Last year, when the Moro Islamic Liberation Front was able to wrangle the Framework Agreement on the Bangsamoro from Aquino administration representatives who want peace at all costs, we wrote the Inquirer to express our misgivings: the so-called peace talks might turn out to be a Trojan horse for the Filipino people. This is because the pact is a veritable minefield of provisions, which calls for the creation of a state within a state, in other words, a substate, all for the sake of peace.
Now the administration may have realized that it has overreached itself. It is taking time, as it should, to flesh out the details that would be the meat of the agreement. This has only upset the agenda of the peace advocates who caused to be published a one-page manifesto in this newspaper, which bannered the call, “sign the peace agreement now.” Amid the platitudes about the historic significance of the peace process and about building lasting peace in Mindanao, the ad says nothing of what the pact should contain by way of achieving not just any peace, but peace that is honorable and fair and consistent with our Constitution, the covenant that binds us as one people. The manifesto, despite all its talk of an immediate settlement, fails to state one word on the obligation of the negotiators to stay within the parameters of the basic law.
The peace advocacy of those who attempt to speak for civil society has turned into a policy of appeasement reminiscent of what Neville Chamberlain did in pre-World War II Britain. The British leadership proudly announced “peace in our time” after agreeing to the German annexation of Czechoslovakia, only to discover too late that the Nazis wanted more. The most outrageous concession to armed might in the name of peace did not prevent the war from happening.
In a parallel vein, will the creation of a substate in our land turn out to be a prelude to unilateral secession?
The philosopher George Santayana once said that those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it.
—MARIO GUARINA III,
former Court of Appeals justice,
Parañaque City