A Legacy of Failure

The violence in Sulu the past weeks, which was punctuated by the series of bombings in three key cities on Feb. 14, indicate that the objectives of the 1996 peace agreement are far from achieved.

By Carlos H. Conde

MANILA – Nearly a decade ago, the Philippine government and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), the first Moro separatist group, signed a peace agreement that many thought would end the 27-year Islamic rebellion in the southern Philippines.

But the violence there the past two weeks, which was punctuated by the series of bombings in three key cities on Feb. 14, indicate that the objectives of that supposed political settlement are far from achieved.

“It is not a stretch to say that the outbreak of terrorism in the Philippines can be traced directly to the failure of the 1996 peace agreement with the Moro National Liberation Front,” said Abhoud Syed Lingga, a Moro scholar and expert on the Islamic separatist movement in Mindanao.

As a result of the failure of the 1996 peace agreement between the government and the moderate MNLF to end the conflict in Mindanao, other groups grew. These are the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) – which had broken away from the MNLF earlier - and the Abu Sayyaf, a group that originally espoused Islamic fundamentalism but degenerated into kidnapping, rape and murder, and is now trying to return to its fundamentalist roots, terrorism experts say, by establishing alliances with domestic Islamic groups as well as the Jemaah Islamiyah.

People were euphoric after the signing of the agreement, which established the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). Millions of dollars in aid from the West poured into Mindanao, where most of the country’s Moros live. As part of the agreement, the armed forces absorbed former guerrillas of the MNLF. Livelihood projects, many of them funded and supported by the United Nations and Western nongovernment organizations, were established.

The government insists that the agreement produced some significant gains, such as the Moros’ integration into the political and economic mainstream, representation in government, establishment of their own educational system and the integration by the former guerrillas into the military.

Slow implementation

But over all, the implementation of the agreement has been slow, the results modest at best. “There have been problems, true, but despite these problems, the process has been holding,” said Teresita Deles, an adviser to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on the peace process.

“People should also keep in mind that, since 1996, there has not been open hostilities between the MNLF and the government,” she added.

Whether Moros actually benefited from these gains is another story, said Soliman Santos, another expert on Islamic separatism.

The Moro region was still the poorest in the country, the literacy rate hardly improved, the infant mortality rate was still the highest compared to the other regions, lawlessness was still rampant. Tens of thousands of Moros were displaced in the ongoing conflicts.

Before long, Moros started to look to the MILF, which by then was offering the very thing that the government and the MNLF had said they had delivered: self-rule for Moros.

The Washington-based U.S. Institute of Peace, which has been involved in the peace process on behalf of the U.S. government, recognized early on the difficulties that lie ahead. “The long history of the conflict and the failed approaches to resolve it have created deep divisions among Moros and among the general Filipino populace, which regards any peace agreements with skepticism or, at the most, guarded optimism,” it said in a recent report.

The ARMM, the region that the MNLF has been tasked to manage, was not exactly autonomous. It is hamstrung by a number of factors, among them the fact that it still depends on Manila for its budget and that it cannot exploit its natural resources that easily and on its own because it would violate the constitution.