struggle for self-determination.

I've chosen to call our initialed memorandum the Agreed Text� to express conformity with its form and contents. The real question is what all of this might mean for the next presidency. The most common misconception about consent to bound by an agreement is that it is a constitutional process. The Senate approval can be misleadingly mistaken for ratification that is quite a different process.

Let me point this out that signature imposes no obligation to ratify. Treaty law practice looks at ratification in terms of acceptance or approval carried out on the international plane by:
(1) execution of an instrument of ratification by the executive;
(2) exchange for the instrument of ratification of the other party; or
(3) lodging with the depositary the original text for custody.

My sober analysis is linked to statecraftmanship. Just look at the pages of the Agreed Text as illustrative of the right nexus of compromise and common resolve. Government-MILF negotiations are not appeasement. No peace negotiations are to be automatically interpreted as defeat/ capitulation under the aegis of arrogance of state power.

As a note to end this piece, the general objection that the framework agreement omits any mention of the Philippine Constitution helps little in this context. The existing legal frameworks encourage us to change the way we think about totality of relationships between politically equal citizens maintained with their rational consent. The time of excuses (and explanations) is past since the need of the hour today is to take a long-term objective of the Bangsamoro people future political status.

END.