Guest Post: Why the Sultan of Sulu is Wrong

photo credits: globalnation.inquirer.net

The sultan is embarrassing not just himself but all of us. By sending his “people” into another country’s territory, supposedly to reclaim it, he has shown how ignorant he is of the principles behind international law and simple ethics. It’s tragic that this man doesn’t see how fallacious his position is. If it were true that any country still possesses a right to control a former territory, then, pray, we should not at all complain if the Spaniards, Americans, and Japanese all call up Malacanan Palace today and inform us that we are still theirs because we were once so before. 

But it gets worse. As usual, the greater part of the netizens who comment about the issue share the same myopia. In other words, the people who think the Sultan and the rest of the Filipinos in Sabah are right because they are courageous are also wrong. For courage is a virtue, and there is nothing virtuous in occupying a piece of property that is no longer ours, even if it was ours before. President Aquino is right in choosing not to support the Filipinos there. True nationalism consists not in supporting your fellow Filipinos even when they are in the wrong just because they are Filipinos too, but in dissuading them from doing something wrong, despite their being your countrymen, because a bad act is still a bad act, whatever your nationality might be. 

Only Filipinos blind to what is really at stake here can ever think that what the sultan is doing can ever be something honorable. His “army” is just a gang of innocent ruffians who had surrendered their right to think for themselves to a pseudo-monarch who lives somewhere in suburban Manila because the real army, the Philippine army, is against him. “Reclaiming” Sabah for the purpose of forcing oneself into the peace agreement between the government and the MILF is pathetic, incredible, and just plain wrong. 

Guest Post from: 

Mr. Gian Carlo Velasco

Writer