Timeline to peace

It was in July 2010, or barely a month after he was sworn into office, that President Benigno Aquino III assembled a new panel to resume peace talks with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. A year later, in August 2011,

Mr. Aquino met with MILF chair Murad Ebrahim in Tokyo to hash out the formal resumption of the peace process, which got underway in December of that year. It took about 10 months for the government and MILF peace panels to agree on a framework agreement that would govern the peace talks. The agreement, signed on Oct. 15, 2012, stipulated that the two sides needed to work on four major areas—transitional mechanisms, power-sharing, wealth-sharing and normalization—before a final peace document can be signed and the new political entity called Bangsamoro proposed by the agreement submitted to Congress for voting.

It took another year and three months before the two panels signed, on Jan. 25, 2014, the normalization annex, the last of the four documents that make up the comprehensive peace agreement. The proposed Bangsamoro Basic Law that would govern the new entity has since been submitted to Congress for deliberation; it remains pending in both the Senate and the House. Once it acquires congressional imprimatur, it will be subjected to a referendum in the areas in Mindanao covered by the new autonomous region.

Why is it important to recall this timeline? Because, to hear it from the critics not only of the BBL but also of the government’s very tack of talking peace with the MILF, the current negotiations have been a hasty, reckless and careless process meant to secure “peace at all costs” so that, as the canard goes, Mr. Aquino can bid for a Nobel Peace Prize. The timeline—going for five years now—testifies otherwise, and highlights instead the measured and painstaking efforts that the two panels invested in the delicate work of forging peace for a region long in need of it.

Before the Mamasapano debacle that left 44 members of the Philippine National Police-Special Action Force dead when they raided a known MILF lair in pursuit of two terrorists (18 MILF fighters and at least five civilians were also killed), hardly a peep was heard from these now-rabid critics of the peace process. But now all gloves are off, with the war drumbeats by sundry keyboard warriors drowning out any rational discussion of the continuing need for a peaceful solution to the conflict in Mindanao.

Former assemblyman Homobono Adaza has raised the argument to a more incendiary level by formally charging Mr. Aquino and his Cabinet with treason for having negotiated a peace agreement with the MILF and supporting the BBL which he calls, this early, an “unconstitutional” bill. Now, how fundamentally different is the Aquino-MILF peace process with the earlier one entered into by President Fidel Ramos with the Moro National Liberation Front? That one resulted in a final peace agreement in 1996 that saw the MNLF lay down its arms and Nur Misuari become head of the newly created Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. The ARMM was itself created through an act of Congress in 1989, or about seven years before Ramos concluded a deal with Misuari. If talking peace with rebel groups is by itself a treasonous act, per Adaza, then Ramos must be guilty of it, too—along with everyone else who went along with the government-MNLF deal.

Adaza also says the BBL is even more unconstitutional than the memorandum of agreement on ancestral domain signed by then President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo with the MILF, which was struck down by the Supreme Court for being contrary to law. He conveniently leaves aside the fact that, while the Court slammed the process that led to the MOA-AD as “whimsical, capricious, oppressive, arbitrary and despotic,” it never declared as treasonous, or injurious to the interests of the republic, the very act of the government trying to explore peace with rebel groups.

The Court’s message in its ruling was that any negotiation for peace should go through a thorough, transparent and extracareful process, vetted by all proposed stakeholders in it. The sober, deliberate and open manner that characterized the government-MILF discussions, leading to landmarks that no other negotiation before it has managed to do, indicates that the process was marked by sincerity and good faith on both sides.

The serious, judicious work in trying to bring peace to Mindanao is not what is inimical to the country; it’s the act of recklessly demonizing the process and further poisoning the public discourse that is.