CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY (MindaNews / 05 December) — As reported recently in the media, the three House of Representatives (HOR) Committees charged with the four House bills proposing a Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL) have created a Sub-Committee to prepare a draft of the merged bills that is expected to be ready by the end of January 2018.
The House Sub-Committee is headed by Zamboanga Sibugay 1st District Congressman Wilter “Sharky” II Palma. Specifically, Palma is tasked to “iron out” which of the parts of the four bills could be cobbled together into a final draft like “Humpty Dumpty Sitting on a Wall.” In other words, Palma and the Sub-Committee he heads will be “separating the chaff from the grain,” meaning purging, from their point of view, those that are ‘unconstitutional’ or ‘undesirable’ from the four bills, and coming out with a “merged” bill that will be passed for deliberation on the floors of the Lower House of Representatives.
We are aghast to learn that there are four different bills on the BBL in the HOR, which clearly reveals that there are correspondingly four different versions of the BBL in Congress. We still do not know how many versions the Senate has. But for sure, whatever version is passed on by the HOR to the Senate will undergo more changes.
So what happened to the BBL draft produced by the Bangsamoro Transition Commission (BTC Part 2) that was submitted to President Duterte and which the latter is supposed to certify as “urgent bill”? Gone with the wind?
As part of BTC I that crafted the CAB-compliant BBL (editor’s note: compliant with the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro) under Aquino’s presidency, we feel that we are going through a déjà vu in light of this replay of events vis-a-vis the BBL in Congress. Or, to be more brutally frank, what is being experienced today is the same nightmare that we went through when the Aquino regime and the 16th Congress messed up the CAB-compliant BBL so much so that what came out was a “BBL” – or versions of it – that not even an unlettered Moro patriot brother on the ground could swallow.
In hindsight, we cannot but conclude that the BTC Part I and Part II were turned into rigmaroles to make it appear that government is complying with the FAB and CAB.[]/a> with []/a> with |||
To use a cliché, we were “stubborn as a mule” and as stupid.
So today, there are four versions of ‘BBL’ in the HOR. And once again Congress is playing the parlor game of ‘eeny, meeny, miny, moe’ on the ‘BBL’ and the Bangsamoro as it did in the previous Congress. President Duterte did not even mention it when he spoke at the Bangsamoro Assembly. Probably, though, we will still end up, among other things, with a ‘Bangsamoro Government’ of a regional entity like ARMM without a Police Force or police powers. Without a police force, however, whatever Bangsamoro Government version that makes it to the finish line set by Congress will be like an aging toothless tiger unable to even chew on a leaf of grass.
And with the MILF transitioning to NGO as announced in the media, the Abu Sayyafs, ISIS, and all the crazies and gunslingers in town will have a field day running around the Bangsamoro and playing ‘Indians and cowboys’ with the AFP and the PNP. There goes your ‘demilitarization’! There goes your ‘Moro self-governance’!||| |||buy imuran online with |||