Is BARMM ‘an experiment’? (1)
Cotabato City—Here, the election fever is at its hottest levels, with all of the regionally registered and accredited political parties scrambling for opportunities to convince people to vote for their political parties and for the individual representatives in each voting district.
It is also when the acknowledged “high-end” hotels in the region are filled with equally high-level guests, especially those related to election matters. Last week, two top national officials visited the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) to hold press conferences about the historic first regional parliamentary elections here.
Commission on Elections chair George Garcia and Department of the Interior and Local Government Secretary Jonvic Remulla were among the top national officials who were here last week. Their presence was marked with a heavy retinue of security officers, a composite team of Philippine Army and Philippine National Police elements tailing the vehicles that carried them.
Barring any untoward incident, the first regional parliamentary elections will happen just two weeks from now—Sept. 14, 2026. Eligible voters in five component provinces and two cities of the region are expected to troop to their respective voting district polls on that day. These are Basilan, Tawi-Tawi, Lanao del Sur and the Maguindanao del Norte and del Sur for the provinces, and Cotabato City and Marawi for the city components.
Remulla held a press conference during his visit, where he said that the BARMM elections this year are “an experiment.” He said the Sept. 14, 2026 regional elections are an “experiment—it will show that a Muslim nation can exist in a Christian country…” Remulla also said that the old paths (referring to the long history of conflict in the region) are “in the past; we are all now united as Filipinos.”
A lawyer who has served for years as part of the entire peace process architecture, Camilo “Bong” Montesa, has praised Remulla for this comment. Montesa said that it was, so far, the “clearest and most honest statement of the national government by a senior Cabinet member and a close confidant of the President.”
Montesa appreciated that no less than this level of national government official said it frankly that it is not a “local poll; it is an experiment.” Montesa went on further to say that Remulla was right in saying that it is “an experiment.” But he strongly disagrees with Remulla that the elections will put an end to the current serious political crisis and violent conflicts in the region.
And Montesa rightly thinks so.
In September 1996, the Philippine government under then President Fidel V. Ramos signed the Final Peace Agreement (FPA) with the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF). As the name of the agreement suggested, it was deemed “final” in the sense that it was envisioned to end the protracted armed conflicts in the region. Some political observers said that if the MNLF participated in the regional political exercise in the region after the signing of the FPA, the “bullets would stop.” One development worker cleverly coined the phrase “from bullets to ballots” to indicate that once regional elections happened and the top MNLF leader became the governor of the ARMM at that time, conflicts would stop. Bullets would no longer be fired.
But just a few months after the signing of the FPA, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which broke away from the MNLF as early as 1977, proved this observation wrong.
The election of no less than MNLF chair Emeritus Nur Misuari as ARMM governor did not put an end to the vertical conflict with Philippine government forces. The breakaway group of the MILF continued the struggle to assert the Bangsamoro right to self-determination through its various offensives against Philippine government troops.
It was largely because the MILF was not a party to the FPA, and the Philippine government thought wrongly that forging a peace agreement with one revolutionary faction and making some of its leaders the head of the former regional autonomous government then would stop the armed conflicts altogether.
The national government decided to go into the long process of peace negotiations because it recognized that as a distinct group of people in the country, the Bangsamoro, or the Moro people, have the right to assert this distinctiveness, guaranteed no less by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international conventions.
Thousands of Moro victims and their survivors have seen through more than four decades of oppression and nonrecognition of their historical rights as a people of distinctive identity. This reached its height during the martial law administration of former President Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr.
(To be continued next week.)
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