Bullets and ballots in BARMM elections (1)

Cotabato City—Last Sunday, Sept. 13, 2026, the eve of the first-ever parliamentary election in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Mindanao (BARMM), firefights once again flared up here, causing the deaths of at least three people.

The skirmish on the eve of the elections took place in Barangay Bagua, this city, known to be the turf of a political family associated with one of the leading political parties in this year’s elections. This is the Bangsamoro Federalist Party, the regional version of President Marcos’ Partido Federal ng Pilipinas. The other party in this skirmish included supporters of the United Bangsamoro Justice Party, the political party of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

But body counting associated with this envisioned historic election has started last July, even as the polls still had to open yesterday morning. Last Sunday evening, several individuals were included in this year’s election-related fatalities here. And some local civil society observers feel that the body count will still rise as the polls opened to the region’s more than 2 million voters yesterday morning.

Bombs were reported lobbed in two different barangays in the city last Saturday, Sept. 12, and some have complained about helicopters hovering all over the city on Sunday evening.

On the day of the election itself (yesterday, Sept. 14), a ballot box was confiscated by a Commission on Elections team assigned in the municipality of Maluso, in Basilan province. The ballot box allegedly contained already shaded ballots, according to a report from the Commission on Elections (Comelec)-BARMM spokesperson on national television.

All these and other minor irregularities discovered by the Comelec have made the latter decide to put under its direct control Cotabato City, as well as Maluso in Basilan.

Such incidents have somehow justified the deployment of more than 10,000 police officers distributed in the five component provinces in the region, in anticipation of a highly intense security situation during this first-ever parliamentary election.

Comelec has repeatedly said it will push through with the election, no matter what. This is somehow reassuring, after four postponements of this election that will determine the members of the first regular parliament in the region.

Continuous postponement of the elections means that the sitting officials of the interim parliament will be accountable only to the sitting president of the country, and not to the people of the districts or areas they are supposed to represent. This situation has given rise to huge levels of disillusionment among the region’s constituents who had hoped to see real and meaningful changes in their lives after a new group of nonpoliticians who were appointed among the first top leaders of the region.

These nonpoliticians belong to the top leadership of the MILF, the party to the signing of the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro that became the basis for drafting the already ratified Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL). The BOL is the legal basis for the creation of the BARMM.

For more than four years into their leadership, MILF top officials running the region helped in securing a peaceful respite after long years of armed struggle with Philippine government forces. In other words, the series of vertical conflicts between Philippine soldiers and MILF combatants have halted.

But building peace needs more than just halting vertical conflicts. The region has also been host to deep-seated rivalries among political families that have engendered what is referred to as horizontal or communal conflicts. Such conflicts are mentioned in the literature on peace and conflict studies as “rido,” or vengeance fighting. Rido is a Meranaw word that has been popularized to refer to these series of skirmishes between the forces of two warring political families and their extensions (in-laws and other blood relatives). Some of these ridos have existed for decades and they have become quite difficult to solve. Parties to a rido just lie low for a while before something causes a flare-up, leading to serious firefights that have displaced several rural communities in the Maguindanao provinces and in Lanao del Sur.

But is flooding the region with so many armed elements—a composite of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police—a surefire solution to prevent election-related violence?

From the experiences of previous elections even during the previous autonomous setup here, matching the numbers of private individuals with guns with more (official) security officers in full battle gear has not solved this intractable problem.

But how has the national government “behaved” in its relationships with the BARMM, then and now?

(More next week.)

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