At least three attempts to broker a peace have failed
As leaders of the Moro Islamic
Liberation Front jetted into Manila for the signing Monday of the initial peace
agreement between the Philippine government under President Benigno Aquino III,
they had to know that they were taking a chance that could cost them. While the
agreement was described as historic, it was not unprecedented. And in the
previous attempts lie the seeds of potential trouble.
Previous agreements have been
wrecked by a Congress dominated by landlords and big business who saw any
political accommodation of the Moro people as a threat to their continued reign
in Mindanao.The Philippines is 81 percent Catholic, with Christians slowly
intruding into what was one a largely Muslim island, a long-simmering issue The
failure of the past agreements has led to the marginalization of at least one
Mindanao leader who tried to put it together and badly weakened his
organizaion.
MILF leaders headed by chief
Murad Ebrahim arrived to sign the framework agreement, as it is called, in a
ceremony attended by Aquino and Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak, whose
country helped to broker the deal.
The agreement calls for the
establishment of a new autonomous region on Mindanao, to be called the
Bangsamoro, or Muslim Nation, by 2016 and hopefully to end 40 years of
bloodshed that have taken an estimated 150,000 lives and stunted the economic
growth of the region.
Both Ebrahim and independent analysts
and others have warned that Monday's signing does not guarantee an end to the
conflict although the MILF’s 12,000 guerrilla fighters are supposed to disarm
by 2016.
Ebrahim’s deputy, Ghazali Jaafar,
stressed that “this is just the beginning of the peace journey." Despite
the fact that Aquino said it involves a broader swathe of the Muslim south, for
instance it leaves open the question what to do about the Abu Sayyaf, the
murderous Islamic sect with alleged connections with Al Qaeda that has been responsible
for numerous kidnappings and killings in the south.
Precedent leaves room for
caution. In the four decades of internecine war in most parts of southern and
western Mindanao, two peace agreements were reached and another almost got
underway. These agreements, the 1976 Tripoli Agreement and the 1996 Jakarta
Peace Accords, were between the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the
Marcos regime and the MNLF and the Ramos government respectively. The botched
Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain would have been the third of this
kind, but the first involving the MILF.
Past Philippine presidents always
regarded the MILF as a breakaway group from the MNLF that could easily be dealt
with militarily, until the total capitulation of MNLF leader Nur Misuari in
1976 in the Tripoli Agreement, which was signed in Libya with deposed strongman
Muammar Qaddafi as its principal broker and backer.
Many field commanders and senior
leaders of the MNLF saw the accord as a ruse and a trap. The late Salamat
Hashim wasted no time in seceding from the MNLF to form the MILF and pursued a
more radical solution to the centuries-old conflict.
Salamat would later be vindicated
as the Marcos regime made a sham of the Tripoli Agreement, prompting Misuari to
resume fighting against the government. However, by the time Misuari realized
he had fallen into the trap laid out by the later-deposed dictator, the MILF
had already made significant headway in recruiting disgruntled senior
commanders and young ideological Muslim scholars, cutting into the MNLF’s
influence.
In 1996, Misuari finally settled
for the Jakarta Peace Accord for which the MNLF was promised greater autonomy.
But like the 1976 Tripoli Agreement, the Jakarta Peace Accord was never meant
to give the Bangsamoro the right to full self-determination. The promise of
genuine autonomy was reduced to the granting of ministerial powers that only went
to the traditional adversaries of the Moro rebels, the Moro warlords and
politicians. Most of these warlords are still in place.
Misuari, after serving a term as
governor of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, would eventually lose his
pre-eminent role in the Bangsamoro struggle.
President Fidel Ramos also tried
to reach out to the MILF by initiating peace negotiations with the Moro rebel
group that had already surpassed the armed strength of the MNLF with whom he
signed a peace agreement. But Ramos ran out of time before the end of his
six-year term.
Ramos’s successor, former
President Joseph Estrada, instead of pursuing peace chose a path of destruction
by ordering an all-out war with the 12,000 fighters of the MILF. President
Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who succeeded him, did the same only to cave in to
pressures for a negotiated political settlement with the MILF.
In 2008, the Arroyo government
and the MILF were close to signing the memorandum of understanding on the
autonomous district. But it came at a time when President Arroyo’s credibility
ratings were at their lowest and suspicions that she was using the peace pact
as a medium to amend the Constitution and perpetuate herself in power only
reinforced the position of the anti-Moro block in Congress as well as local
government officials.
The well-intentioned agreement
did not even get past the Supreme Court where its opponents sought legal
relief. It was declared unconstitutional and its defeat immediately plunged
parts of predominant Muslim Mindanao, with a population between 4 million and 9
million, to the brink of civil war.
The botched agreement signing
also drove a wedge inside the MILF with senior MILF commander Ameril Umra Kato
forming his own Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighter (BIFF).
The MILF has come full circle. On
Monday, it agreed to the framework agreement for Bangsamoro. Far from being a
peace deal, however, the initial agreement is largely a broad stroke document
where the MILF practically leaves the future of its struggle for
self-determination in the hands of Congress although the creation of Bangsamoro
to replace ARMM is already a moral victory for the MILF as the word literally
means “Moro nation.”
The organic act that would create
the new autonomous political entity to embody the aspirations of the Moro
people, unfortunately, is within the realm of political reality where their
previous leaders have failed before.
How the present MILF leadership
will be able to reverse the history of capitulation, surrender and betrayal that
led to the failures of their past struggles is a task Chairman Murad Ebrahim
and the rest of the central committee members cannot afford to fail.
The autonomous agreement is just
the first step to a long journey for peace in Mindanao. Ending the war is way
easier than achieving a just and lasting peace. Now the hardest part of the
quest for peace begins.
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