Urgent: Save BARMM
With so many crises confronting it, the Marcos administration should be burning the midnight oil these days. Malacañang’s lights need to be on well into the night for crisis talks, because that’s what the country is likely facing—weeks and months of turbulence and challenges ahead.
The war launched by the United States and Israel on Iran, which has jacked up crude prices worldwide and triggered fears of its effects on the economy, and the millions of overseas Filipino workers caught in the crossfire in the Middle East, is the latest predicament the Marcos administration has had to scramble to address.
On top of that, it has yet to deliver any decisive resolution to the festering flood control scandal. No big fish sits in jail at this point, and neither has any speedy, large-scale drive been put in place to pursue accountability for the massive corruption uncovered so far.
That appearance of official waffling is bleeding into political instability, as various factions smelling blood have ramped up agitation and noise to fan the public’s frustration and further weaken the administration’s credibility. In this, the Marcos administration has not helped itself by giving its detractors enough plausible ammunition to sustain the barrage.
Existential battle
The impeachment proceedings against Vice President Sara Duterte will add more headwinds to this churning political landscape. Tensions and social divisions are expected to be even more pronounced once the high-stakes exercise gets underway—all in the shadow of the most consequential event ahead: the 2028 presidential election. Many observers warn that the polls two years away will be a bruising existential battle, as the Duterte forces deploy everything in their might to regain power and wreak vengeance on perceived enemies, not least the Marcos dispensation that had marginalized them.
These are the main headline-hogging issues, but rarely mentioned in the same breath is another grave problem that threatens to spiral into chaos unless the Palace is able to get a good grip on it: the fracturing Bangsamoro autonomy and peace process.
“Dark skies loom” over the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM), as this paper’s Mindanao-based columnist Rufa Cagoco-Guiam has written, over a raft of issues that are dividing the leadership of the governing Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).
Jockeying for power
It was the MILF that forged the landmark Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (CAB) on March 27, 2014, with the national government under then President Benigno Aquino III—an agreement that ushered in peace in Muslim areas in Mindanao long wracked by secessionist violence and war.
But now, “cracks are appearing at the peace implementation table, where government representatives sit across from their MILF counterparts. Cooperation is dissolving into confrontation, as the gains of the past decade disintegrate before the eyes of the agreement’s authors and ardent promoters,” warned two peace monitoring watchdogs.
First off, the BARMM has been kept on an unsteady footing by the multiple postponements of elections meant to allow it to elect representatives and leaders to its parliament. The elections were finally supposed to be held in March this year, but the Commission on Elections suspended the exercise for the fourth time following a Supreme Court ruling that Sulu is not part of BARMM.
In the meantime, the long period of uncertainty appears to have only deepened the jockeying for power among the BARMM leadership—and Malacañang’s clumsy hand may have aggravated the “internal fractures” and “rapidly eroding” trust the peace nongovernmental organizations have cited.
A tinderbox
In a move that unsettled the region, the President appointed Abdulraof Macacua as Bangsamoro interim chief minister, replacing MILF chair Ahod Ebrahim. The MILF central committee slammed Macacua’s appointment as violative of the provisions of the peace agreement and the Bangsamoro Organic Law that created the BARMM.
Mr. Marcos, wrote Cagoco-Guiam, “should take responsibility [for] having driven a wedge among the top MILF leadership through his decisions in rearranging the interim leadership and of the membership of the interim Parliament.”
Macacua also heads the MILF’s 40,000-strong armed wing. The MILF had earlier halted the final phase of the decommissioning process mandated by the CAB that would have “put beyond use” the weapons of about 14,000 former combatants, presenting a critical stumbling block to the full implementation of the peace process.
Macacua has added to this turmoil with his heavy-handed move to threaten to fire BARMM officials who had questioned his appointment.
Over 10 years into the Mindanao peace process, the gains remain fragile—and now BARMM is deteriorating into a tinderbox as toxic politics, incompetence, and mixed signals mar the process. The Marcos administration must step in with dispatch and good faith firmness before Mindanao once again erupts into a crisis of national proportions.
