CANBERRA—Congress’ failure to meet the deadline to pass the Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL) averted the nation’s plunge to political suicide.
The House of Representatives closed the second regular session of the 16th Congress on Wednesday night saddled by unfinished business involving legislation widely regarded as crucial to bringing peace to resource-rich Mindanao, which has been plagued by more than three decades of strife.
The default came despite the push of the Aquino administration and grim warnings from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front of dire consequences if Congress watered down concessions granted by the government in the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro, a peace accord signed last year between the government and the MILF after 17 years of negotiations.
Instead of succumbing to pressure from Malacañang, which wanted at all costs the passage of the BBL as a “peace in our time” legacy of the Aquino administration before it ends its term next year, the House leadership took a face-saving tour de force by deciding on a new timetable that would approve the BBL in September, allowing for amendments.
Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr. confirmed that the House leadership had agreed to scrap the so-called “opt-in” provision that would allow areas contiguous to the Bangsamoro territory to be part of an expanded area, through a majority vote in plebiscites on the fifth and 10th years of the law’s passage. This provision has triggered the most objections and uncertainties from the public, according to Belmonte.
The BBL, a pet project of the administration in its obsession to leave a legacy as a peacemaker of world renown, has run into stiff opposition in the Senate, traditionally the more independent of the two chambers of Congress. The Senate’s concurrence is needed to pass the BBL.
No sector, except perhaps the general public, can claim to have benefited from the postponement of the vote on the BBL to September—clearly not the government and the MILF. The territorial concessions to the MILF allow for an area larger than the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, which the Bangsamoro seeks to replace. The MILF has expressed fears that the draft charter for the Bangsamoro substate had been diluted in the Senate and the House, but will await the final results when Congress reopens. Ghazali Jaafar, MILF vice chair for political affairs, gratuitously said his organization’s Central Committee was respecting the legislative process involved in the BBL but that it would monitor developments “with vigilance.”
Jaafar needed a lot of gumption to say this. He has no choice but to respect the Philippine constitutional process. He is only a partner designated by the government in the peace panel in its policy of appeasing and not offending the MILF. He claimed that the MILF Central Committee had witnessed dilutions of the proposed BBL in the House ad hoc committee, and added: “We are afraid that more will either be added or deleted from it, and will not be the same as agreed in the provisions of the Comprehensive Agreement.”
Jaafar needs a reality check, and he should know by now that the Comprehensive Agreement and the BBL are still works in progress, subject to revision as they go through the crunching mechanism of the legislative process.
Sen. Ferdinand Marcos Jr., chair of the Senate committee on local governments which had held hearings on the draft BBL, had earlier said in a privilege speech that the document was riddled with unconstitutional provisions and that he was preparing a substitute bill. He warned that in its present form, the proposed Bangsamoro charter would lead, not to peace in Mindanao, but to something like a national calamity.
The President wanted Congress to pass the BBL before his July 27 State of the Nation Address. The MILF also wants it approved as soon as possible, without changes. But Congress is not obliging to meet their timetables. The bill is caught in a legislative bottleneck.
While both the government and the MILF are putting pressure on Congress to rush the approval of the BBL, opposition to the measure has mounted in the nonpartisan public sector. One of the more significant criticisms of the BBL in civil society has emerged from a movement led by former chief justice Reynato Puno. The movement, which depicts the BBL as a move to dismember the republic to make way for the expansionary demands of the MILF, appears to be gaining ground and causing concerns among political circles. To this movement, the BBL is to be shunned as an untouchable creature, as contemptible as the Great Plague of the 13th century in Medieval Europe.
In a statement last week, Puno warned that the vulnerability of the BBL to constitutional attacks might jeopardize efforts to bring about lasting peace in Mindanao. He said there were valid constitutional objections to the bill that needed to be addressed thoroughly in order to prevent the Bangsamoro people from giving up on peace.
Noting that the mixed opinions on the BBL lean more on unconstitutionality, he said the proposed measure could be the subject of legal disputes in the future. “If you have that kind of dispute, you have the danger of the Bangsamoro saying, ‘That’s it. We don’t want this kind of arrangement anymore.’”
The best solution, Puno said, is to call a constitutional convention whose members could be elected simultaneously with the candidates in the 2016 elections. He said the draft BBL is only possible under a federal parliamentary form, which is not allowed under the Constitution.