Looking back: MILF, MNLF peace deals

MANILA, Philippines - What the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) started on Jan. 7, 1997 in Barangay Simuay in Sultan Kudarat, Maguindanao will culminate on Thursday with the signing of a final peace pact that took both sides 17 years to draft together.

The GPH-MILF talks have had many ups and downs, to the point that it collapsed many times over, with negotiators restarting the proposed agreement each time, in a bid to find a lasting solution to the nagging “Moro issue” or the quest of Mindanao’s Muslim communities for self-rule under the international right-to-self-determination (RSD) doctrine.

The peace talks between the government and the MILF started three months after the signing of the September 2, 1996 final peace agreement between the government and the Moro National Liberation Front.

The founding chairman of the then monolithic MNLF, Nur Misuari, was quick to complain against Malacanang’s move to start talks with the splinter group, MILF, barely three months after signing a final peace accord brokered by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

“The ink of the pen we used in signing the final peace agreement between the government and the MNLF has not even dried and here comes another peace effort with another group,” a ranting Misuari then said.

Misuari, who hails from Sulu, has a deep-seated animosity with the MILF, sparked by his ideological differences with its founding chairman, the late Egyptian-trained Imam Salamat Hashim, an ethnic Maguindanaon.

As young comrades so full of idealism, Misuari and Hashim helped each other organize the MNLF between 1971 and 1972. They became estranged in 1979, due to irreconcilable differences that ushered in the birth of the Salamat-led more secular MILF.

With senior ethnic Maguindanaon members on his side, Hashim bolted from the MNLF and launched the MILF in the early 1980s. The splinter group established base at the Tugaig area in Barira, Maguindanao, which was to become “Camp Abubakar Assidik,” the group’s first ever bastion in Mindanao.

Among those who left the MILF with Hashim were Muhaquer Iqbal, who is now the MILF's chief negotiator, and Al-Haj Murad Ebrahim, now the group's chieftain.

It was in Camp Abubakar, located at the tri-boundary of Maguindanao’s adjoining Barira, Buldon and Matanog towns, where Hashim showcased his concept of a puritan Islamic community, governed by Sharia and the Islamic principle of oneness of religion and governance.

The so-called “Mindanao Conflict,” in contemporary history, began with pockets of hostilities between Moro gunmen belonging to the so-called Mindanao Independence Movement and government security forces in Kabayuan District in Buldon, the old Maguindanao province, in the early 1970s, before the outbreak of the full-blown MNLF uprising in 1974 in Sulu, now a component province of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

The conflicts in Buldon and nearby areas were followed by the simultaneous attacks in Oct. 21, 1972 in strategic areas in Marawi City, including the campus of the state-run Mindanao State University (MSU), by Maranaws armed with vintage World War II rifles.

The armed Maranaws took over the government’s station dxSO inside the MSU campus, aired martial songs, and repeatedly called on Muslims to rise against government and fight for Mindanao independence.

Optimism

Orlando Cardinal Quevedo, who is also the incumbent bishop of the Archdiocese of Cotabato, said he is delighted to see the culmination of the GPH-MILF peace agreement with the signing of the Comprehensive Agreement on Bangsamoro (CAB).

The CAB is the final peace compact between the government and the MILF, the basis for the setting up of a Bangsamoro political entity to replace the ARMM via a plebiscite.

Members of the congregation where Quevedo belongs, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI), which has been operating humanitarian missions benefitting Muslims and Christians in Central Mindanao, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi since even before World War II, were just as elated.

The OMI’s Philippine provincial superior, Fr. Lauro De Guia, said the signing of the CAB is one step to the “unfolding of an era of harmony and development” in Southern Mindanao.

Two provincial governors in Central Mindanao, Emmylou Mendoza of North Cotabato and Esmael Mangudadatu of Maguindanao are optimistic that the CAB will usher in improvements in the security situation in their provinces.

“Without conflicts we can pursue more socio-economic projects and carry out more interventions needed to alleviate our constituents from underdevelopment caused by armed conflicts and natural calamities. These are the factors that motivate us to support the peace process, along with our natural love for peace,” Mendoza said.

Challenges

The provincial government of Maguindanao, which has jurisdiction over 36 towns, all bastions of the MILF, has been implementing since 2011 various socio-economic projects as part of a low-level normalization process for conflict-stricken areas. Maguindanao became poor due to conflicts that rocked the province from the 1990s up to 2008.

For most local officials and key stakeholders to the peace process, the effort to restore normalcy in many areas in the proposed Bangsamoro territory will be tedious and cumbersome.

“It will need patience, dedication and, most importantly, the perseverance and cooperation of all Muslims, Christians and indigenous non-Muslim groups in the envisioned Bangsamoro homeland,” said merchant Pete Marquez, a senior member of leading business clubs in Central Mindanao.

Poverty and underdevelopment in many flashpoint areas covered by the 1997 Agreement on General Cessation of Hostilities between the government and the MILF worsened during the first 11 of the shaky 17 years of peace talks by both sides.

Massive destruction

The negotiations first collapsed in Apr. 30, 2000 when then President Estrada declared an all-out war against the MILF in a military adventurism that displaced about a million Mindanao residents.

President Estrada, in fact, even led soldiers in celebrating the fall of Camp Abubakar on June 10, 2000, as a result of his campaign to drive away MILF rebels from all of their supposedly recognized 44 “main and minor camps” scattered across mainland Mindanao.

The peace talks again hit a snag when government forces took over the MILF’s last frontier, the Buliok Complex at the border of Pagalungan, Maguindanao and North Cotabato’s Pikit town in February 2003, under the pretext of a calibrated police action meant to flush out kidnappers from the 3,000-hectare guerrilla enclave.

Hashim was forced to leave Buliok Complex and relocate to Butig, Lanao del Sur, where he died of a heart disease four months later in the same year.

Hundreds of villages in the three provinces were again ravaged when more military-MILF hostilities ensued after the aborted August 5, 2008 signing in Malaysia of the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD).

The botched MOA-AD was the supposed, first ever basis, for the creation of a Bangsamoro homeland in Southern Mindanao.

The Supreme Court restrained the government and the MILF from signing the MOA-AD on the behest of influential groups, among them blocks of Mindanao politicians hostile to the peace talks. The High Tribunal eventually declared the document unconstitutional.

“This time we are witnessing the dawning of a new chapter in the history of Mindanao’s Bangsamoro community," said Bobby Benito, director of the Mindanao Human Rights Action Center, apparently referring to the advent of the MILF-led Bangsamoro political entity.