“Government should have a coherent and cohesive peace agenda” – BCJP

By William B. Banzali

January 31, 2010



Davao City - The Bangsamoro Center for JustPeace Inc. (BCJP) on Friday told Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process Secretary Anabelle T. Abaya to come up with a coherent peace agenda in talking with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and other revolutionary movements in the country.


”The Executive, Legislative and the Judiciary should come up with a coherent peace agenda in talking with MILF to ensure that whatever the peace panels may agreed in the negotiations is binding and be treated as national policy and government’s position, not just one chamber of government, in this way, the fate of the MOA AD could have been avoided,” said BCJP Executive Director Abdulbasit R. Benito in an open forum during the OPAPP Peace Partners Forum held at Grand Regal Hotel, Davao City on January 29, 2010.



He said it is difficult to negotiate with the peace panel that has no clear mandates. The MOA AD experienced shows how weak the government peace panels was, including the executive when some local chief executives in some provinces in Mindanao oppose the agreement on ancestral domain, and the Supreme Court responds to the petition very quickly”.



Mr. Benito also reacted to the presentation that the root causes of conflict in Mindanao are due to poverty, socio economic inequity and poor governance. “These issue of poverty, poor governance, un peace and others are just a symptoms of a main problem, for us and the people we talked, we believed that the root caused of problem in Mindanao is Injustices committed against the Bangsamoro people, we are politically disenfranchised, we are systematically marginalized”, He said. Unless this root caused of the problem is address properly, the juspeace restoration in the Bangsamoro homeland is elusive, Benito added.





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