Historic

I can understand the jubilation of the people of Muslim Mindanao, which some of them expressed with much weeping, at the prospect of the guns being stilled once and for all in their corner of the world. I myself caught a glimpse of the cost of the war a long time ago when I talked to a 12-year-old boy ages ago.

The boy was living with a religious group, a refugee orphaned by the war. His family was wiped out in a firefight along with much of his village. He had no problems talking about the firefight that took out his family in the crossfire. He survived, he said, by lying on the ground underneath the bodies of the dead. He got a little excited when he talked about the arms that were used in the fight. He seemed impressed by them, and named their make one by one.

I asked him how he knew that when he was lying on the ground underneath the dead bodies. He said he could hear them. Of course everybody knew what they were.

I would learn later that the boy had never seen the inside of a classroom and could neither read nor write.

Over the years, I would hear a lot of horror stories about the war in Mindanao, one more horrifying than the other. Indeed, more horrifying than the one Ging Deles mentioned in her speech last week, about a group of child refugees in North Cotabato who ran away from a firefight nearby and had to cross the rampaging waters of a river to get to safety. But my mind keeps going back to that 12-year-old boy.

The bigger horrors of war are not the ones that are seen, it is the ones that are not. That the 12-year-old boy should lose his family is a horror enough past grasping. But to have gone through life, such as 12 years constitute life, not knowing the letters of the alphabet, knowing only the calibers of guns, not being inflamed by the spark of learning but being so only by the instruments of killing, that is the truly tragic thing. The waste of a mind is the most wasteful thing there is. It is the most horrifying thing there is.

That is why I think the guns will be stilled once and for all in Muslim Mindanao. That is why I think peace will settle on Muslim Mindanao as surely as a sigh settles upon a parched earth after rain. Because the costs of that war are too unacceptable to bear.

That is so despite the obstacles that lie in the path of peace. Which, on the face of it, looks formidable.

I myself am not particularly alarmed by the presence of spoilers of the peace—the Moro National Liberation Front and others that mean to block it even if they have to continue to wage war against it. Though that looks like the most formidable obstacle of all. At the very least that is so because history is not on their side, they are “yesterday’s men,” as Bill Clinton called those who threatened to derail the settlement of the Irish conflict, which eventually got to be settled a decade later. An apt way to describe those who have become irrelevant to the equation, whose time has gone, who are bucking futilely, if bloodily, an idea whose time has come.

At the very most, because they no longer have a powerful backer, Malaysia, on their side.

I’m a lot more worried about the peace agreement still needing to go to Congress and thence through a plebiscite. Both are potential minefields.

Though P-Noy is expected to certify the agreement as urgent, it is by no means a done deal. While the congressmen are not entirely bereft of a sense of self-preservation, if not principle, which will be sorely tested if they rejected the agreement, it is not the safest thing to rest your case on it. Congress’ capacity to bend toward Malacañang’s way of thinking is largely transactional, and P-Noy no longer has the Priority Development Assistance Fund and the Disbursement Acceleration Program with which to transact.

That is quite apart from the usual politicking that attaches like leech in swamp water to everything that passes through Congress. The year after next being election year, the politicking should become even more shrill. The peace settlement in Muslim Mindanao will very clearly be a feather in P-Noy’s cap, one that has global peace-prize possibilities that will impact locally in terms of electoral possibilities. It will take deft steering to see this ship through the clashing rocks.

The same is true, if not more problematical, with a plebiscite. You can almost see the constitutional challenges that those opposed to it are preparing, even as we speak, to bring to the Supreme Court. If constitutional challenges can be hurled against the Reproductive Health Law, they most certainly can be hurled against the idea of a Bangsamoro homeland.

But I personally am bullish about the peace process pushing its way through Muslim Mindanao, the way life pushes itself out of the rubble. Part of my bullishness comes from the experience of other countries in this respect, not least the laying down of arms by the Irish Republican Army, a thing so seemingly impossible, so seemingly unthinkable, only the other decade. As someone put it about smoking, there’s a habit far more powerful than smoking, and that is not smoking. It’s the same thing here: There’s a habit more powerful than killing, and that is not killing.

Peace is a far more powerful habit than war.

I refuse to caution against premature jubilation, premature celebration, for a more basic reason than not wanting to be a killjoy. That is that the jubilation itself, the celebration itself, set against the backdrop of the apocalyptic horrors of war, the unacceptable costs of war, is a force itself that will brook no obstacle in its path. The taste of freedom is the most powerful enticement to not want to be a slave again. The taste of peace is the most powerful enticement not to want to go to war again.

The taste of life is the most powerful enticement to not want to go back to death again.