Thursday, August 14, 2008 Editorial: And then they dance the Cha-cha
EVEN before anyone from government showed any effort to shed light on why the memorandum of agreement on ancestral domain (MOA-AD) was drafted without giving a hint about it to anyone outside the august circle of Mindanao, peace experts in the government and Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) peace negotiations panel, Manila newspapers are screaming, Charter change. Like, duh?
Indeed, there are stirrings of that long desire to be free from the Manila government since that bombshell called MOA-AD was leaked out to the public. Moreso after more than a hundred thousand residents were forced to flee as bandits and rebels once more raided their farmlands and torched their houses.
Beyond those stirrings is an even greater but never heard demand to be consulted. But, no, the Manila government and the Manila media are too important for that, anyway, they profess to know the solutions to our problems. And so, they came out with the MOA without consulting people, and now that the MOA exploded on their faces, they are now doing the Cha-cha tune -- apparently dangling a longed-for state to further divide a Mindanao which they have just recently divided anew.
But looking through the half-hearted, uncoordinated, and stupid moves and proposals being fed the already exasperated Mindanaoans, there are two undertones that can be sensed, but which the central government would never be caught admitting. All that's happening today is but a manifestation that the central government doesn't really know what to do with Mindanao, but that it is too haughty to admit that it is stumped, clueless, stupid, and too greedy to open the discussion to those whose future they are trying to decide. Mindanao, for one, is just too rich to allow it to slip away from their hands.
And so, they are just biding their time, maybe, until they can gracefully exit and then buy more time after 2010.
After all, today is not the best time to admit that it no longer knows what to do. That's bad press, that's feeding the opposition's theory that this government has been bluffing all the time, and the people are already restive enough; with just a little show of weakness it will not take much for the masses to kick out a whole administration. What with the corruption exposes, the rice crisis, the Princess of the Stars hullabaloo (which by the way is still out there bottom hull up, endosulfan and all), the MOA-AD, and then the Central Mindanao gun battles and massive evacuations.
And because the gun battles are raging and the bombs are exploding right in their faces, they have to bring out one more card to raise an even greater uproar -- Cha-cha. It's too embarrassing to admit that the central government is restless, and so the best way is to raise an uproar, a solution out of the fix they have found themselves in -- a solution that will entail bringing the arguments, debates, and heated shouting to a bigger, louder arena the Houses of Congress and Senate.
That's how it has been in the past, the recent past and today. When things go rough, dangle a very enticing scenario, proposal, issue or concern to the politicians, and the uproar they will raise will surely drown out even the loudest of all explosions. As an added treat, the uproar will also glue people to their televisions for another week, that's one more week past with nothing solved. There will still be fighting in Mindanao, there will still be resentment, everything will be just as it was before the fighting broke out, even before the Tripoli Agreement in 1976 and the GRP-MNLF peace agreement in 1996, and the infamous MOA-AD of this month. But isn't that what government really wants? Between admitting helplessness and creating scenarios of discourse, the second option will always be more enticing and face-saving as well.
But it is this hee-hawing through three generations that is really behind all these incessant conflict. A government that's at a loss on what to do is a government that will opt for a status quo. And for Mindanao, the status quo means more of the same -- moments of peace, seasons of gun battles, and a lot of concerned politicians taking the grandstand in time for the next elections, afterwards... more broken promises, more rebels, more gun battles, more promises, more promises broken, ad nauseum.
