Way to go

The signing won much praise from global leaders, as well it should. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon lauded President Aquino and Moro Islamic Liberation Front chair Murad Ebrahim for their “vision and leadership” and the peace panels for their “perseverance, commitment and courage.”

The signing was done specifically by Miriam Coronel-Ferrer and Mohagher Iqbal, the chief negotiators of the government and the MILF, respectively. To them apply most the words “perseverance, commitment and courage,” they who toiled largely beyond the glare of the media to steer the negotiations through to the end.

What they signed specifically was the last of four documents that make up the peace agreement, which is “normalization.” What it means is the “decommissioning” of the MILF, the term the MILF prefers over disarmament, which connotes surrender and a less than just struggle for freedom.

The signing was an uplifting sight and deserved all the accolades it got. It does give hope that the guns will eventually be stilled.

But—and things like this always carry the inevitable “but”—the “decommissioning,” not to speak of the peace process itself, remains an arduous uphill climb. At the very least, the laying down of arms is contingent on the government also phasing out its own military presence in the area.

That requires significant and continued demonstrations of good faith on the part of both sides. Particularly given the presence of “spoilers” all over the place. Not least the Moro National Liberation Front, which has branded the deal a betrayal of its 1996 peace agreement with the government. If the government can turn its back on that, it says, the government, or the ones to follow it, can always turn its back on this agreement. This puts the onus of proof on the next presidents to show they remain committed to this deal.

Of course, government pledges are supposed to carry through to future ones, but government pledges being merely suggestions in this country—only debt payments are not, which are guaranteed by automatic appropriation—you never know. One or the other side can always cite violations to void the deal.

Additionally, it requires tremendous patience, or forbearance, on the part of the public to stay the course, or continue to believe in it, notwithstanding efforts by various elements to subvert it. Indeed, notwithstanding efforts by rabble-rousers to inflame emotions by pointing to presumed violations. It takes time for decommissioning to take effect. The Irish Republican Army itself took more than 10 years to disarm, and rogue elements, though small and marginalized, still run around wreaking mayhem in the north.

More than this, the far bigger challenge is not the MILF disarming, it is the warlords and clans disarming. The plethora of violence in Muslim Mindanao isn’t coming from the institutional threats, it is coming from the private groups. International Alert head Pancho Lara, who has inputted a great deal in the peace process, tells me that according to their studies, out of 600 cases of violence there in 2012-2013, only around 100 or so involved the MILF, the Abu Sayyaf, the MNLF, and the New People’s Army. The rest, or some 500 cases, involved the warlords, the clans, and various criminal syndicates.

Not quite incidentally, some of the people involved in the peace talks themselves are members of armed clans, if not out-and-out warlords. It’s not the easiest thing to refute the logic that if one’s enemies, or potential enemies, are armed, why should one render oneself vulnerable by disarming? That’s the same logic with gun ownership, except that the threat in this case is very real. Why should the MILF disarm when the MNLF and other groups opposed to the agreement will not? Truly, it will take some time before the doubt, suspicion, and distrust recede. And no small effort by the MILF to patrol its ranks and the government to show it can protect a decommissioned MILF.

Which brings up the question: “How do you solve a problem like Nur Misuari?” Many of my Mindanaoan friends who have no love lost for him tell me that the best course is still to wave the olive branch at him, or try to include him in the peace process, however that is not the easiest thing to do. The alternatives are horrible to contemplate. The fact that Misuari was able last September to mount the siege of Zamboanga, which is not his turf, and the fact that he has managed to elude the authorities up to now, must suggest that he continues to enjoy a mass base among the Tausug. Though he nowhere near commands the force he used to, he still controls a good deal of Sulu and Basilan and is perfectly capable of scuttling the best-laid plots of mice and men of peace.

Lara tells me as well that the “shadow economy” particularly thrives in the areas Misuari controls. The “shadow economy,” as the book “Out of the Shadows” describes it, is made up of “livelihood” or moneymaking ventures engaged in by whole communities in Muslim Mindanao, which have persisted and grown over time so as to qualify as a full-blown “economy.” Some of these ventures are thoroughly unsavory, such as gunrunning, drug distribution, smuggling, and kidnapping. These are sources of great wealth; anyone controlling these can last a long time.

The roadblocks are there, but the government and the MILF also have something just as formidable, if not more so. Which is the force of an idea whose time has come. No one really thought the war in Northern Ireland would end, there were just too many obstacles, not least the depth of grief and bitterness over blood spilt. But it happened, after a decade of dogged shepherding. A couple of years ago, nobody seriously thought the MILF would agree to lay down arms. However provisionally, it has.

What can one say? Way to go.

But it’s still one long way to go.