(Delivered on November 12, 2009 in Davao City, at the conference of the Mindanao Working Group).
I am happy to be here and more so because I am excited to share with you the exciting things happening inside the GRP-MILF peace process. If you asked me a month ago whether there will be significant movement within the remaining period, I would have said, “not much”. But as a participant in the negotiations for the past four weeks, I am energized. I see a lot of reasons to be optimistic and excited.
The peace process as an operating system
We can compare the peace process to a computer “operating system” like Apple’s Leopard or Microsoft Windows. Just as an operating system is a platform to attain outcomes, the peace process is a platform to attain a specific outcome - in this case, a negotiated political settlement with the MILF - a building block in the crucial work of attaining that long elusive peace in Mindanao.
Operating systems crash. They are not perfect. Bugs or problems are found that create glitches and hang the system. When a system hangs, all other applications hang and there is a need to reboot or restart it. However, merely rebooting the system will not suffice. Without a permanent solution to the bugs, the system will, again and again, continue to crash and with it all other applications.
The same is true with peace processes. They crash. And when they do, all the relevant applications, whether it be - third party facilitation, ceasefire monitoring, rehabilitation and development projects, and humanitarian interventions - crash with it.
The GRP-MILF peace process: a history of crashes
The peace process has its own history of crashes. It crashed in June 2000 when President Erap decided to call for an all-out war. It crashed again in February 2003 with the offensives at Buliok Complex.
Every time the peace process crash, the human, economic, and political costs are tremendous. Lives are lost, properties destroyed and civilians are forced to evacuate from their communities. With each crash, people’s confidence in a peaceful settlement is progressively diminished. Nobody wants any system to crash - whether of the computer kind or peace processes. But if there is one thing that technology teaches us, it is this: to solve the problem, one must identify the “bugs” that caused crash and to find a way of correcting it, usually via an “upgrade”.
For Erap’s “all-out war”, the problem was the violation by both parties of the ceasefire agreement and their lack of mutual trust and confidence. The solution then was to bring in a third-party - The Government of Malaysia - to mediate and facilitate the negotiations between two distrustful parties.
For the crash of the Buliok offensives, the problem was the suspicion that the MILF was coddling kidnap-for-ransom groups, like the Pentagon Gang. The solution consisted of two upgrades in the process: first, bring in the International Monitoring Team or the IMT to monitor the ceasefire agreement and second, to create the Ad Hoc Joint Action Group or the AHJAG which is a platform where the Government and MILF security forces can jointly pursue lawless and terror elements.
The current crash
Coming now to the current state of things, the peace process crashed last year when the Supreme Court TRO’d the signing of the MOA-AD. We have yet to recover from that crash. Formal Talks have not yet officially resumed. We are still offline.The MOA-AD triggered attacks by a few MILF commanders on unarmed civilian communities and the subsequent military offensives to pursue and arrest these commanders brought war, once again, to Mindanao.
The “bugs” of the current crash
What are the problems? We see three: first, the lack of support and control, second, spoilers and third, the need to protect civilians
Firstly, lack of support and control.The MOA-AD episode showed how fragile and weak the support was to the peace process. While the panels were about to sign a significant agreement, they failed to rally their respective constituencies around it.
For the Philippine Government, it highlighted the need to bring into the process and get the active support of the Supreme Court, Congress, local government officials, indigenous peoples groups and civil society organizations.
For the MILF, it highlighted the need to bring into the negotiations their local commanders and the bigger Bangsamoro constituency - traditional leaders, politicians, civil society organizations, not just the armed groups.
Furthermore, with the elections hurrying near, there is a question of continuity. How sure are the parties that the peace process will survive the change in administration and that the previous agreements will be honored?
Secondly, “spoilers”. Who are “spoilers” but people and institutions who feel that they have a stake in the process and yet were excluded from having a meaningful and substantial participation in crafting the agreement. It also includes people and institutions whose interests, whether political, economic or regional, are threatened by the changes that will be brought by the peace agreement. The MOA-AD episode revealed how a few but determined and well-resourced “spoilers” can derail and scuttle a process meant to benefit the many.
Thirdly, the need to protect civilians. The biggest casualty of the MOA-AD episode are the thousands of IDPs still living in subhuman conditions this very minute in Central Mindanao.
The plight of the IDPs remain to be the most vivid proof of the truism that civilians bear the heaviest cost of war and that whether it be all-out peace or all-out war, there must be a mechanism to protect them.
Again, the problems are: lack of support and control, spoilers and the need to protect civilians.
The necessary upgrades for the current crash
What are the necessary upgrades to the system? First, generate support by building a coalition of friends and by consolidating internally. Second, craft a strategy to deal with spoilers. Third, create a civilian protection mechanism.
To the problem of lack of support and control, we decided to build a coalition of friends - composed of states and international and national NGOs - who will publicly lend their credibility, goodwill, influence and wise counsel. This coalition is expected to “push” us to complete the process and in the event that a final peace agreement is signed, to help in implementing it. This coalition is the “International Contact Group” (ICG).
Furthermore, on the side of Government, we will consolidate our ranks by engaging, perhaps more than we ever did in the past, the Supreme Court, Congress and Mindanao leaders to find acceptable solutions to peace in Mindanao.
To the problem of “spoilers,” the first act should be the conduct of the broad consultations with stakeholders. However, in addition to broad public consultations, we will engage those who are opposed to the peace process in an inclusive and honest dialogue and come up with real alternatives. We will make sure that they cannot anymore use the excuse that they were not consulted.
To the need to protect civilians, we decided to invite civil society organizations, whether national or international, to help us monitor our agents’ compliance to established norms and rules on civilian protection. We created a Civilian Protection Component of the International Monitoring Team to flesh out this commitment.
Civilian protection is important to us. This is the reason why although it is structurally part of the International Monitoring Team, its mandate and existence will continue and is independent of whether or not there will be an International Monitoring Team in the future.
These are the things which makes me feel excited about the prospects and sustainability of the peace process today and beyond 2010. We are fixing the problems and the upgrades are in place.
But there is more.
One Bangsamoro Challenge
We, in Philippine Government, are slowly moving towards the direction of a closer, integrated response to this single, yet multi-faceted, 1 Bangsamoro Challenge. We cannot continue to deal with MILF peace process, the MNLF peace process, the challenge to make ARMM work, and the threats posed by extremist groups like the JI and Abu Sayyaf as if they are separate and unrelated.
While different people sit at different tables and dealing with different parties, we want to bring these tables closer and closer to each other and in one room. The underlying theme of all these issues are one and the same: the challenge of distinct and minoritized people seeking recognition of identity and a space to live out this distinctiveness.
While we engage these groups differently, we want to engage them in view of all our other efforts across the other tables. In the end, we are talking about the same people, the same aspirations, the same problems and probably the same solutions.
One Government Response
Concretely, we want One Government Response to to this One Bangsamoro Challenge. We want the actions of our negotiators with the MILF to be informed by what’s happening with the MNLF review of implementation, informed by the planning done by MEDCO, informed by the inputs of our security forces and informed by the active participation of civil society and peoples organizations.
In the same way, we want our efforts at reviewing the implementation of the 1996 Final Peace Agreement to be in sync with our negotiations with the MILF and consistent with our Mindanao 2020 Agenda.
When our security and police forces plan and operate their tactical operations, we want it to be informed by the over-all strategic objective of the “primacy of the peace process,” with the participation of the autonomous regional government and conscious of the development initiatives we are doing in the area.
With respect to the partners in the Mindanao Working Group, we desire that your initiatives in Mindanao be actually aligned and support our peace, security and development agenda. It should do no harm.
Task Force HELP: Central Mindanao
I am talking here not just of a mere upgrade of a single computer system but of creating a vibrant “local area network” of the different systems involved in Mindanao - integrating security, development, peace and governance systems and yes, including systems of the foreign assistance like the Mindanao Working Group. I am talking here of people and institutions talking closely to each other, complementing each other, enriching each other. It is a worthwhile task which must be commenced soon.
This is the reason for the establishment of Task Force: HELP Central Mindanao, which is the initial platform that will facilitate these conversations between security, development, humanitarian and governance systems. When before these systems were “closed”, we want them now to be “open”. The Mindanao Working Group should work closely with this Task Force.
These are the reasons why I feel excited about this peace process. And I think it should excite you, too. The doors for real participation and contribution by members of the Mindanao Working Group are open. It awaits only your generosity and response.
Let me end by saying this: we survived the crash. The bugs have been identified.The upgrades are installed. It’s time to reboot the peace process.
Daghang salamat ug maayong buntag kaninyong tanan!
(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. PeaceTalk is open to anyone who wants to share his/her views on the peace processes in Mindanao. Assistant Seretary Bong Montesa is senior advisor and spokesperson for the GRP-MILF peace process. He is also the Chair of Tripartite Implementation Review of the 1996 GRP-MNLF Final Peace Agreement)
Source: http://www.mindanews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7220&Itemid=266
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