When Thieves Lie:The Bangsamoro ‘Ancestral Domain’ MoA Begins To Unravel

What’s worst than a lying thief?

My answer: a treacherous lying thief. While this writer abhors speaking in the first person. I am making an exception here because it has become abundantly clear to me, as it has to many thinking Filipinos that the government of the day is commiting the high crime of treason by attempting to sign away a huge chunk of the southern Philippines to a secessionist rebel group that claims to represent the ‘Bangsamoro’ people and their supposed ancestral domain even as the Organization of Islamic Conference does accord them that recognition

In Manila today lawmakers began crossing party lines to join the loud declarations that the MoA violates the Constitution.

Also today, a chasm fully appeared in the so called “meeting of minds” between the Arroyo regime and the MILF with the ‘little president, Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita rejecting the MILF assertion that the formation of the so-called Bangsamoro Juridical Entity was “a done deal” with negotiators having afixed their initials to the agreement two days before the scheduled formal signing of the piece of paper.

Mr. Ermita even sought to amplify on that denial by saying the initialed agreement “does not violate the Constitution because it is only prvisional.”

Here Mr. Ermita, a former congressman and a former defense undersecretary appear to be caught in the administration own lie.

Now the increasingly loud discussions among constitutional experts experts, political analysts and ordinary Filipinos is that since some leaders having stayed in office on the strength of a ’stolen’ mandate, lying about having sold out the nation is just one more sin.

In his 1923 essay The Degrees of Sin, T. Pirce Brown wrote, ““…if no sin is worse than another, you should be as glad to associate with a drunken, adulterous, lying, murdering thief as you would be with one who failed to give as he had been prospered, or pray as he should.”

Those foisting the Bangsamoro ancestral domain MoA on the nation as the formula for peace are in ‘good’ company.

Against this backdropp, our troops and those of the MILF are pareparing for the worst.