Bold bid for peace

Was it improper for President Aquino to have flown all the way to Tokyo to meet secretly with Murad Ebrahim, the leader of the secessionist Moro Islamic Liberation Front?

Perhaps. The reactions from certain quarters have the ring of predictable Monday-morning quarterbacking. Sen. Francis Escudero called the meeting “ill-advised… as Murad is not even [Mr. Aquino’s] counterpart.” House Minority Leader Edcel Lagman deplored the meeting for posing an “unnecessary risk” on the President’s person, and one that “violates his avowed policy of transparency.” An unnamed diplomat was more blunt, saying that what Mr. Aquino did “was an act of treason.”

If the President can take any comfort in this, it is that bold steps toward peace-making have often met the same levels of doubt, cynicism and vituperation. To cite a historic example: Anwar Sadat was never forgiven by some of his countrymen for forging a peace treaty with Israel. The Egyptian president was assassinated by fundamentalist Arabs for his efforts, but the peace he managed to forge between Egypt and Israel has held fast all these years—the only such agreement between the Jewish state and its hostile Arab neighbors.

We are not suggesting that President Aquino is risking the same fate as Sadat’s. We are only pointing out that any genuine move towards peace between two intractable enemies always engenders suspicion and denunciation, as both sides maneuver from a place of self-interest to try to shave off maximum concessions from any final compromise. As it is, the government and MILF peace panels have yet to come up with anything approaching a substantive draft agreement, and already too much is being read into the President’s proactive gesture of personally assuring the leader of the largest Muslim rebel group that here now is a new government they can begin to trust and work with.

Because if there is anything the stalled Mindanao peace process needs, it’s a fresh burst of resolute imagination, plain honesty and good faith from both sides after the poisonous atmosphere that beclouded the talks the last time Malacañang and the MILF sat together to work out a framework for peace.

The Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD), reached between the government of then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and the MILF, envisioned a much-expanded Bangsamoro homeland that was to have its own “basic law,” police and internal security force, system of banking and finance, civil service, education, legislative and electoral institutions, as well as full authority to develop and dispose of minerals and other natural resources within its realm. For all intents and purposes, it called for a new and separate country—a prospect that would have led to the dismemberment of the republic. Worse, Arroyo had agreed to these terms completely in secret, startling the public with a virtually finished document that, were it not for the national outrage that ensued, would have been signed into law by both parties. The Supreme Court eventually declared the agreement unconstitutional, but the botched process not only capsized, yet again, prospects for peace in Mindanao, it also claimed a heavy price: some 750,000 people displaced and nearly 400 dead, as rogue elements of the MILF rampaged to protest the MOA-AD’s scuttling.

Mr. Aquino’s gesture of meeting personally with the MILF chair should go a long way towards disinfecting the air and rebooting relations between the two sides. However, the government peace panel’s first task is to hold the MILF to its recently announced modified position, that it is no longer asking for an independent state, but only a “substate” in Mindanao.

“The powers over national defense, foreign relations, coinage and currency and postal services will still be with the central government,” the MILF said. “The substate is still part of the Philippines. It has no army, except police and internal security forces, tasked to do policing within.”

Other daunting details need to be fleshed out—like how to accommodate the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao into the proposed substate, for instance—but if the MILF can show it is sincere in living up to its new stipulations, and can rein in its armed breakaway groups to assure that any treaty has reasonable chances of being enforced, then Mr. Aquino’s daring bid for peace during his watch might yet prove prescient. Let him not forget, though: before any signature is put on paper, the Filipino people must know, understand and agree to it. No secret deals this time.