Peace in Mindanao and the death of BBL

My heartfelt condolences to former Rep. Pablo "Pabling" Garcia on the passing of his beloved wife, Esperanza Fiel Garcia yesterday who succumbed to kidney failure. She was a retired Regional Trial Court Judge and spent her retirement in what is perhaps her most productive time when in 1970, she founded the Cebu CFI Community Cooperative with only 20 members and P200. The CFI Cooperative now has over P10 billion and 90,000 members nationwide, a true testimony of her great love for the cooperative. This is a record that is hard to beat in the cooperative industry.

But her greatest achievement was despite her busy schedule, he played mother to her 10 children, notably, former Cebu Governor and now Rep. Gwen Garcia, former GSIS General Manager Winston Garcia, former Rep. Pablo John Garcia, Dumanjug Mayor Nelson Garcia, former Barili Vice-Mayor Marlon Garcia and former Provincial Security Adviser Byron Garcia who created the Dancing Inmates of the Cebu Provincial Jail. Her remains is in the Crystal Palace in Nivel Hills. May we request our pious readers to please pray for the repose of her soul.

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The demise of the Bangsamoro Basic Law has caused a ripple effect in our media outlets, where the news stories are still focused on what happened to the BBL and why it ended up dead. As I have so many times pointed out, the BBL died simply because it gave Filipinos a false promise of peace in troubled Mindanao. Above all, logic dictates that you could never hope to come up with a peace agreement only with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front on board with the peace panel of the Philippine government, while denying the Moro National Liberation Front its role in the peace process which they originally started. Yesterday, the Philippine Star featured a news story and let me reprint this for you. "An official of the Moro National Liberation Front has welcomed the failure of Congress to pass the Bangsamoro Basic Law, saying it saved the peace agreement between the government and the MNLF that was signed in Tripoli, Libya in 1976.

"What saves the situation is the death of the BBL. Had the BBL gone through Congress and the Senate and become a law, wala na talaga ang MNLF," said Habib Mujahab Hashim, chairman of the MNLF's Islamic Command Council (ICC). Hashim claimed that the government violated the Tripoli agreement and the 1996 final peace accords when it signed the framework and comprehensive agreement of the Bangsamoro - blueprint of the BBL - with the MNLF's rival faction, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

He said the intention was really to erase MNLF and to abrogate the 1976 Tripoli accord. "So they failed to do that, they have no other choice but to go back to the legal, internationally recognized agreements - the 1996 final peace agreement and the 1976 Tripoli Accord," Hashim said. Hashim, who attended the 5th Tripartite Ministerial meeting last week in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia between the Philippine government, MNLF and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), said the meeting was an indication that the government was going back to deal with the MNLF."

Need I say more… this story tells you that the only Filipinos supporting the BBL are those rabid yellow supporters of Pres. PNoy Aquino. Yet the BBL as we wrote yesterday began on August 5, 2012 when Pres. PNoy Aquino held a secret meeting with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front  Chairman Al Haj Murad Ebrahim in Tokyo. Then he violated the 1987 Constitution when he gave Murad P5 Million pesos, which is in effect, "Aiding and abetting known enemies of the state."

Then he committed all his political stock and the government money on a roadshow selling the BBL to the Filipino nation with all the false promises of peace in Mindanao. It was then that we all reckoned that there was an ulterior motive by Pres. Aquino who was "lured" by his advisers that he would bag the much-coveted "Nobel Peace Prize" if he successfully produced a peace agreement with the Muslims in Mindanao. Yet he could not find the logic that by excluding the MNLF, the BBL was doomed to fail and it even failed in a Congress filled to the rafters with his yellow allies.

But what eventually killed the BBL was what I would call a "Divine Intervention" called the Mamasapano massacre. In my book, the BBL would have passed in Congress because the Filipino people were nonchalant about this law, until January 25, 2015 when 44 Special Action Force troopers were brutally killed in Mamasapano by elements of the MILF. Pres. PNoy Aquino until now refused to accept his responsibility over their deaths of the SAF troopers. The killing of the SAF commandos, which were posted in Facebook, was more than enough for us to reject the BBL. The only thing left is the blame game where allies of Pres. PNoy still insist he played no part in the operation.

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