Two brief comments from our end related to the peace process in Mindanao.

First, we believe this period when parties are exchanging drafts for some kind of agreement on ways forward, is a good opportunity to present suggestions by civil society organisations. We have highlighted this to our fellow ICG colleagues, as well as to the Malaysian facilitator. All of you have worked on consultative processes or other initiatives to come up with an agenda for peace in Mindanao. We encourage you to address the parties directly (for those of you who haven't done so yet) and, in as much as possible, to come up with a consolidated joint proposal.


Second, we have been inquiring with friends from other contexts on additional ways for the participation of civil society in the peace process. We are happy to share with you a suggestion by Christine Bell, a researcher on peace, human rights, and the role of women in peace processes, who was active in the peace process in Northern Ireland. Her thoughts are as follow:

"If there is a chance that the elections stall things (and often people get elected by being ‘anti peace process’ – or the toughest negotiator), then our experience in Northern Ireland was that it was good that there were ‘parallel’ almost ‘official track 2’ fora for discussion and some sense of an ongoing peace process to be kept alive. If there is a strong post-election peace process, then these mechanisms widen participation.

In Northern Ireland we had the Dublin Forum for Peace and Reconciliation which took a large number of submissions and held hearings on matters such as self-determination, human rights, women’s rights etc, at an early stage of the process. Other processes have had ‘peace building commissions’. Some sort of parallel process could also address the ‘internal’ tensions [among parties and stakeholders], and provide some outlet for them. Post agreement we had the ‘civic forum’ which was to perform a similar function. In fact we also had a negotiating forum during the talks that was elected, but that had its own elections which required a much lower threshold for election to the forum meaning that women’s coalition and small loyalist parties were able to get elected to the talks. A forum could also or alternatively be created which enabled internal mind. Dialogue and Philippine-philippine political dialogue on Mind (this is quite ambitious). The general point is that it might be important to have some forum which has a strong public talking role which has some capacity to survive fluctuations in the peace process, in particular due to elections."

Please don't hesitate contacting us for any additional information or comments, or if you want to get in touch with Christine Bell directly.

In peace,

kristian herbolzheimer, cynthia petrigh
conciliation resources