COLUMN: OPINION ON PAGE ONE- Is radical change possible? – By Francisco S. Tatad

AS the new year kicks in, we need to see above all how we have fared and are faring in terms of what we have set out to do as individuals, as a people and as a nation. Regardless of our individual proclivities and idiosyncrasies, have we become better human beings, better Christians or non-Christians, better citizens, better members of our respective families, better friends of our friends, and better adversaries of those who hold different views on things moral, ethical, religious, economic, social and political? Do we have friends who will swear we would never betray their loyalty for a price, or foes who will swear we would never falsify the truth even if the devil asks for it?

These are some of the questions we need to ask, on a permanent basis, in the course of our journey on this planet. And we should ask them on this most important day of our lives. This is part of our continuing effort to try, in the language of the Gospel, to “become saints.” And the Gospel says we are all called to become saints. Given the vast and intricate political milieu in which we live, we have to ask ourselves whether we have upheld our first and inexhaustible relationship with God amidst all the challenges, or have subordinated it, for the flimsiest of reasons, to our relationship with creatures such as the State or the temporal powers in control of the State.

As a human being, I continuously ask myself these questions. And I ask you, dear reader, to ask them yourself. I am a political columnist, I regularly write three political columns a week. It is a task I have assigned myself. I have to ask myself whether I could function as any kind of critic at all, if I did not first recognize myself and each of my subjects, as a creature of God, who is commanded by “conscience” to do what is good and avoid what is evil, in the exercise of all our faculties.

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Our first and last end

This is the first principle of practical reason, which allows us to know God as man’s First and Last End. It means, we begin in God and end in God. It is the north star of our existence. To appreciate the rightness or wrongness of the acts of the State, one must take into account not only the political or police issues involved, but above all the command of the divine positive law from which the civil law emanates.

The divine command, Thou shalt not kill, not the President’s instructions to the Philippine National Police or “vigilantes” to waste every alleged drug suspect found standing at the wrong time in the wrong place, should set the standards of justice. The nation must know that every extrajudicial killing offends not only the Constitution, the rule of law, and the rights of man, but also the rights of God. We must therefore stop the extrajudicial killings by stopping the killers, especially if and when they will not stop themselves.

A private lawyer has tried to make President Duterte accountable for the murders of the Davao Death Squad when he was still mayor of Davao City by bringing a complaint of “crimes against humanity” before the International Criminal Court at The Hague. He has tried to evade criminal accountability by withdrawing the Philippines’ treaty membership in the Statute of Rome that established the ICC. The withdrawal takes effect in March. The ICC process has not gone beyond the prosecutors’ “examination” of the document submitted by the complainant/s. But even after that, some sources believe the ICC may yet decide to go after him, if it finds any basis to assume jurisdiction and prosecute. Filipinos may then feel obliged to do whatever they could to help in this effort.

Things to stop

There are a few other things Filipinos must stop.

They must stop the rape on the Constitution through the railroading of DU30’s proposed “federalization” of the republic or Speaker Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s proposed shift to parliamentary government for their own ends. The Constitution is called the fundamental law because it is the only law authored and approved by the sovereign people of the Philippines. And yet sitting politicians are doing their best to mangle it in pursuit of their selfish interests.

The Philippines is a unitary state; there is nothing to federalize. The proposal to break it up into 18 separate states is not federalization, but balkanization, which will result in the extinction of the Republic of the Philippines. The proposed federalization would have some rational basis if the state of Sabah, which is being claimed by Manila but is now incorporated into the Federation of Malaysia, were to be proposed as an additional state, together with the contested territories in the Spratlys as another additional state.

But there is no such proposal, which would certainly raise a storm from Malaysia and China, if there was. The proposal to break up the Republic into 18 separate units fails to take into account the fact that only three of these proposed units, at best, can support themselves. The others would be insolvent “states.” In addition to the fact that the math does not show how the proposed union would be able to support its additional layers of government, no federal union has ever been created by “balkanizing” an existing whole and, like Humpty Dumpty, putting the splinters together back again.

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The real motive: separatism

Sensible critics have described the idea as ludicrous, dictated by a long subsisting desire to create a separate and independent “Mindanao.” The proposal for an “independent” Mindanao first surfaced in 1969 from Cotabato’s late former governor Ugtug Matalam. Over time, it drew support from a slew of Mindanao warlords, including Salipada Pendatun and Rashid Lucman. Its last incarnation was in 1990 when former Cagayan de Oro mayor Reuben Canoy tried to revive the movement, with the help of renegade Col. Alexander Noble with his loyal troops in Mindanao. In October of that year, Noble entered Cagayan de Oro, a city of 400,000, with nine truckloads of militiamen. There he met Canoy who had become the new leader of the independence movement.

Canoy had served as my undersecretary of public information, but decided to reclaim his elective position as CDO city mayor after a short while. In 1982, after I resigned from the Cabinet, we co-founded the Social Democratic Party of the Philippines. Neither the SDP nor I had anything to do with the Mindanao independence movement. In 1987, I ran for senator under SPD in coalition with the Grand Alliance for Democracy, of which I eventually became the chairman. In Manila, Canoy released copies of the proposed Mindanao official passport, and the proposed Mindanao dollar. But he resented the fact that no one was paying him enough attention.

Gen. Renato de Villa, Cory’s AFP Chief of Staff, was forced to put his 159,000 men on alert, but Cory herself did not quite know what to do with Canoy. In the end, they decided to detain him. I visited him in jail and said he posed no danger to the state, despite his Mindanao passport and Mindanao dollar. The government had no choice but to release him.

In 2016, we heard of the Mindanao independence movement again, after DU30 made Davao del Norte Rep. Pantaleon Alvarez Speaker of the House and Mindanao Sen. Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel 3rd Senate president. Alvarez was known as a strong advocate of DU30’s “federalism,” reportedly because of his being secretary-general of the MIM. Under the Constitution, as tirelessly pointed out in this column, the President has no lawful role to play in proposing any constitutional revision or amendment. But DU30 created a consultative committee of so-called constitutional experts, with questionable funding, to propose a federal charter. He has been the principal engine of this campaign, which is patently illegal.

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Arroyo’s intervention

Now Speaker Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has offered an apparent way out. The former president has mobilized her forces to propose a shift to parliamentary government, rather than to a federal one, getting DU30’s unconstitutional proposal out of the way. But it has introduced a separate problem. Arroyo is being termed out by June 30 next year, having already served three terms as a House representative for Pampanga. However, in a parliamentary government, she could run again as member of parliament, and then seek the position of prime minister.

Arroyo has a better chance of throwing a monkey wrench into DU30’s federal project than DU30 has a chance of halting Arroyo’s proposed move toward a parliamentary government. Neither option seems suitable for the nation right now, mainly because the Filipino people have no clear interest in it; only a few may be persuaded to believe that the nation is capable of holding an honest plebiscite on this question.

The Senate is the best hope of making sure the House initiative does not prosper. Filipinos have a duty to make sure the Senate resistance does not crumble. In May 2012, 19 of 23 sitting senators accepted a bribe of P50 million or more each from President B. S. Aquino 3rd and his budget secretary Florencio Abad to convict the late former Chief Justice Renato Corona, whom 188 congressmen had impeached without reading the Articles of Impeachment they had signed.

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Scuttling the elections

Filipinos must stop all plans, obvious or not so obvious as of now, to scuttle the May 2019 senatorial elections, and install a military junta composed of active or retired military generals. This sounds all irresponsible talk, but it is all we hear from people making a political pilgrimage to Davao. And it seems to get closer to reality as every retiring AFP Chief of Staff is offered a Cabinet post. DU30’s only program of government these days is how to find a way of continuing in office on top of the three co-equal and coordinate branches of government, without having a real program of government. We need to end this nonsense.

Beyond the drug killings, we must now stop the growing number of enforced killings and disappearances of political rebels. At the beginning of his term, DU30 named top communists to the Cabinet and asked the nation to prepare for a coalition government with the CPP/NPA/NDF. Now he wants a death squad to take care of his former bosom friends. He still talks of imposing martial law nationwide with the CPP/NPA/NDF as a major provocation, but on the recent 50th anniversary of the CPP as a revolutionary party, the government shot itself in the mouth by calling the CPP/NPA/NDF a “failed rebellion.”

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Unbridled corruption

The unbridled corruption in Congress and in local government, as shown by the most notorious flood control projects in Sen. Chiz Escudero’s Sorsogon, has exceeded all previous levels; this has prompted DU30 to decree the abolition of the utterly corrupt Road Board, with its reported loot of P50 to P60 billion. The uncontrolled spike in drug traffic from outside the country and the role played by drug lords with Chinese-sounding names—these must now receive our people’s urgent and unforgiving attention.

Finally, DU30 must now know that if there’s anyone who has earned any right to rebuke God, the Pope, San Isidro Labrador or plain Catholics, it is not this foul-mouthed gentleman from Davao. He must know that he has done enough dirty talking since 2016, and that he cannot remain the same obnoxious boor he has been these past three years. We are entitled to cleaner air, after the midterm.

After three years, Filipinos should be ready to confront moral and political vileness and evil, wherever they find it. Confrontation is now unavoidable. The only way for DU30 to avoid it, is for him to undergo radical change—for the better.

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