National Security and Peace in Mindanao
NATIONAL SECURITY AND PEACE IN MINDANAO
By Jose T. Almonte
Centrist Democratic Forum on Decentralization and Political Reform among Local Leaders in Northern Mindanao
Grand Caprice, Limketkai Drive, Cagayan de Oro
14 May 2011
Let me begin by stating my basic view of national security.
This may sound odd—coming from a professional soldier—but I do not regard weapon systems, however advanced, as the foundations of national security.
I’ve seen enough of conflict; and regard war as the perversion of a natural process. In peace, sons bury their fathers; but in war, it is fathers who bury their sons.
I believe that if you want to assess a country’s capacity to defend itself, you should look to its government’s ability to better the lives of its people.
I believe people’s well-being to be the other side of the coin of national security.
I believe that if you want people to defend their country, give them a sense of community: give them a stake in the system. Empower them to create social wealth. Then they’ll defend their country—even with their bare hands.
In sum, I view national security as founded ultimately on a country’s social cohesion—its political unity—and its economic viability.
THE SOURCES OF OUR VULNERABILITY
Now let us briefly assess our country’s specific strengths and vulnerabilities, using these measures.
Well over a century after our forefathers fought Asia’s first nationalist revolution, we Filipinos are far from being a fully achieved nation.
Our country may have recovered its freedom, but we have not used it to unify all our territories nor build our nation.
Until now, our fragmented political system hampers our ability to concentrate on national purposes and achieve national goals.
We Filipinos still have a classic weak state—a government unable to enforce all its writs, control corruption in office, and guarantee even the basic civil liberties.
Economically, competition is hampered by vested interests and inconsistent state policies. Thus competition is weak, and weakening still.
Monopolies and cartels dominate many sectors. Regulatory capture keeps down key services—oil, water, airlines, power, ports, shipping.
In the World Bank’s view, the weakness of the Philippine state “stems from the effective control by interest groups of the state machinery, such that role making and enforcement serves not the general welfare but particular interests.”
In other words, because of a failure of governance our country is suffering from the pernicious consequences not merely of regulatory capture but more so from the most insidious form of captivity: state capture.
Between 1976 and 2000—a quarter-century of unprecedented growth for much of East Asia—our own GDP growth barely exceeded population increase.
In 2009, the World Bank estimated poverty incidence at 26.5% of our population—up from 24.9% in 2003.
Inequality has made poverty in our country so difficult to ease that, together with India and Peru—whose income and social inequality approximates ours—it has become an unwilling host to one of the world’s last Maoist insurgencies.
Be that as it may, the fact is our insurgency is no longer communist-ideology-driven but derives its sustenance from the injustice of poverty—a poverty caused by a failure of governance.
MINDANAO CONFLICT A THREAT TO SECURITY
Let us now turn to the situation in Mindanao—which is of course a threat to national security; and to the prospect of peace there—which is crucial for national development.
Once regarded as our ‘Land of Promise,’ Mindanao over these last four decades (since 1969) has been the arena of a separatist conflict stirred up by rivalries over land and livelihoods complicated by ethnic and religious enmities. To date, this conflict has cost our nation 120,000 people dead and P270 billion in economic losses.
The fighting has also turned more than a million of our people into ‘internal refugees.’
Like all fratricidal conflicts, the Mindanao war has been so bitter that even making peace is a tortuous and protracted process. Extremists on both sides try repeatedly to break up any peace process that develops.
The Mindanao peace process was most successful during the presidency of General Fidel V. Ramos (1992-98).
Like me a professional soldier who refused to have Filipinos kill fellow-Filipinos, President Ramos did not react to these provocations.
He personally ensured that all our people involved in the peace process subscribed to his strategic vision of peace as the precondition for development in Mindanao.
LANDMARKS IN PEACE-MAKING EFFORTS
After many twists and turns, Government signed a final peace agreement with the ‘Moro National Liberation Front’ in September 1996.
The peace pact granted general amnesty to the rebel fighters; regional autonomy to the Muslim-majority provinces; and reintegration of qualified MNLF fighters with the armed forces and the national police.
I think it testimony to how well-grounded the Ramos-MNLF peace was that these integrated units remained loyal to their commands during the subsequent fighting with the MILF—the MNLF’s breakaway Moro Islamic Liberation Front—including Misuari’s MNLF faction when later he decided to again defy the government.
Ramos began this second Mindanao peace process immediately after making peace with the MNLF. It, too, prospered— producing a ‘General Agreement for the Cessation of Hostilities’ in July 1997.
And that ‘ceasefire’ lasted 30 months—until Ramos’s successor, President Estrada, unaccountably ordered “all-out war” on the MILF.
By then, the Mindanao situation had so stabilized that President Ramos easily obtained the agreement of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei to an East ASEAN Growth Area that would have made Mindanao and Sulu the centers of a sub-regional growth quadrangle encompassing Borneo, Sulawesi, and the Moluccas.
During those 30 months, the Ramos administration was also able—at the MILF’s own request—to complete local development programs—notably a potable water system, an irrigation network, and farm to market roads—in parts of Central and Western Mindanao.
Unfortunately Ramos’s term expired in June 1998; and his successor’s Mindanao policy was unaccountably aggressive and warlike.
In April 2000, the populist President Estrada gave the AFP an ill-conceived order to assault the MILF’s stronghold—in the course of which mosques were destroyed, families dislocated, and MILF fighters redeployed to new focal points of resistance.
Adding insult to injury, Estrada had a truckload of beer and pork lechon delivered to his ‘victorious’ troops as they entered Camp Abubakar.
Facing up to challenges of long-term change
Mindanao policy in our time must face up to
geo-political changes in East Asia and in the world.
In foreign policy, we’ve cut off our umbilical cord to the United States, and made common cause with our ASEAN neighbors in their project to make ‘One Southeast Asia’ the core region of an ‘East Asian Economic Grouping.’
Mindanao—with its agricultural, marine, and subsoil wealth—would then become a tremendous natural resource for our country.
But, for this to happen, we need to stabilize Mindanao’s security situation: we need to create Mindanao peace that will endure.
Only then can we begin to draw out the store of vigor, talent, and creativeness still locked up in Mindanao’s 22 million people.
You and I know peace must endure if sustainable development is to come from it. And peace should mean not merely the absence of conflict. Peace should mean the realization of the hopes we share—of lifting up the common life and winning the future for every Filipino.
WE CAN’T KEEP USING FORCE
TO SUPPRESS OUR REBELLIONS
What is also plain is that we can’t keep using police—and military—methods to suppress these rebellions. We must try and understand why men rebel—so that we can apply lasting remedies.
We need to understand how far these outbreaks are motivated by ordinary people’s frustrations over their lack of autonomy: their inability to break through the obscure social forces they see as controlling their lives.
Certainly the killing competition between our rebels and our military has gone on too long. Not only has it cost us exorbitantly in both blood and treasure. It has also distracted us from attending to the problems of under-development, inequality, and injustice that divide our people and render us unable to strive for modernization.
Make no mistake: Unless we put an end to this nation’s war against itself—unless we stop Filipinos from killing fellow-Filipinos—our country will never become a developed nation worthy of respect in the community of nations.
Without peace and stability, our nation’s time and resources will be frittered away, fighting an internal war that—in the absence of reform—will never end.
WE CANNOT DEVELOP SEPARATELY
Not just in Mindanao but in national society, land hunger, joblessness, and a widespread and persistent type of poverty have been the main sources of our social violence and civil disorder.
Over these past 60 years alone, agrarian dissidence has generated two radical insurgencies—the second and more sophisticated of which still lingers in parts of our archipelago.
The best cure for poverty is still growth that generates jobs that pay decent wages and livelihood opportunities for small entrepreneurs.
By now we Filipinos must realize that we cannot develop separately—as geographic regions, social classes, ethnicities, or religious groupings isolated from one another.
Our basic strength must come from our unity. We can develop only as one country, as one nation.
Organizing peace in MindanAO
After the fall of President Estrada in a ‘people-power’ revolution in January 2001, the successor-government of Gloria Arroyo and the MILF easily agreed on a new cease-fire.
Their negotiators set up a truce-monitoring team composed of Malaysia, Japan, and Brunei. They also agreed on protocols for delivering humanitarian aid; building rehabilitation projects, and carrying out development programs.
Foreign sponsors for these post-conflict programs have quickly come forward.
I have high hopes for capacity-building activities they’re also undertaking, to bring up potential leaders of the Muslim communities.
These concessions and mechanisms have cut down the incidence of conflict, although rogue commanders and “lost commands” keep up tensions in some areas.
Local peace councils—offshoots of the bishops-ulema conferences set up by the Ramos government—lead peace-making efforts in some places.
More earnest and more systematic devolution of political authority to local government units (LGUs) and the award of control over local natural resources to local communities should help nurture democratic institutions at rice-roots level in some places.
THE ‘ANCESTRAL DOMAIN’ CONTROVERSY
The GRP-MILF negotiators who worked on the peace panel between 2001 and 2008 also agreed that the concept of “ancestral domain”—crucial to the MILF claim—connotes not only land ownership but also is a way of acknowledging the ethnic identity of the ‘Bangsamoro’ people.
They set down this broad definition in a memorandum of agreement (M0A) that became part of a peace agreement the negotiators initialed in Tripoli (Libya) in June 2001. Just before a final signing was due in Kuala Lumpur in August 2008, the Philippine Supreme Court declared the MOA unconstitutional for conceding too much in concepts and territory to the MILF panel.
Then President Arroyo not only suspended the negotiations. She also disbanded the GRP negotiating panel. And this is roughly how things are at the moment.
There are no easy choices. All I know is that a dissolution of the talks—and a resultant backsliding into war—is not an option.
But if a renewal of conflict is not an option, neither is a peace agreement that does violence to the Constitution.
So what are we to do?
AMEND ARMM CHARTER TO SUIT NEW DEMANDS
President Ramos suggests we return to the Tripoli Agreement of 1976 between the GRP and the MNLF, and to the Organic Act of Muslim Mindanao that created the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).
He asserts that, in the Tripoli Agreement and its associated legal and administrative enactments, we have a provision—a framework—for political autonomy already established. And in its present form, this structure is embodied in the ARMM.
The ARMM was created by Congress in accordance with the Constitution and accepted in a plebiscite by the electorate.
But its Organic Law is not written on stone.
The ARMM Charter we can modify and refine to reflect the national experience of the past 35 years.
President Ramos suggests we amend this sub-national Charter to meet in some measure the MILF’s grievances and demands.
He contends that we can reconfigure the ARMM’s territorial boundaries, strengthen its powers, rebuild its political checks and balances—and even reexamine the whole scope of its relationship with the central government in Metro Manila—in ways that can satisfy the MILF.
MINDANAO SHOULDN’T NEED TO
WAIT ON A POLITICal SETTLEMENT
Even with the best will in the world, this process will be protracted. But Mindanao’s people—whether Muslim, Christian or lumad—shouldn’t need to wait on a political settlement.
In this belief, President Ramos in 1995 ordered the 14 provinces and 9 cities referred to in the Tripoli Agreement grouped into “Zones of Peace and Development”—into which Government would channel focused social welfare, infrastructure, and development projects in a kind of “affirmative action” or “positive discrimination” program.
The East Asian financial crisis of July 1977 cut short this program to bring our poorest administrative regions of the Philippine South closer to the economic level of the more progressive Luzon and Visayan regions.
Succeeding administrations with other priorities simply swept the Ramos programs aside. But the concept on which they are built remains a valid and useful one—and a concept
all of us who wish Mindanao well would want undertaken.
MINDANAO AND ARAB PEOPLE POWER
The young people in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) acting as citizens—who are 30 years old and below, and 60% of the population—have mobilized a people power movement since January this year to peacefully recover their dignity and freedom, and to have control over their lives. They have succeeded in Tunisia and Egypt. It is a work in progress in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Oman and Syria, and others may follow.
The distinct character of this movement is what the Syrian rebels call “Silmiyyah”, meaning, peaceful. It contrasts rather sharply with al Qaeda’s violent method.
The overwhelming popular support this peaceful movement has generated promises to negate bin Laden’s legacy of violence if it lives after his death.
Perhaps our militants in Mindanao must wisely consider this paradigm shift in MENA in order not to be on the wrong side of history.
A time to ask ourselves what we
can do for the common enterprise
Lastly—we as a people have a busy agenda before us, since our problems are not government’s alone. They are also ours. Democratic government cannot do things by itself. It needs constant and consistent support—from people like you who are here.
We must all get involved. We cannot be passive spectators to government’s efforts. For if government fails, then we all fail—for we will have frittered away the years we need to put our house in order.
This is a time, therefore, not only to assess what government has done—or failed to do—in Mindanao.
This is also a time for us to ask ourselves what we have done—and what we can do—for the common enterprise.
This is a time for us to speak—not only of rights—but also of duties—and of civic responsibility.
***
The forum was organized by the Centrist Democratic Movement Federation of the Philippines (CDM Federation) - Lambigit in Northern Mindanao in collaboration with the Centrist Democracy Political Institute (CDPI) and the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) Philippines.
For more information, please contact the Regional Secretary at the email add: cdmnorthernmindanao.lambigit@gmail.com and feel free to visit the website at www.lambigit.yolasite.com and www.cdm-philippines.org
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