Montesa: One government response to One Bangsamoro challenge

DAVAO CITY (MindaNews/14 November) – Peace Process Assistant Secretary Camilo “Bong” Montesa says the Phlilippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) “survived the crash” in the peace process last year and the Philippine government is “slowly moving towards the direction of a closer, integrated response to this single, yet multi-faceted, One Bangsamoro Challenge.” Montesa, head of the Peacekeeping and Peacemaking Group at the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process (OPAPP), senior advisor and spokesperson for the GRP-MILF peace process and also government chair in the Tripartite Implementation Review of the 1996 GRP-MNLF Final Peace Agreement, told the Mindanao Working Group in a meeting in Davao City last Thursda that “we cannot continue to deal with MILF peace process, the MNLF (Moro National Liberarion Front) peace process, the challenge to make ARMM (Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao) work, and the threats posed by extremist groups like the JI (Jemaah Islamiyah) 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,” he said.

“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,” Montesa added.

“Concretely,” he said, “we want One Government Response to to this One Bangsamoro Challenge.”

Same page

Montesa said they want the actions of government negotiators with the MILF “to be informed by what’s happening with the MNLF review of implementation, informed by the planning done by MEDCo, (Mindanao Economic Development Authority), 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,” he said.

Montesa explained that when government’s 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.”

He expressed hope that the the MWG initiatives in Mindanao “be actually aligned and support our peace, security and development agenda. It should do no harm.

Montesa said development in the peace process in the past four weeks has “energized” him.

“I see a lot of reasons to be optimistic and excited.”

Crash

Montesa likened 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,” he said.

He cited the number of times the peace process crashed – in 2000 when then President Estrada launched an all-out war against the MILF; in February 2003 when the Arroyo administration waged war purportedly against a kidnap-for-ransom gang but later admitted it was against the MILF.

“Every time the peace process crashes, 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,’” Montesa said.

“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,” he said.

“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,” he said.

Problems

For the crash brought about by the Supreme Court’s issuance of a temporary restraining order on the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD), Montesa cited three problems: “first, the lack of support and control, second, spoilers and third, the need to protect civilians.”

On the first, he said “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,” he said.

“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,” Montesa added.

The electoral process in 2010 was also cited on the matter 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?”

On the “spoilers” which he described as “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.

“Biggest Casualty”

On the need to protect civilians, Montesa said the “biggest casualty of the MOA-AD episode are the thousands of IDPs still living in sub-human conditions this very minute in (Southwestern) 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,” he said.

To “upgrade” the system, he said: “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.”

The first is being addressed by the creation of an International Contact Group (ICG) which will “publicly lend their credibility, goodwill, influence and wise counsel.”
Montesa said that 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,” he said.

On 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,” he said. (MindaNews)