09:31
Tieng Anh Vui
A FEW miles outside Cotabato City in Mindanao, in the south of the Philippine archipelago, a squat, disconcertingly new building sits stranded on its own off the main road. It may not look much—and it certainly did not cost much—but it might play a vital role in the political future of the Philippines. For this is the Bangsamoro Leadership and Management Institute, the place where rugged, gun-toting guerrilla fighters will be turned into thoughtful, economically literate administrators running a future Bangsamoro state. At least, that is the theory.
It is just one of several initiatives that have taken off since the signing last October of a framework agreement between the government and an Islamist rebel group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), fighting for a Bangsamoro homeland. The agreement ended a decades-long war between the two sides that had left about 120,000 people dead and more than 2m displaced.
Peace was won through compromise on both sides. Instead of getting a separate Islamic state, as the MILF, representing the substantial Muslim minority in Mindanao, had fought for, the rebels settled instead for an autonomous Bangsamoro state, which will remain part of the Philippines. Meanwhile, though the government of the majority-Catholic country is not to lose the territory, it has conceded a notable devolution of power to the new state, which will elect all its own officials.
The new state will roughly encompass the same area as the present Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao, founded in 1990 as an earlier compromise between the government and the MILF. This region, encircling Cotabato City, became a byword for maladministration and corruption; neither did it stop the two sides sliding back into all-out war in the late 1990s. Hence the establishment of the brand new institute, funded mainly by Japan, with its courses in accountancy and conflict resolution. It is an attempt to ensure that this time round a cadre of competent administrators is ready to take over.
Other signs of faith in the future state are appearing. A Bangsamoro Development Agency is being set up to channel new investment into the region. Cotabato City is likely to be the new capital. Battered by years of war, it now has a new hotel and convention complex. A shopping mall is also going up.
All this is welcome, perhaps, but it runs ahead of progress in the negotiations to determine exactly what the new Bangsamoro state will look like. The talks are behind schedule and, according to one MILF negotiator, proving “tricky”. No wonder, since getting a framework agreement signed at all meant shelving the most divisive issues. Deadlines for those come and go. Since both sides are anxious to have the new Bangsamoro state established by 2016, before Benigno Aquino’s term as president ends, slippage now will matter later on.
A big sticking point is how the centre and the future state should carve up revenues from Bangsamoro’s considerable mineral and hydrocarbon potential. The two sides are still unreconciled. Disagreements also exist over territorial waters, or rather over the ownership of what lies beneath them.
Trickier still are negotiations over what is called “normalisation”, that is, disarming the former guerrillas of the MILF while pulling the Philippine army back from the field. Here the two sides remain far apart. The government, unsurprisingly, is keen to ensure that the MILF put their weapons “beyond use” as soon as possible. The MILF, on the other hand, wants help to create new livelihoods for its former fighters. That, it insists, will be the best guarantee that they will not soon return to armed struggle.
One adviser on the MILF side, Naguib Sinarimbo, says that government vacillation on some of these issues is “slowly eroding the trust between the two parties”. As for the government, Senen Bacani, a member of its five-person negotiating panel, argues that it is taking it “slowly and surely to make it all legally watertight”. The last thing anyone wants is the repeat of a 2008 fiasco, when the supreme court declared the last peace deal unconstitutional following complaints from opponents.
Yet for all its current hurdles, last year’s framework has acted as an inspiration to those caught up in conflicts elsewhere in South-East Asia. For instance, the Thai government has for the first time started formal talks with its own Muslim rebels in the south of the country. Meanwhile, the MILF reports that negotiators for the armed wings of the Kachin, Karen and other groups in Myanmar have visited it to learn how it won the Bangsamoro state from the Philippine government. The ongoing negotiations have ramifications well beyond the Philippines.
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