CAMP DARAPANAN, Maguindanao - Year 2014 will be remembered as the year Malacañang and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) forged a truce meant to put closure to decades of secessionist strife in the country’s south.
The local Muslim, Christian and Lumad communities are optimistic that the March 27, 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on Bangsamoro (CAB), a product of 17 years of negotiation, will usher in lasting peace in the restive southern Mindanao, where Moro rebels have been fighting for self-rule since the early 1970s.
It is also in 2014 when the MILF began its conversion from a revolutionary organization, which splintered from the Moro National Liberation Front in the early 1980s, into a political front in a bid to pursue its peace and development goals through governance, which is for the group an entirely new arena.
The MILF’s political preparations, which took off with the December 23 to 25 symbolic launching of its newly formed United Bangsamoro Justice Party (UBJP), is in line with its quest to govern Mindanao’s Muslim groups and contemporary non-Muslim and indigenous hinterland folks through the Bangsamoro government, to be created based on the CAB and the Oct. 15, 2013 Framework Agreement on Bangsamoro.
The event was held at the MILF's main base, Camp Darapanan, located in Sultan Kudarat town in the first district of Maguindanao.
Thousands of MILF members and supporters joined the activity and pledged allegiance to the UBJP.
The MILF's chieftain, Al-Haj Murad Ebrahim, said their political party will pit candidates for elective positions in the upcoming Bangsamoro government, which will hold its first ever elections in 2016.
The enabling measure for the creation of the Bangsamoro entity, the draft Bangsamoro Basic Law, is now in Congress, expected to be passed into law by early 2015.
The bill, once enacted and ratified via a plebiscite, will replace the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao with a more politically empowered Bangsamoro region.
Even Mindanao’s Catholic figurehead, Orlando Cardinal Quevedo, is praying for lasting peace in the region.
In his 2014 Christmas pastoral message, Quevedo, concurrent archbishop of the Cotabato Diocese, called on Catholics in Mindanao to pray for the success of the southern peace process.
Quevedo, who belongs to the Oblates of Mary Immaculate congregation, said his Christmas prayers also included supplications for the national government to succeed in its campaign against criminality and terrorism.
The MILF is confident it can address domestic peace and security concerns through the Bangsamoro government.
However, Muhaquer Iqbal, chair of the Bangsamoro Transition Commission, said the Bangsamoro government would need the support of all sectors in its core territory to succeed.
He said the MILF will cease to exist as a revolutionary organization once the Bangsamoro government is in place.
“It will become a diplomatic, socio-economic and political arm of the Bangsamoro people that would continue to struggle for peace and development and the full realization of their aspiration for self-governance in the context of the right-to-self determination doctrine,” Iqbal said.
Iqbal, as chair of the MILF’s peace panel, was instrumental in the crafting of the CAB.
Iqbal said the government-MILF peace deal can be chronicled as Asia’s longest peace process in terms of time spent by both sides on negotiations and in addressing the challenges and constraints met along the way.
Peace talks between the government and the MILF started on Jan. 7, 1997, about three months after the MNLF’s Nur Misuari and President Fidel Ramos forged a final peace accord, which the influential Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) helped broker.
Several member-countries of the OIC, a bloc of more than 50 Muslim states, including petroleum-exporting nations in the Middle East and North Africa, have also been helping push the GPH-MILF peace efforts forward.
The 1997 government-MILF ceasefire is, in fact, being enforced in flashpoint areas by the International Monitoring Team, comprised of military personnel from Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and Libya, and non-uniformed conflict resolution experts from Norway, Japan and the European Union.