State of Emergency

Former defense secretary Avelino Cruz Jr. has called on Filipinos to be "vigilant and fight any attempt" of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to impose emergency rule if hostilities in the Central Mindanao region escalate and ignite terrorist attacks in other parts of the country.

In an interview on the television news channel ANC Thursday night, Cruz said: "There is always temptation... We should be vigilant, we should fight against any attempt to impose any kind of emergency rule because that's the last thing we need... It will exacerbate the situation."

He said that Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) Chief of Staff Gen. Alexander Yano would most likely not allow this to happen.

"Yano, I think, is a very professional soldier who exhibits responsibility and restraint. He knows how to [balance] these operations in order to achieve the correct objectives," Cruz said.

He added that the officers and men of the AFP would not "go along just in case somebody has the insane idea of trying to do that."

"I don't think the AFP will go along with it," he said.

In the same interview, Cruz expressed pity for the military that was tasked to defend the territory nearly given away by the government in the controversial Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD) with the Muslim separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

He also said the Filipino people should be vigilant against any attempt to change the Constitution before the May 2010 presidential elections.

"Any amendment to the Constitution should be done after 2010 in an environment devoid of any suspicion or [without] people in government with a hidden agenda of some sort," Cruz said. "If you have a new president in 2010 to shepherd these amendments, it will be a transparent, non-suspicious and more auspicious situation than what we have now."

Cruz is currently a partner in the country's most influential law firm, CVC Law (Villaraza, Cruz, Marcelo & Angangco), more popularly known as The Firm, which used to be President Arroyo's private legal counsel.

The Firm is now the legal consultant to opposition Sen. Manuel "Mar" Roxas, who filed a motion before the Supreme Court, questioning the constitutionality of the MOA-AD as it would supposedly dismember Mindanao from the rest of the country.