Dysfunctional

No ifs and buts here. Interior Secretary Ronaldo Puno, in his characteristically forthright way, identified the kidnappers of missionary priest Fr. Michael Sinnott as the MILF 113th Base Command operating in the Lanao provinces.

No surprises here either. Nothing happens in this area without the MILF knowing about it.

Spokesmen for the MILF have vehemently denied any of their units were involved in this brazen and yet cowardly crime: seizing an aging priest and demanding a ridiculous ransom for his release. But they are spitting against the wind.

The MILF leadership is notorious for being incapable of controlling the actions of its constituent units. It is an organization without corporate integrity; a movement with little means for enforcing internal discipline.

When the Supreme Court ruled against the very idea of “ancestral domain”, two MILF commanders from the same Maranao area went on a rampage. They attacked several communities and indulged in arson.

The MILF leadership could not exercise control of their units then. There is little basis to hope that they could exercise control over renegades now.

A couple of years since the rampage, the two senior MILF commanders responsible for the atrocity remain at large. They are hiding out in what the MILF defines as its “territory.” Any effort by the AFP to move in force to get the renegades is opposed by the MILF, which constantly threatens to abort the peace process if they do not get their way.

Neither — and this is remarkable — has the MILF made any effort to discipline their own men responsible for atrocities. They have never clearly committed to disband the units that ran amuck. They have not lifted a finger to bring the errant commanders before the bar of justice.

And, come to think of it, they have not even clearly apologized for the carnage even as this was done by men wearing the movement’s uniforms.

For decades, the area the MILF defines as its “territory” has been under a reign of terror. Marauding armed bands have made the place inhospitable to any business. Bank robberies, kidnappings, murders and extortion happen with regularity.

Granting that these crimes may not have been on the direct orders of the MILF leadership, the presence of a large insurgent force in the area has been conducive to the proliferation of criminal bands in the tri-border terrain bounded by the Lanao Provinces and Zamboanga del Sur. The presence of the MILF main forces in the area has not deterred criminality. What it has done is to deter effective law enforcement in this forsaken place.

What the presence of the MILF forces has done to this area is to deter effective governance. Government barely exists here. The economy is in tatters. The population has been forced to become economic migrants to other parts of the country. Those that are left there are regularly dislocated whenever clashes happen.

Not only is the MILF a dysfunctional organization incapable of any semblance of internal congruity, the movement itself is a dysfunctional presence in the community it professes to seek to liberate.

The longer the MILF persists as an armed organization with a futile goal, the more the Muslim Filipino communities will suffer from its mere presence. The only thing it has succeeded in doing through the length of its anomalous existence is to postpone progress in the region it seeks to govern.

How long has Sinnott been held captive? And in that period, what has the MNLF leadership done to save him?

All we have from the MNLF leadership are denials that their organization is in any way involved in this latest criminal act. With their forces on the ground and their political network in place, they should be doing more than that. Government should hold the MILF leadership to the standard of what they are capable of doing rather than what they timidly commit to do.

Otherwise, they should cease to be treated as a responsible partner in the serious effort to find peace in communities exhausted by war.

The Sinnott case is not just another kidnapping to be resolved in a manner that, we pray, results in the survival of the victim. It is a recurrent symptom of a malignant political condition where a large armed band has been allowed, in the name of peace-seeking, to virtually rule over a territory without the responsibility for keeping its units in line.

True, a peaceful solution to the secessionist problem is something of great value. But there should be a cap on the price we are willing to pay for holding on to the hope that an amicable settlement will ever be reached with an insurgent group that wants power but has proven incapable of exercising responsibility.

We now know who hold Sinnott. We probably knew all along that regardless of whatever chain of command this renegade group recognizes, the responsibility for such an atrocity even becoming possible rests entirely on the laps of the MILF leadership.

Once again, we must call on the MILF leadership to exercise some responsibility for keeping order in a place where disorder is the direct outcome of its armed presence. This will sound increasingly like a futile call: the MILF has never once been able to exact discipline from those who march under it flag and hide in the folds of territory it claims to control.

Statesmanship requires we deal with the MILF and not directly with whoever directly holds the priest captive.