Everyone, almost, wants Joc-Joc home

Everyone, it seems, wants former Agriculture Undersecretary Jocelyn "Joc-Joc" Bolante home from Los Angeles. The Senate wants him, the Ombudsman wants him, farmers’ groups want him, even Malacanang wants him, if one is to believe what Executive Secretary Ed Ermita has said.

The only one who doesn’t want him back is the mastermind of the fertilizer scam –it obviously couldn’t have been Joc-Joc himself – who is even now quaking in his or her boots over the prospect of this peripatetic traveler finally coming home to spill the beans. While Ermita might hope that Joc-Joc will come home and clear his name, many think it more likely that many more, shall we say, "interesting" people will get caught in the dragnet. That, in the first place, is why Bolante’s been scarce from his homeland.

If it were only possible to clear his name, without dragging others into the mud with him, does anyone really think the national guessing game about where Joc-Joc was all along, and those rumors about his latest sighting, a la an allegedly very much alive Elvis Presley, would have even gotten started?

At this point, that "mystery" about why he was arrested by United States immigration authorities when he landed in LAX from Seoul seems relevant only if his detention means that he will have to first face charges in an American court before being deported back to the Philippines. Anyway, do we really care whether his B1-B2 visa had expired, or whether the Philippine government had asked for his apprehension, both of which I really doubt?

Whatever charges he now faces in the United States – and the speculation includes violations of the federal anti-racketeering statute or some state law in California which supposedly prohibits the importation of stolen money into the state –the concern is that the US may get first crack at putting Bolante behind bars if he is found guilty.

Such a delay is thought to be disadvantageous to anti-GMA forces because it means Joc-Joc might not be available yet as a campaign issue, should the 2007 elections be held as scheduled. If the US nails him on some charge or other, he will go through the court process and, if convicted, serve time in a US jail.

Only after all of that will he be deported to the Philippines to face whatever charges are eventually filed against him by the Ombudsman. That could take a very long time, much longer than some eager beavers are willing to wait.

The government cannot be accused of undue haste or inordinate interest in locating the whereabouts of Joc-Joc. After all, to this day no charges have been filed against him by the Ombudsman. Since no case is pending against him in court, no request for extradition can issue from the Philippine government. Neither can his passport be cancelled since, as our Department of Foreign Affairs has stressed time and again, his case does not fall under any of the legal situations authorizing cancellation of his passport.

Against this background, Executive Secretary’s plea that Bolante come home to clear his name has to be taken with a considerable grain of salt. The only way any such declaration can be half-way credible is if, by some miracle, the plunder or malversation cases are forthwith filed against Joc-Joc and an extradition request filed with the US government on the strength of such pending cases.

We can disregard all the other verbiage coming out of Palace functionaries. As is often said, we have to look at what they do, and forget what they’re saying. All paeans to one’s burning desire to get to the truth behind the fertilizer scam sound hollow. At the end of the day, despite all those adverse findings of the Commission on Audit and a frustrated Senate Committee on Agriculture, we have not heard from the one person who was, as it were, present at the creation and knew all about this sordid affair.

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A high-level Chinese diplomatic mission to Pyongyang has reportedly failed to produce any breakthroughs in the effort to get the Kim Jong-Il regime to address the crisis caused by North Korea’s recent testing of long-range ballistic missiles. This is distressing news and a matter which we in this country should not ignore.

If the prospects of a serious confrontation between North Korea, on the one hand, and South Korea and Japan, on the other, become imminent, the Philippines will inevitably be drawn into the melee, if only because of our geographic proximity to the contending parties. Think of it this way: If those Taepodong II missiles have the capability to reach the United States, which admittedly some experts dispute, how safe are we in this country? The overall complexion of the security situation in Asia will also change, possibly irrevocably.

The reason is that Japan, as a matter of self-defense, has become so worried about the North Korean action that it has threatened to re-arm itself and even undertake a preemptive strike. While this is technically contrary to the Japanese Constitution which has, since the end of the Second World War, allowed only defensive capability, the Bush Doctrine has redefined defensive action to include pre-emptive strikes, for which offensive capability is axiomatic.

At the Manila Overseas Press Club Philippines-Japan Friendship Night recently, I asked the Guest Speaker, Japanese Ambassador Ryuichiro Yamazaki, to confirm or deny that the intention to re-arm and to engage in pre-emptive war were new Japanese initiatives, as reported in media. The affable Ambassador, understandably, wouldn’t be drawn into this thorny thicket and uttered familiar diplomatese on what the Japanese Constitution provided.

He did say, though, that at that moment, a high-level Chinese government team was in Pyongyang in order to make the Beijing government’s deep concern known and persuade the North Koreans to cease missile test firings. Now that the Chinese mission has failed, it is time for the Six Parties – namely the United States, South Korea, North Korea, China, Russia and Japan – to respond decisively and unambiguously.

If severe sanctions, such as a halt to food and other humanitarian aid, are the key, well, this may be the occasion to go do it, even with the human catastrophe that will be the inevitable result. There seems to be no consensus on the extreme sanction, armed hostilities. We all hope the Six Parties don’t go there, but with a helmsman like Kim in North Korea, one can’t predict where all this is headed.