Dividends

Rep. Pastor Alcover Jr. is hard at work preparing an impeachment complaint against P-Noy. He will file his case as soon as Congress resumes its session. He is doing so, he says, because P-Noy violated the Constitution when he agreed to give the Moro Islamic Liberation Front P5 million for a leadership training program and the New People’s Army P31 million for whatever it is they are going to use it for.

Specifically, he says, P-Noy violated an article of the Constitution that says “no money shall be paid out of the Treasury except in pursuance of an appropriation made by law.” He finds it the strangest thing that government should justify this in terms of fulfilling a commitment made by the previous administration. “It is curious that despite the apparent obsession of President Aquino’s administration to investigate the allegedly anomalous transactions entered into by the previous administration, he readily complied with this commitment which is patently illegal.”

This notion is not as fringe as it seems. The people who are still shouting their heads off for “all-out war” against the MILF have seized on it like a terrier on a stranger’s leg and will not let go. That includes several bishops who have preached the ungodliness of it, an affront to God and man, but especially of man in the form of the soldiers who were killed in Al-Barka. P-Noy hasn’t just failed to punish the killers, their pitch goes, he has managed to reward them. That pitch is fever-pitch, particularly as made on AM radio, but it has gotten its share of sympathetic listeners.

Clearly, it’s not just the sums P-Noy’s detractors are trying to exploit. If it were merely so, then they would be dwarfed (no pun intended) by the Ali-Baba treasure Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her husband threw away, quite apart from stole, in her nine years of benighted rule. It’s the apparent betrayal the sums constitute against the aggrieved that a case is being made for. But that’s really the easiest thing in the world to put down.

At the very least, of course government may not pay out public money other than for an appropriation made by law. But the P5 million and P31 million are perfectly well within an appropriation made by law. That is the peace process. That is why we have a Peace Commission. That is why we have peace talks with the MILF. That is why we have peace talks with the NDF. Last I looked, those talks have not been broken, suspended, or stopped. The killings of the soldiers, which resulted from the unsanctioned adventurism of a military group, as has become clear by now, have not made the talks with the MILF, in particular, less imperative, it has made them more so.

Had Alcover et al. bothered to do some research, they would have discovered the concept of “peace dividend,” which is a time-honored tradition in peace negotiations. The idea is as inspired as it is simple: You succeed in forging peace, you lessen the cost of war. Or more specifically, you succeed in forging peace by investing in the uplift of the areas ravaged by war, you reduce the fortune you waste on war or the budget of the military which has a way of bloating with war. That is the reason it is called a “dividend.” Peace does bring dividends, not least in terms of money. That is not to speak of dividends in terms of avoiding the cost of human lives.

The P5 million and P31 million, in fact, are just “earnest money.” The peace process will require far bigger outlays from government for public works and other projects. A just peace costs an arm and a leg, but an unjust war costs a body and soul.

At the very most, it’s only the war-mongers, quite apart from supporters of the former squatter in Malacañang, who believe that anything less than all-out war against the MILF for a blunder committed by the AFP will constitute not betraying the soldiery. An idiotic belief which you would have thought Erren Khe had already proven. Erren was the brother of one of the victims in the encounter in Basilan and by all rights should be raising a storm and vowing death to his enemies. He hasn’t. Despite having seen the state of his brother’s remains, which is enough to make the stones weep, and despite being baited to it by the hosts of a TV program, he has refused to rattle his saber. He has said instead that he and the family his brother left behind prefer to obtain justice through legal means. He has said instead that the soldiers themselves have no wish to shed more blood in Muslim Mindanao as it is already awash in it.

You’d think that would already have put those who loudly call for war from the safety of their homes to shame. But, no, they’re cranking up their rants. There’s nothing impeachable in the initiatives P-Noy has taken for peace, there’s everything laudable in it. He’s not the one that ought to be impeached, Alcover et al. are.

Their cause is the easiest thing to scuttle, but you wonder why government hasn’t been able to do that. What in God’s name is wrong with its communications arm? Of all the justifications for P5 million and P31 million—and they are legion—all it could come up with was that government was honoring a commitment made by the previous (non)-president. That is pathetic, and it makes Alcover look brilliant. True enough, why should you honor the commitments of one who made her commitments for reasons that owed largely to personal rather than national interest, for self rather than collective survival?

And why in God’s name do you have to wait till the brickbats come your way before you bother to explain your policies, particularly about so vital a thing as peace, to the people? You can’t work peace without communicating peace, and if that’s the way government communicates, the last thing it will bring upon itself is the first that peace does to a country:

Dividends.