Suspicion of blackmail
There
must be something that is pestering President Aquino in wanting the
Senate to approve the sellout agreement called the Bangsamoro Basic
Law. The public is equally getting curious, for maybe there is in that
agreement something we do not know which reason why his appointed panel
virtually collaborated with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) to
come out with a shoddy agreement. Looking at his conduct, one could draw
an inference that the President appears to have been blackmailed either
by the MILF or by its principal sponsor to accept the BBL in its
original form. Never in our history had this happened where the President is running upstream against the overwhelming current. The ordinary men on the street, soldiers, the policemen, the government employees, and even the poll survey conducted by their controlled survey outfit show that the people are against it. They are trying to mislead the public by their gambit that approving the BBL is to give peace a chance, ergo those against it are against peace, which is illogical because approving it does not guarantee peace. Such is strange, for no less than the President and his weaning political sycophants are the ones giving the House and the Senate the deadline to approve it.
The conduct of the administration virtually has all the markings that the President and those giving him the cordon sanitaire appears to have been blackmailed. In their fear that something will happen, they too are trying to blackmail the legislature by threatening to withhold their pork barrel should they vote against the approval of the bill. Maybe it is a ploy to pass on the responsibility so that in the end, B.S Aquino will be absolved of treason by pointing to his mindless lackeys as the ones who approved it. Even among Muslims, like the Tausugs, the Yakans, the Sambals, and the Badjaos are against it. They oppose it much that they do not want their ancestral homeland to be colonized by people from the Malay peninsula and to force them to renounce their loyalty to the Sultan of Sulu as their rightful leader and the legitimate owner of Sabah.
There is more than that meets the eye behind the eagerness to reach an agreement with that band of terrorists that is being directed from without. The President has virtually put at stake it his position, and his legacy, if any, he hopes to bequeath to our people. Congress is already investigating the leak that bribe money paid by a Chinese drug lord identified a Bo Wang was used to compel some members of House Ad Hoc Committee on the Bangsamoro Basic Law to pass the BBL for the plenary approval by the entire members of Congress. Some say, this pretending-to-be-honest administration simply reenacted what they did to impeach chief justice Renato Corona on the basis of the bribe offered and not on the trumped-up charges they filed against him.
If such allegation is true, it would be pretty dangerous because at stake is not just the reputation of one unwanted President we can easily kick out, but the Republic of the Philippines where all will be forced to pay their share to preserve the territorial integrity of this nation. In fact, we are still smarting from that humiliating debacle where 44 members of our elite police force were practically butchered before our very own eyes, and the senator-chairwoman, plucked from obscurity in the US, who led the investigation of the heinous crime now refuses to submit her report finding PNoy as “ultimately responsible” for what happened.
In the book written by John J. Mearsheimer, “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics,” he said, “Blackmail is a more attractive alternative (to war) because it relies on the threat of force, not the actual use of force, to produce results…Blackmail is difficult to achieve, however, because the great powers are likely to fight before they submit to threats from other great powers.” Analyzing what PNoy now is doing, it is indeed possible that he or his greedy cronies in the oligarchy have been blackmailed, and have succumbed to it. Mearsheimer is right that while states can resist blackmail by going to war, a leader who is blackmailed consequent to his lackluster decision and misjudgment of events cannot.
Once that is proved, it would be equivalent to confirming that he committed treason much that he and he alone dealt with the group that is likely not to honor an agreement. The Armed Forces can ignore any possible blackmail, but not the leaders who committed themselves to selling this country. Our Armed Forces has always managed to maintain the upper hand in the fighting against the secessionist rebels, and in that capacity, could contain the rebellion even in an all-out war. Even if they will declare a religious war or jihad, it is likely to fail because the majority of the Christians have never been blindly noosed to obey the dictates of the hypocritical clerics.
In fact, it was the secessionist rebels that were forced to seek a peace agreement without the precondition of humiliating our Congress to approve their separatist demand. They were forced to come to the negotiating table with the Armed Forces, chivalrous enough to give them an honorable peace. On the contrary, it was they who scrapped the peace agreement signed in Jakarta in 1996 and ignored the various presidential decrees issued by President Marcos granting them autonomy, not to say the guarantee made in the 1987 Cory Aquino Constitution. They rejected them because their principal brokers led by Malaysia, the US, Japan and the Untied Kingdom told them it is not the kind of peace that would favor their economic and security interests. Their local minions headed by the country’s top maharajah – the Ayala family, also favor the sellout agreement because they too will benefit from it.
In that, one could surmise that even if President Aquino would succeed in ramming into our throat the passage of the BBL to comply with the possible blackmail that threatens to incinerate him now, that would not guarantee peace. Rather, it will re-polarize the country with our President oddly fighting against the wishes of his own people. Either way, there will be no peace if Congress will not enact the BBL into law much that the MILF is committed to renew the fighting if the BBL is rejected, or assuming there will be peace should Congress approve it, but the people in Mindanao will never accept it without giving those affiliates of al Qaeda and al Nusra a good fight. They fought before and won, and it would be foolish for them now to give up their lands without a good fight.
rpkapunan@gmail.com
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