Mr. President, in your inaugural speech at the Quirino Grandstand on June 30, 2010, you announced before the public that you “will be sincere in dealing with all the peoples of Mindanao”; thus, for this reason you pledged yourself to “a peaceful and just settlement of conflict, inclusive of the interests of all – may they be Lumads, Bangsamoro or Christian”.
You also emphatically declared: “You (the people) are the boss so I cannot ignore your orders.” In Tagalog: “Kayo ang boss ko.”
These pronouncements renewed in us that spirit of optimism oozing with hope that a peaceful and just political settlement of the conflict in the Bangsamoro will finally be resolved under your watch.
At that moment, we thought that at last here was a Filipino president who meant serious business; a president who could empathize with the plight of the long-oppressed Bangsamoro people because he, too, experienced the trauma of state oppression and persecution; a president who, like many among our brethren, had lost his own father to the forces of evil that once governed this country.
Mr. President, we feasted on your words of promise like starving men marooned on a desert of despair.
Our spirits were further buoyed, thus, when you announced that the GRP Peace Panel negotiating with the MILF had been reconstituted with a new set of members under a law professor meticulously selected by you on the basis of their competence, knowledge, experience and sympathy for Mindanao.
And when you likewise announced that peace talks would immediately resume after Ramadhan, we went ballistic with joy. We were beginning to see the light at the end of the dark tunnel. The pervasive darkness of war and conflict that blighted our Moro homeland, at last, was about to be dissipated by the light of freedom and justice. Elusive peace seemed no longer elusive.
Or so we thought.
For, suddenly things have changed. In the 100 days that you’ve assumed office, the feeling of the people on the ground has progressively turned from hope to disenchantment to anger. For, like an automobile on reverse gear, instead of moving forward the quest for peace and justice, your government has begun to move backwards at a faster acceleration than what it promised to fulfill at the beginning of your administration.
You have closed the door to constitutional amendment that would have accommodated any final political compact agreement with the MILF, which, for your information in case you’ve not yet realized it, has already conceded to constitutional remedy to allow the restoration of peace in our troubled land. Hence, by the very pronouncement of your government shutting down the avenues to constitutional amendment even before the resumption of talks could begin, you have already dealt the death blow to any prospective peace agreement with the MILF by consigning it beforehand to the same fate as the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD) in 2008.
Not satisfied with that, you have created conditions which lead to the nullification of the gains of the peace process. Your Department of Foreign Affairs has issued new orders to foreign governments, institutions and NGOs, including those actively providing assistance to our poverty-stricken people and our refugees, to seek prior clearance and approval from your government before engaging the MILF in dialogues or launching humanitarian activities in the conflict-affected areas of Mindanao and Sulu.
You have also insisted that peace talks with the MILF should be in the Philippines, not in Malaysia or, for that matter, in any other neutral foreign venue as had been agreed upon by the MILF and the Philippine government in 2001.
Alas, Mr. President, now we are beginning to realize that when you mentioned in your speech before the joint Houses of Congress that the conflict in Mindanao is merely “a situation”, you really meant what you said. The hundreds of thousands of refugees dislocated and the thousands of lives lost every time war breaks out in Mindanao and Sulu are as trivial a “situation” to you as the bungled Manila hostage-taking incident.
This sinister move that intends to isolate the MILF from the international community and in the process control if not prevent the flow of humanitarian aid to the victims of war is an unconscionable act that makes you no different from your predecessors. It is sheer hambug on your part and your government to presume you can resolve and handle alone the Internally Displaced People (IDP) problem in our homeland without foreign humanitarian assistance. In case you have not read the papers, the World Food Program of the UN has just issued a public statement as posted in the Philippine Daily Inquirer dated October 12, 2010 that 250,000 people in Mindanao still displaced by war and natural disasters are starving and would need $26 million in food and other kinds of assistance. This assistance you cannot provide -nor were your predecessors able to – not only because of entrenched corruption in government but more significantly because in your word the Mindanao conflict is “a situation” which implies it is nothing to worry about. The truth is: the IDPs or the resolution of the conflict is not in the list of your national priorities.
And now you want the international community to stop its humanitarian activities in Mindanao and Sulu without your prior approval? Not only would this drive our people further into the deep bowels of poverty, misery and hopelessness, you are forcing them to abandon the ways of peace to redress legitimate grievances.
Which means, Mr. President, that you are rekindling the embers of the armed conflict whose flames had been reduced to a flicker by the peace negotiation and its promise of a just peace in our homeland.
Are the bottomless pockets of your so-called peace advisers, who, we know, have earned the infamous reputation for making fast bucks out of foreign aid assistance to the refugees in Mindanao and Sulu, more important to you than the welfare of the IDPs or the future of peace in Mindanao?
Lest you forget, Mr. President, you announced in Ramadhan 2010 that the immediate resumption of peace talks with the MILF shall commence after the holy month.
With great anticipation and eagerness, we waited for your words to come true. Then suddenly, the news of the arrest of Brother Edward Guerra, a senior member of the Central Committee of the MILF in charge of foreign affairs, who was arrested by agents of the CIDG-PNP at the Davao International Airport in September 22 to attend a UN conference on human rights in Geneva, hit us like a thunderbolt. We also learned from his family and lawyer that he was tortured while in maximum security detention at Fort Bonifacio. Brother Edward Guerra’s health is in a precarious state given his heart ailment, diabetes and hypertension.
Your late father, for reasons that need not be explained, would have created havoc in his grave if he were to learn that your government still uses torture on helpless political prisoners, especially on those afflicted by heart ailments.
The depression that we felt upon learning this morphed into extreme apprehension when news also brought to us the information that MILF members involved in peace monitoring were arrested by your military and police in Maguindanao.
We also learned that the arrest warrant for Brother Edward Guerra was issued by the court on September 1, 2010. This was well within the timeframe of your invitation, Mr. President, to the MILF to resume talks with your government!
What game of grand deception are you trying to play on us, Mr. President?
The reaction of your Chief Negotiator, Prof. Marvic Leonen, to the protest filed by the MILF on this matter is quite revealing. Leonen said that Brother Edward Guerra is not in the list of the MILF Peace Negotiating Panel. What he infers, therefore, is that his arrest and subsequent torture in the hands of his captors are justified.
Even then, the deafening silence of your Presidential Peace Adviser, Secretary Ging Deles, on this matter that is crucial to the fate of the negotiations, is, to say the least, strange. So strange that we wonder whether a presidential peace adviser does really exist in fact or just in the imagination of Ms. Deles.
At any rate, does this mean, Mr. President, that any member of the MILF from the rank and file who is not a member of the MILF Peace Negotiating Panel is an open prey? Following this argument, even Brother Al Haj Murad Ebrahim, the MILF Chairman who is not among the listed six members of the MILF Panel, can be arrested anytime by your state police and military!
The convoluted logic of your Chief Negotiator, Mr. President, deliberately leaves out the fact that the principal of the MILF Peace Negotiating Panel is the MILF Central Committee of which Brother Edward Guerra is a senior member, being chair of its Foreign Affairs Committee. Technically, in view of the peace talks being held in foreign venues, principally Malaysia, the negotiations are within the jurisdiction of the Foreign Affairs Committee he currently chairs.
For all intents and purposes, Mr. President, Bro. Edward Guerra is as much an important principal of the MILF Peace Negotiating Panel as MILF Chairman Al Haj Murad Ebrahim, the two vice-chairmen, and all the other members of the Central Committee of the MILF.
Mr. President, in case you still miss the dire implication of the arrests of Brother Edward Guerra and other MILF members similarly abducted by your state police and military, allow us to inform you now that this is tantamount to a declaration of a new war against the MILF and the Bangsamoro people.
It is in this context, Mr. President, that we hold you and your government responsible for any outbreak of hostilities in the Bangsamoro.
We are no longer afraid of war. The long-running conflict in our homeland has drained the last drop of fear from us. What is left are desperation and hopelessness; a permanent and pervasive feeling of insecurity under the Philippine state. And if indeed fear remains, it is the fear that peace will remain as elusive as ever.
We are afraid that in the event peace and justice are not realized in our time through peaceful negotiations, the argument that only though the barrel of the gun can such peace and justice be achieved will rule the day and the days yet to come.
Do not squander the remaining years of your presidency, Mr. President, and leave the future of peace in Mindanao and Sulu to be shipwrecked on the barren rocks of war and conflict. This is what your predecessors did.
You promised that you will be different from them.
So prove it, Mr. President, not merely by uttering empty rhetorical and meaningless statements but by sincerity emanating from the heart and animated by affirmative action.
Prove it, Mr. President, before you are overtaken by time.
Prove it, Mr. President that we, the people of the Bangsamoro and not only the people of Luzon and Visayas and the settlers in Mindanao, are also your “boss”.
If you think that we do not deserve to be in the same category as your constituents in Luzon, Visayas and the Christian-dominated areas in Mindanao, then leave us Moros alone in peace so we can forge our own future in freedom as a people and as a nation.
Signed:
MARAWI CITY CONFEDERATION OF SUPREME STUDENT GOVERNMENTS
COALITION OF MORO YOUTH MOVEMENTS
BANGSAMORO YOUTH VOLUNTEERS PROGRAM
JUST MOVEMENT-MINDANAO
YOUNG RANAW EDUCATORS INC.
Bangsamoro Youth Assembly (BMYA)
Anak Moro Organization
United Bangsamoro Women for Peace and Development
Bangsamoro Center for JustPeace (BCJP)
UNYPAD
UNYPHIL
BMYLF
October 15, 2010
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