The fragile peace
First off, a correction. The meeting between the Colombian women visitors and members of the “Good Wednesday Group for Peace” took place in Camp Awang of the 6th Infantry Division, not 7th ID as erroneously reported.
The former commander of the 6th ID, known as the “Kampilan Division,” was Major General Anthony Alcantara, under whose watch the GWGP emerged. The current commander of Kampilan Division is Major General Rey Ardo.
Even as the group of Colombian women, accompanied by two members of the Philippine delegation that visited Colombia last August—peace advocate and church worker Susan Granada and myself—were going around Cotabato and Davao in search of perspectives on the armed conflict and the peace process, the country was agog over reports of an encounter between army troops and elements of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in Basilan.
Nineteen soldiers were officially reported to have been killed in the firefight which took place in Al-Barka, Basilan. Testimonies from survivors said the troops, many of them undergoing training for the Special Forces, were surrounded by the Muslim rebels and overwhelmed by gunfire. Some politicians, notably former President Joseph Estrada, saw this as proof of the “treachery” of the Moro and urged President Benigno Aquino III to drop the ongoing peace talks and wage an “all-out war” against the MILF.
We had heard sketchy initial reports about Basilan on the day we arrived in Cotabato, but even then no one wanted to comment on the “incident.” Under the terms of the ceasefire negotiated some years back, “movements” of both the MILF and the military are supposed to be coordinated, overseen by a coordinating committee on the cessation of hostilities. We met Said Saleh, chair of the CCCH for the MILF, and he explained that the coordinating mechanism was supposed to ensure that all armed encounters in the field would cease, or be held to a minimum, while the government and MILF panels are still negotiating.
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So what happened in Basilan? A source says the troops, who were reported to be still undergoing undersea diving training, were hastily mustered to go after local MILF chief Dan Laksaw Asnawi, who had been imprisoned on criminal charges but escaped and was sighted in Al-Barka.
“They need experience in the field to be able to graduate,” my source said, implying that the soldiers had been sent on an “adventurist” escapade by an over-eager commander. Higher-ups had bewailed the decision to attack the MILF camp, saying it had not been communicated to higher echelons and were thus not coordinated with the MILF.
But the MILF leadership also admitted to a lack of coordination in three separate attacks that took place in Zamboanga Sibugay. The MILF said the attacks in Alicia and Kabasalan towns were in retaliation for earlier raids by the military, but MILF spokesperson Von al Haq admitted that these raids, which resulted in the deaths of seven more soldiers, were not coordinated with the central command.
Why would the fragile truce, so sensitive that all movements on the ground need to be coordinated with the highest command levels, all of a sudden break so spectacularly with tragic loss of lives? An observer noted how “easy it is” for the ceasefire to be broken, how easily talk could escalate from seeking peace to launching all-out war.
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There is a procedure to be followed in cases of ceasefire violations. Government panel chair Marvic Leonen, in a statement, said the procedure is laid out in the 1997 Cessation of Hostilities Agreement that requires investigation and eventually a report to both panels. The investigation is to be carried out by the International Monitoring Team, headed by a Malaysian general, which reports to Leonen and Mohagher Iqbal, who chairs the MILF panel. In a statement, Leonen said he had “instructed the government’s coordinating committee on the cessation of hostilities to aggressively facilitate the investigation and make a report forthwith.”
Meanwhile, Moro civil society groups and peace advocates belonging to the Reform ARMM Now (RAN) Coalition, are “urging the MILF and the military to immediately cease any further security operations while investigation is ongoing to determine the culpability (for) the recent incident (in Basilan).” Expressing their deepest sympathies to the families of the victims, they urged: “Let us not allow such harrowing trauma to spoil the ongoing peace process… and be fooled by the few irresponsibly urging President Aquino to wage an all-out war where no one benefits (exacerbating) the already fragile peace and order situation in Mindanao.” They recommend that both peace panels “immediately convene a back-door meeting and fact-finding to stop the escalation of conflicts.”
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Indeed, in this very sensitive and crucial period in the search for lasting peace in Mindanao, there is a need to “disarm” the words used in covering conflict, said Marisol Gomez, a Colombian journalist with the newspaper El Tiempo.
I was appalled, for instance, when in the course of reporting the Basilan killings, “TV Patrol,” the early-evening newscast of ABS-CBN, ran an informal poll asking the viewing public if they thought it was time to stop the peace talks and begin an “all-out war” (that phrase again) against the MILF.
I was aghast because, at that time, there was still little information on which to base a conclusion, since an investigation was still ongoing and there were allegations of “aggression” on both sides. The result of the text-in poll was not at all surprising: 97 percent in favor of ending the peace talks and launching war, and only 3 percent against. If policy were made based on TV polls, we would be finding ourselves deep in a conflict by now, where civilians—Muslim and Christian—are the biggest victims.
