Total breakdown By Francisco S. Tatad | Posted on September 27, 2013 at 12:01am | 7,828 views In revealing the P50-million Malacañang “incentive” promised and delivered to senators for convicting then-Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona in 2012, Senator Jinggoy Estrada confirmed our original proposition that President B. S. Aquino III had long become the chief corruptor of Congress and had long lost the moral authority to govern. He should be impeached because he has deserved impeachment, and the people should turn him out by other means, if impeachment is not possible. This is nothing political or personal; it is simply how our political and justice system should work. Congress itself should not be spared. The members of Congress should bear the consequences of their own crime. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance at the time, Senate President Franklin Drilon has much to account for, not only in connection with Estrada’s expose, but also in connection with his refusal to subpoena Janet Lim Napoles, the purported mastermind in the alleged P10-billion pork barrel scam, to the Senate Blue Ribbon hearings upon the request of its chairman. It matters not that the hands of Chairman Teofisto Guingona, Jr., may not themselves be altogether clean. Drilon’s problem will not simply be limited to keeping the Senate presidency, which he should now resign before he is dismissed by his peers. He will have to worry about saving the Senate as an institution whose honor and integrity have been irredeemably tarnished by the pork barrel scandal. If it can no longer be done, then the Senate must perforce fall. For his part, Aquino’s problem will be how to keep the nation from breaking up should he decide to use everything in his power to stay on. Some might find it useful to adopt Moro National Liberation Front founding chairman Nur Misuari’s declaration of independence for the whole of Mindanao, which has caused the ongoing standoff in Zamboanga City, as a model for demanding the resignation of the Aquino government. The question is no longer whether or not Aquino should survive, but rather whether or not the nation should. If we see that the survival of one means the death of the other, we should choose well and we should choose now. It is not easy at all, but it can be done and must be done. Despite everything, there are still those who would weave their own fairy tales about Aquino’s nonexistent merits and virtues. In the face of the undeniable Zamboanga fiasco, some still find the time to bombard the public with drivel. “The President showed extreme courage in going to Zamboanga City in the midst of heavy fighting between government troops & Moro rebels,” says one message. “While reporters covering the fighting were shown wearing armored vests & steel helmets, the President mixed with evacuees without wearing anything to protect himself. After the Zamboanga City crisis, people appreciate PNoy more than ever as their leader.” This one is blasted from cell phone No. +639175901111, unsigned. I tried calling the number, but was told, “the subscriber cannot be reached, please try again later.” Anyone with half an ounce of intelligence could see where it is coming from. The reporters wore armored vests because they had to go where the fighting was; in contrast, Aquino “mixed with the evacuees” only to be photographed and filmed for propaganda purposes. He would have been laughed off the scene had he worn a steel helmet or bulletproof face mask and a Kevlar vest with those harmless and hungry evacuees. The crisis, far from being over, has now spilled over to North Cotabato and Maguindanao where the Bangsa Moro Islamic Freedom Fighters attacked the towns of Midsayap, Tulunan and Parang a couple of days ago. So the war, far from receding, has grown. People therefore are not interested in how Aquino behaves when he smells gunpowder, but in how and when he intends to end the war. What’s taking it so long? Why is he using a purely military approach to an unquestionably political problem? And why has he put Secretary of Interior and Local Government Manuel Roxas II in charge of the military operations, when he has nothing to do with the military, and knows nothing about the military, the MILF, or the Mindanao conflict? Why has Aquino shut out the real professionals and the ones mandated by law to attend to this crisis and place this incompetent instead? As this is a military operation, AFP Chief of Staff Gen. Emmanuel Bautista should be on top, and Maj. Gen. Rey Ardo, commanding general of the West Mindanao Command, should be the ground commander. The Chief of Staff is next to the Commander-in-Chief in the military chain of command. Neither the Secretary of National Defense nor the DILG Secretary is part of that chain. For his part, Ardo is the theatre commander for Western Mindanao. This does not necessarily exclude the police: they provide garrison and perimeter defense. But this is the responsibility of the Zamboanga chief of police at the local level, the regional commander at the regional level, and the Philippine National Police Chief Alan Purisima at the national level. The DILG Secretary has no rightful involvement here. Yet he has inserted himself at the center of it, despite his zero experience in police matters. He has put himself in the way of smooth and efficient police operations, and put in harm’s way those very operations. Obviously, all this is aimed to provide Roxas the political exposure he needs to become a viable presidential candidate in 2016. But after the Napoles scandal in Manila and the fiasco in Zamboanga, he may no longer have any 2016 candidacy to speak of. The Moros, who have suffered heavy losses in the fighting where they were outnumbered 200 against one, are not likely to forget it was Roxas who shot down the idea of a “ceasefire” just because it came from his potential 2016 rival—Vice President Jejomar Binay. Neither are the Zamboangueños likely to forget that Roxas was the one ineptly coaching Aquino from behind while their once beautiful city was being destroyed, and tens of thousands of their own relatives, neighbors and friends were being driven out of their homes, before they were all razed to the ground. Nor are the soldiers likely to forget that they had to kill and risk getting killed for something they only half-understood, on a wretched combat pay and even more wretched field rations, while Roxas and his friends literally swam in millions, if not billions of the people’s pesos. fstatad@gmail
Posted on: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 16:17:41 +0000
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