EDITORIAL - What kind of animal is an ATS?

The Philippines is probably the only country in the world that recognizes “areas of temporary stay” for criminals, places of solace where not even authorities of the law empowered to enforce the sovereign mandate of the state can enter.

Most Filipinos knew nothing about these ATS. They only came to hear of them for the first time when 19 soldiers were killed by Muslim rebels in an ambush in Basilan. The soldiers were pursuing escaped murderers when ambushed, reportedly because they strayed into an ATS.

How could there be areas within the republic over which government has willingly ceded authority and control? No sovereign state worth its honor and dignity can have places within its jurisdiction that are off limits to any application of its sovereign laws.

Has the government sold out to the Muslim rebels that it must now give up authority and control over parts of its territory as a form of appeasement? And appeasement for what? That the Muslim rebels might come to the peace table?  

The Muslim rebels only want one thing their own Islamic homeland carved out of the sovereign territory of the Philippines. And they will employ any means to attain that goal. They will use force every now and then, or dance with government to buy time to regroup and rearm.

The reason why Mindanao has never seen peace in decades and will never see one is because both sides do not see eye to eye. The goal of Muslim rebels has always been perfectly clear to them. It is government that does not see this reality with the same clarity as do the rebels.

And so a succession of presidents deluded themselves into thinking they can buy peace by being nice, naively thinking they can talk Muslim rebels out of their goal. They never understood that niceties only appeal to these people as appetizers for their eventual feast.

The government is blind to the fact that the Muslim rebellion has many guises the MILF with whom it is talking long-term, the supposed breakaway factions the MILF uses as leverage for quick concessions, and the Abu Sayyaf over which it pretends to have no influence.

All these guises are one and the same interchangeable pieces of the same ruse. Yet it is to all these guises that the Philippine government served “areas of temporary stay” on a silver platter. There is a term for this situation in Cebuano: “Giluto sa kaugalingong mantika.”