Cardinal hits BBL ‘misinformation’

COTABATO CITY—A respected Catholic Church leader in Mindanao issued an appeal for people to distinguish between falsehood and truth about the government’s peace process with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), saying members of the panels that negotiated the government’s peace deal with MILF had been “demonized.”

Orlando Cardinal Quevedo, archbishop of Cotabato, said the public is being fed false information about BBL.

In an open letter, dated March 23, to the Senate and House of Representatives, Quevedo described BBL as “the most significant hope so far for a just and lasting peace” in Mindanao.

Quevedo, however, acknowledged that the deaths of 44 elite police commandos, 17 MILF men and three civilians in an operation to take down international terrorist Zulkifli bin Hir alias “Marwan” had derailed the peace process.

But BBL, he said, should be taken up by Congress objectively so that the proposed law “will pass the criterion of constitutionality.”

“Yet, both peace panels have been demonized. Judgments have been made about the BBL that the BBL itself does not advocate,” said Quevedo in his letter.

Quevedo said that as a Church leader in Mindanao, he had been following the peace process closely.

According to the cardinal, he sees BBL as articulating three main principles—preservation of national sovereignty, safeguarding national territorial integrity and realizing the Bangsamoro struggle for self-determination in a limited territory.

“Contrary to misinformation and misinterpretation, the BBL does not advocate the dismemberment of the republic,” said Quevedo’s letter.

“It does not lay claim to all of Mindanao and Palawan. It does not advocate the complete independence of any of the entities of the proposed Bangsamoro government (e.g., police, auditing, accounting, civil courts), such that their national counterparts have no effective role over them,” he said.

He, however, asked lawmakers not to turn BBL into another “meaningless word.” “For me, a refined BBL is about truth and justice,” said Quevedo.

“This is the way of the heart, the way to a just and lasting peace,” he said in his letter. Edwin Fernandez, Inquirer Mindanao