PRESIDENT Aquino’s last-ditch potshots at critics of his Bangsamoro basic law (BBL) during the recent Philippine Military Academy (PMA) graduation smacks of sour-graping and tacit lamentation and frustration for failing to achieve the coveted Nobel Peace Prize nomination.
Pushing the same thing and expecting different results is insanity, Albert Einstein says. The Mamasapano massacre changed the conditions, making BBL untenable or unacceptable.
Perhaps, it is wise to learn from the great US President Abraham Lincoln, who was besieged with a raging American civil war that cost over 600,000 Americans lives from 1861 to 1865. But this did not stop him from building the 3,000-kilometer railway project that cut travel time from east coast to west coast from six months to only six days.
The parallelism may seem incomparable, but it provides lessons on crisis management on handling different battlefronts simultaneously, while paradoxically focusing always on one at any given time. This metaphor of straddling the divide is what made Lincoln a great statesman, who united America over the same issue that led to the civil war—industrialization and his railway economics.
The political metaphor over BBL is anchored on two opposing beliefs. BBL advocates earlier clamored for its urgent passage, arguing tautologically that it is because BBL was not passed earlier that the Mamasapano incident exploded.
On the contrary, there are arguments positing that BBL is more divisive than unifying, and that it could possibly lead to more wars as it will only empower the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). Thus, the mounting opposition to the idea of granting rebels the belligerent status and the autonomy of managing huge resources and block grants, like the alleged P75 billion on the first year alone.
Once empowered with funds, what could stop the rebels from arming further and pushing possibly for an Islamic State similar to Saudi’s radical Wahhabism, which inspired Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, al-Qaeda and other radicals. Are there guarantees to peace? Even the Peace Panel admits there are none, but insists BBL is still worth the gamble.
Critics argue, on the contrary, that because Muslim Mindanao is highly feudal and not democratized, pumping more funds will only benefit the leaders and not the masses, who still live in abject poverty with Maguindanao recording a poverty incidence of 57.8 percent and Lanao del Sur, 68.9 percent, according to the 2012 National Statistics and Coordination Board.
When Lincoln pushed for industrialization and railways, the British empire, which could not forget losing to the 1776 American revolution, detested it as it will kill its maritime colonial trade. Railways developed the inland market of America, building cities along the way. Traditionally, civilizations were built around “ports” along coasts, thus, the word “opportunity” and other word derivatives like export, import, report, etc., all evolved from the word “port.”
The British incited the Southerners to pursue a belligerent position and rise up in arms, arguing they were different from the rest. On the contrary, Southerners were the same as everybody. After all, America was a land of migrants or communities of Irish settlers, Italians, Anglo-Saxons, Germans, Jews, etc. This big fatal lie cost the lives of over 600,000 Americans in the civil war.
Another big lie was the propaganda that industrialization and railways will affect the slave-owning Southerners. On the contrary, Lincoln planned to build railways to also industrialize and bring development to the South.
Marauding bandits, like the Jesse James brothers who were romanticized and made into heroes of the South in legendary tales, were actually antidevelopment for robbing banks and raiding train stations. The British empire, known for creating pirates and buccaneers like Sir Francis Drake, was allegedly behind conspiracies creating Jesse James and John Wilkes Booth who assassinated Lincoln.
Amid the South’s belligerent posturing to break away, Lincoln insisted on “keeping the Union.” Similarly, President Aquino must insist on keeping the constitution and our secular society intact and not be misled by the idea peace will happen by granting belligerent status to the MILF, which may later push for secessionism as its logical trajectory. This smacks of the divide-and-rule British Sykes-Picot agreement, which broke up the entire Middle East after the fall of the Ottoman empire in 1918, and prevented the Muslim world from uniting peacefully and getting them busy with turf-building rather than team-building toward development.
Lincoln disarmed the South with his antislavery propaganda, which was sincere, although most Americans were not really serious about it then being too preoccupied with survival and their respective ethnocentricity. In fact, it took over 100 years after Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968 when America became aware about racial discrimination.
Instead of getting waylaid by the tricky notion peace will happen with BBL, government must do a Lincoln and build railways all over Mindanao. For centuries, development was limited to coastal Mindanao cities, which traded solely with Manila and Cebu. Railways and feeder transport will correct this and trigger intratrade and development in the central regions, thus, wiping out insurgency. This way, even tripling budgets than those of the original BBL for political empowerment are welcome.
Just like Lincoln, we can bring real development to Mindanao, or help increase the pie, rather than squabble about the MILF’s share of the pie. Ironically, we can only democratize the fair sharing of the pie, when we focus on increasing the pie through massive production and development by involving the stakeholders themselves. Moreover, granting the MILF belligerent status will only reinforce the differences, thus, incubating the seeds for bigger conflicts where nobody wins.
E-mail: mikealunan@yahoo.com.