Peace and goodwill

There will be no end to comment and commentary after tomorrow, when the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation take the historic step of signing a comprehensive peace agreement that will see the latter lay down its arms while the former launches the official mechanisms that will allow it to fulfill its part of the deal.

After the signing, the proposed Bangsamoro basic law that will give rise to a new Bangsamoro autonomous region will be certified urgent by President Aquino and submitted to Congress for approval. Once enacted into law, the measure will then be voted on in a plebiscite by residents of the identified areas in the new region, leading to the interim appointment of a Bangsamoro Transition Authority that will govern the territory until full normalization takes place with the election of a Bangsamoro government by 2016.

Peace at last for Mindanao?

The least one can do is hope—and, more than that, give muscle to that hope by throwing support behind the government and the MILF’s painstaking work to bring an end to the decades-old conflict in the South, which has led to some 150,000 deaths, the grinding poverty of the region, and the proliferation of bandits and armed rogue groups. We’ve said it before: No other peace negotiation in the history of this country has gotten this far in the last 17 years of on-and-off talks with the MILF, and that kind of determination and goodwill on both sides of the aisle to achieve an equitable consensus on Mindanao deserve to be given a chance to work.

The endless war in the South has invariably displaced civilians, destroyed property and businesses, and generally left much of the region an economic basket case. In September last year, the Moro National Liberation Front—which had been given the singular chance to bring prosperity and peace to Mindanao through the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, but which botched the job by squandering billions of pesos of economic assistance while leaving the area as politically volatile as ever—protested its exclusion from the government-MILF talks in the only way it knew how: It went on a bloody rampage in Zamboanga for three weeks, leaving in its wake nine civilians and 23 policemen and soldiers dead, more than 10,000 houses burned, and some 116,000 people uprooted from their homes.

A special report in this paper by Fernando del Mundo noted that around 20,000 civilians are still holed up in evacuation centers, living in squalid conditions, with 102 more deaths recorded due to disease and deprivation in the encampments.

It’s too early to say whether scenes of abject misery like this will be gone once the peace deal is signed. Extraordinary hurdles remain; the proposed Bangsamoro law may be sabotaged in Congress, or watered down to such an extent that the principal stakeholders, our fellow Filipinos, will see the measure more as a betrayal of their aspirations than the foundation of any viable existence in a postconflict Bangsamoro land. As the MNLF has shown, various groups in Mindanao remain ready to wreak havoc to push for their own agenda—largely to scuttle any peace agreement that would lead to their inevitable irrelevance. From tomorrow until normalization in 2016, the agreement will be in the hands of sundry politicians, many wishing to shape the geopolitical development to their own vested ends—and that is quite a dreary prospect, indeed.

The saving grace is the public, and if the Filipino people see that this peace deal is worth supporting and defending, then it would be much easier for the government and the MILF to bank on positive public sentiment to ensure the successful implementation of the agreement. With the very real possibility of peace and normality for Mindanao now suddenly in the horizon, it is incumbent on the Aquino administration not to fumble with the proceedings by failing, at the very least, to inform the citizenry adequately, forthrightly, about what’s at stake in this historic pact.

It cannot afford to lose the PR war to the cynical and the skeptical who have long peddled the notion that any littlest concession to Muslim Filipinos for the greater good is selling out the country. At this point, more than governmental power, the one thing holding this momentous deal together is the apparent genuine desire for peace on both sides of the negotiating table. That goodwill will be on generous display tomorrow; may it last way beyond the photo opportunity, and into the future years of harmony and progress in Mindanao envisioned by this agreement.