OP ED COLUMN: OPINION ON PAGE ONE- Can DU30 collect now on Xi’s ‘promised’ help? – BY FRANCISCO S. TATAD

.

.

TO President Rodrigo Duterte’s claim that various forces have combined to destabilize his presidency, former congressman/senator/AFP Chief of Staff Gen. Rodolfo “Pong” Biazon is not the first, nor will probably be the last, to say the destabilization has all been “self-inflicted.” Biazon lengthily discussed this issue with me and Catholic broadcaster Ariel Ayala Sunday evening on my GNN cable TV program “Una sa Lahat” (First things first). But we barely scratched the surface.

The drug killings
The list of such self-inflicted destabilization efforts must begin with the drug killings. They continue to destabilize. Nobody is against a proper war on illegal drugs, but nobody wants a single drug suspect being killed without due process. In two years, thousands of drug suspects have perished without documentation or due process. Foreign dignitaries and international human rights organizations have been abused for showing some concern about the killings.

Even priests have been killed for simply quoting one of the Ten Commandments.

Beyond the killings, the killing machine has succeeded in silencing political dissent even on non-drug-related issues, for fear that dissent on any issue could get the dissenter killed as an alleged drug suspect. The opposition is drying up from fear, but this is interpreted by the propaganda fraudsters as the result of the alleged popularity of the President.

.

Federalism as destab
A second open source of self-destabilization is DU30’s “federalism.” It is self-destabilizing because the President has no legal basis in pushing for it. Article XVII of the Constitution provides that any amendment to, or revision of, the Constitution may be proposed by the Congress upon a vote of three-fourths of all its members, or by a constitutional convention called by Congress or directly convened by the electorate, or by the people themselves through direct initiative.

The President is completely and absolutely excluded from the process. And yet DU30 and his consultative committee of “learned constitutionalists” are the ones at the front and center of this absurd project. Absurd, because it seeks to subdivide the unitary Philippine republic into 18 separate states, and put them back together again into one “federal” whole. The apparent model is perhaps Yugoslavia, which disappeared from the map after it was balkanized.

I used to be in favor of federalism, when I thought the Spratly islands, which China has now fortified and militarized, and the state of Sabah, which is now part of Malaysia, could be “federalized” into the Philippine republic. But that hope is gone, and what we have now is a unitary state that cannot by legal definition or by any sleight of hand be federalized. DU30’s insistence on it, just because he has set his mind on it, is a source of a completely unnecessary instability.

Revgov as destab
DU30’s recurring talk of shifting to a “revolutionary government,” and establishing a coalition government with the communists provides the most persistent self-destabilization of his own government. A revolutionary government presumes a successful revolution, which dismantles the existing Constitution and the government under it. DU30 talks about it all the time, as though it were something he could just impose on the existing constitutional structure, without any resistance from those who want to defend the existing order.

A coalition government with the communists, on the other hand, means a working partnership with the communist forces whose attempt to overthrow the civil government in the late 1960s and early 1970s prompted Ferdinand Marcos to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus and proclaim martial law all over the Philippines in 1971. Despite the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet communism after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the CPP/NPA/NDF continues to wage armed struggle and collect “revolutionary taxes” from farmers and businessmen in the countryside.

DU30 has appointed central committee members of the Communist Party to the Cabinet, beginning with an ex-priest Leoncio Evasco Jr. who is NDF vice chairman, whom he has named Cabinet secretary, directly in charge of the Office of the President and 12 to 18 agencies. His self-proclaimed mandate is to turn the Philippines into a Chinese-type socialist state. Under former Senate president Pimentel, PDP-Laban, DU30’s party, has entered into a working alliance with China’s Communist Party.

.

– SPACE RESERVE FOR YOUR ADVERTISEMENT –

.

Impact on military and police
The mere mention of “revolutionary government” or coalition government with the communists is unbearably destabilizing to those who remember DU30 taking an oath to “preserve and defend the Constitution, execute its laws, do justice to every man, and consecrate himself to the service of the Nation.”

It is equally destabilizing to members of the Armed Forces who swore the following oath when they entered the service: “I am a Filipino soldier. I will support and defend the Constitution of the Republic of the Philippines. I will obey all laws, legal orders, and decrees of my lawful superior at all times.” And to members of the Philippine National Police who swore an oath to “love God, my country and people, uphold the Constitution and obey legal orders of the duly constituted authorities.”

The Constitution mandates three coequal and coordinate branches of government—the Executive, the Legislative and the Judiciary. The operative words are coequal and coordinate. Yet in total disregard of the principle of check and balance and the separation of powers, the President has assumed virtual control of the legislature and the judiciary and put an end to the normal operations of the tripartite system of government.

.

– SPACE RESERVE FOR YOUR ADVERTISEMENT –

.

Controlling Congress, destroying the SC
First, he presided over the mass migration of elected congressmen from various political parties into his borrowed PDP-Laban, which did not have more than three visible members before the elections, in order to create a so-called “supermajority.” He handpicked Sen. Koko Pimentel, a Mindanaoan, to become Senate President, and Rep. Pantaleon Alvarez, another Mindanaoan, to become Speaker of the House, and gave them free run of the Congress for the first two years. They have since been replaced by Senate President Tito Sotto and Speaker Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the former president.

Then DU30 moved against Supreme Court Chief Justice Ma. Lourdes Sereno, denouncing her as his “personal enemy” and demanding her immediate removal, not through impeachment, which is the only constitutional way of removing an impeachable chief justice, but through a quo warranto proceeding filed by the Solicitor General, in which eight justices voted, without a single word from the Constitution, to nullify her 2012 appointment ab initio.

No single act of the President and of the Supreme Court has permanently destabilized the constitutional order as much. By exercising a power they did not have, namely, to remove a Chief Justice who should have been removed by impeachment, the justices, at the President’s behest, put themselves above the Constitution and the law.

This compels the ordinary layman to ask, do we still have a valid Consitution, and a legitimate Supreme Court? My own sense as a layman is that we are now ruled by sheer executive fiat. We have become a conquered people, a colonized race.

.

– SPACE RESERVE FOR YOUR ADVERTISEMENT –

.

A friendly foreign spy
On DU30’s so-called “tête-à-tête” with his presidential counsel Salvador Panelo, DU30 said a “friendly foreign government” had informed him that the communists under Jose Maria Sison and the Magdalo group under Sen. Antonio Trillanes 4th and Rep. Gary Alejano “have combined” to plan his overthrow. Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana has confirmed the communist part of the story but dismissed the rest of it as pure “tsismis” (gossip).

Sison has been talking of DU30’s various health issues, and has publicly predicted his ouster before the end of 2019. But he has not said the push would come from the CPP/NPA/NDF or mere poor health. As for Trillanes, I interviewed him in his Senate office last Wednesday, and I saw a man more concerned about DU30’s efforts to void the 2011 amnesty granted to him by President B.S. Aquino 3rd and have him re-arrested for the crimes of rebellion and coup d’etat, which had been dismissed in court and extinguished by that executive grant. He showed no signs of preparing to oust a sitting president.

The trouble though is that we do not know whether the President is bluffing or not. At the beginning of his term, his spokesman Ernesto Abella said DU30 loved to spin jokes, and that only two out of every five statements he makes should be taken seriously. But we cannot afford to speculate when the President is serious and when he is not, especially on matters related to national security.

.

– SPACE RESERVE FOR YOUR ADVERTISEMENT –

.

An act of war?
Since he says a “friendly foreign government” had informed him about the alleged plot against him, he should be able to tell us how that source was able to access its alleged information. If it was the result of a wiretap or an electronic surveillance, who else did they wiretap? The Secretary of National Defense? The Secretary of Foreign Affairs? The Secretary of the Interior and Local Government? The National Security Adviser? The AFP Chief of Staff? The PNP Director General? The various heads of the intelligence services? The President and Commander in Chief?

Does it not constitute an act of war for the intelligence network of a foreign government to spy on the officials and citizens of its host country? Shouldn’t this concern DU30 much more than any possible threat he wants to attribute to Trillanes? Seeing himself as the principal source of his own destabilization, it isn’t easy to see why he is complaining now of being destabilized by others. Between 1986 and 2001, two Filipino presidents fell from power because of mutinous military forces. Marcos fell when the civilian-supported military forces withdrew their allegiance to their Commander in Chief. Estrada fell when the military top brass and the Cabinet similarly withdrew their support and the Supreme Court turned out in full force to support the coup.

But we never heard Marcos or Estrada at any time complain that their enemies were planning to boot them out. Has DU30 never learned from Lee Kuan Yew that “to name the enemy is to make him”? Can he not collect on China’s President Xi Jinping’s supposed ‘promise’ now—as revealed by the Davao strongman—that he will never allow his valued ally to be overthrown by hostiles?

[email protected]

THE MANILA TIMES

.

  All photographs, news, editorials, opinions, information, data, others have been taken from the Internet ..aseanews.net | [email protected] |.For comments, Email to :D’Equalizer | [email protected] | Contributor