Yesterday’s men

It’s too early to bring out the celebratory champagne, the peace deal has constitutional issues that need threshing out, says Juan Ponce Enrile. “Everybody hopes for a peaceful settlement of the problem, but at what price? Is it commensurate to the peace that we want or is it going to be just like what PM Neville Chamberlain of England concluded with Hitler?”

What can one say? You want to draw historical parallels, fine, but you may want to make the parallel a lot more, well, parallel. This is about as parallel as a circle and a square.

Chamberlain’s pact with Hitler was a pact between two countries, not between a central government and a hitherto secessionist force. It was a pact between a weak country and a strong one. Hitler had been arming throughout the 1930s whereas England had not. Later reappraisal of Chamberlain’s conduct would take a kindlier view of it: He had no choice but to try to appease Hitler as England was not prepared for immediate war, having reckoned it wouldn’t face one till 10 years from then. The peace pact between the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front is one between a popular government and a group that, like Northern Ireland’s in the 1990s, has seen no end of war and has tired of the bloodshed.

Chamberlain’s pact with Hitler turned a blind eye to a patent wrong: Germany had just annexed the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia and called the new territory Sudetenland. The government’s pact with the MILF is looking with 20-20 vision at a patent right: The MILF has abandoned secession and embraced integration with the national community, albeit as an autonomous region. The Bangsamoro follows the same template as other autonomous regions in the world birthed by peace agreements between governments and erstwhile secessionist movements.

It’s the best thing to have happened to this country in a very long time. A thing previous administrations never managed to do, certainly not the regime Enrile served faithfully and well, which was Marcos’. It deserves the unstinting support of both Congress (which needs to approve it) and the public (which needs to ratify it).

I’m glad at least that other senators are forthcoming with that support. Gringo Honasan and Tito Sotto, Enrile’s allies in the Senate, urge critics to give “normalization” a chance. “Let’s not make a preemptive judgment on a very dynamic process,” said Honasan. “Nobody said it would be easy from the start. We should have a positive outlook because so much is at stake.” Instead of criticizing, Sotto said, “give suggestions on how to make the undertaking a success.”

But more than that, the support has to be forthcoming from the public. The process will be long and arduous, and our faith in it will be sorely tested over the next few years. As witness the skirmish between government forces and a breakaway faction of the MILF, the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters, almost immediately after the signing of the fourth and last annex of the peace deal.

Both sides of course deny they had anything to do with the signing, they had been having intermittent clashes for some time. The military says it sent troops to Pikit, North Cotabato, to prevent the rebels from crossing from Maguindanao to Cotabato and spread their “criminal activities” there. But you can expect these clashes to grow in the immediate future as those opposed to the agreement step up their sieges and raids to make sure people know that news of their death is grossly exaggerated.

In the Irish case, from December 1993 when the Irish Republican Army and the British government issued the Joint Declaration on Peace (the Downing Street Declaration), to September 2005 when the IRA said it had decommissioned all of its weapons, the bombings, assassinations, and fighting actually intensified. Things like this get worse before they get better. Truly, a thing to test faith, or fortitude.

What complicates things for us is that we are not just dealing with political faiths or principles, or causes, we are also dealing with power and wealth as motive forces for wanting to continue to rebel. The dream of an independent or separate Muslim Mindanao is pretty much gone. The signing of normalization had the explicit blessings of Malaysia, which brokered it, and the tacit one of other Muslim countries, which recognize it. The Moro National Liberation Front and other fringe rebels have precious little ideological leg to stand on, but they have one thing to drive them to not give up their arms: control of the “shadow economy” of Mindanao.

Again, “shadow economy” is the term used by International Alert to describe the “livelihood” or money-making activities in Muslim Mindanao that have become so ingrained in the community, involving as they do all sorts of actors, licit and illicit, private and public, local and national, as to give them stability, permanence, and, at least in the community’s eyes, a measure of legitimacy. Some of them are patently criminal (gunrunning, drug smuggling, kidnapping), others not so, or so only in that they fly under the radar of the Bureau of Internal Revenue (land markets, cross-border trade, traditional credit).

All are humongous, and continuous, sources of wealth. All are a very good reason to continue to “fight for freedom,” however the shibboleth now sounds hollow.

We need to show strong and unwavering support for the peace process to succeed. Just as we need to show scorn and opprobrium for those who continue to oppose it so as to turn them into “yesterday’s men.” That was the term Bill Clinton used during his visit to Belfast in 1995, to refer to those who vowed to defeat the peace. And who truly, though only after a long and blood-spattered time, became what he predicted they would be:

Yesterday’s men.