MILF wants continuation of Mindanao peace process after 2025 elections

COTABATO CITY, Philippines — The continuation of programs complementing the peace overture of Malacañang and southerners is one of the objectives of the political party of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, to pit candidates during the first ever Bangsamoro parliamentary elections next year.

Senior officials of the MILF’s United Bangsamoro Justice Party, or UBJP, told reporters on Saturday that they have reiterated their political goals to thousands of supporters during an assembly in Malabang, Lanao del Sur last Wednesday.

The chief minister of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, Ahod Balawag Ebrahim, who is a Maguindanaon, and the Maranao speaker of BARMM’s 80-member parliament, Ali Pangalian Balindong, together led the gathering of thousands of UBJP members from different towns in Lanao del Sur, held at a large gymnasium in the town proper of Malabang in the second district of the province.

Balindong said on Saturday that they have explained to UBJP members and supporters present in the event that only by the party’s dominance in the BARMM parliament can stakeholders to the Mindanao peace process sustain such initiative, aiming to put full closure to the “Moro issue” hounding the country since the early 1970s.

“We have to continue working for lasting peace and sustainable development in this part of the country,” Balindong, a lawyer and a staunch supporter of the Mindanao peace process, said.

The UBJP had been registered with the Commission on Elections as a regional political party of the MILF, whose two peace compacts with Malacañang, the 2012 Framework Agreement on Bangsamoro and the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on Bangsamoro, led to the replacement in 2019 of the then 27-year Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao with a more administratively empowered BARMM.

Ebrahim, who is UBJP’s president and also chairman of the MILF’s central committee, said they are apprehensive of a “backlash” in the Mindanao peace process if traditional politicians dominate the regional parliament.

"It seems they are not interested in helping solve the Mindanao Moro problem," Ebrahim said. 

Officials of the MILF and the Moro National Liberation Front, which has its separate September 2, 1996 peace compact with Malacañang, are together managing a number of agencies in BARMM.

Both fronts are cooperating in pushing forward the BARMM government’s peacebuilding activities, focused on the socio-economic growth of the Moro, non-Moro and indigenous groups in the autonomous region and the promotion of religious, cultural and political solidarity among Mindanao's culturally pluralistic communities.