This was the region’s first parliamentary election, seen as a crucial step toward self-determination and lasting peace after decades of Islamic terrorists and violence.
The elections will determine 80 parliamentary seats in the region’s legislative body. Unlike direct voting under the national government's presidential system, voters do not elect the region’s chief minister, who heads the executive branch. Members of parliament will choose the chief minister by a majority vote during their first parliamentary session. Voters will choose one regional party, one district representative, and six sectoral representatives. The 40 regional party-representative seats will be distributed to nominees based on a party’s vote share.
Centuries of colonialism by Spain, the U.S., and Filipino Christian settlers turned Muslims into a minority group in resource-rich Mindanao, the southern third of the Philippine archipelago from which the BARMM was carved out. The region has seen decades of intermittent but bloody conflicts over land, resources, and political power.
Since the 1970s, about 150,000 combatants and civilians have died in the southern Philippines, while development was stunted in the country’s poorest region. Western and Asian governments feared the tenacious insurgencies could help foster Islamic extremism in Southeast Asia. Private armies and long-running clan wars have added to the violence.
Under a 2014 peace deal brokered by Malaysia, the largest Muslim rebel group — the Moro Islamic Liberation Front — gave up its goal of a separate Muslim state in the south of the largely Catholic country in exchange for broader autonomy. The group’s 40,000 fighters would be “demobilized” and given livelihoods and other support to help them return to normal life.
The peace deal established the Bangsamoro region, replacing a poverty-wracked five-province autonomous region with a larger, better-funded, and more powerful area, governed by former guerrilla leaders during a transition period that ends with the first regular elections on Sept. 14.
The Moro Islamic Liberation Front last year suspended the disarming of its remaining 14,000 fighters after claiming that the government has not fully complied with socio-economic commitments it made under the 2014 peace deal. Then-presidential assistant David Diciano, who had been helping oversee the transformation of the Bangsamoro region, said in a statement at the time that the Muslim rebel front’s central committee had decided “to postpone the decommissioning of 14,000 of its combatants and 2,450 of their weapons.”
The Institute for Autonomy and Governance, a nonprofit policy and research center based in the region, has noted that the incomplete decommissioning of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front’s combatants, as well as the organization’s split into two rival political parties vying in the elections, pose a potential danger of violence that may affect voters’ confidence to go out and vote. At least 20,000 military and police were present to ensure the safety of voters, candidates, and bystanders.
Many years ago, the new peace deal with Moslem separatists (MILF) was threatened by continued violence from the splinter group BIFF. Last month MILF reached a deal with a splinter group (BIFF, for Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters). BIFF was supposed to rejoin MILF and stop causing problems with their attacks on Christians in the south. BIFF includes former MILF members, something MILF leaders have downplayed for the past two years. Earlier this year MILF openly agreed with government demands to do something about these "outlaws". BIFF contains about a thousand armed men, and MILF sought to negotiate a peace deal with the dissidents while publicly insisting that it would crush this two-year-old group. BIFF had become increasingly violent and outspoken about how MILF is selling out Moslems. Now MILF will have to use force to coerce the BIFF outlaws to get with the new peace deal. Otherwise, the treaty will turn into a civil war within the new Moslem homeland down south. BIFF is suspected of recently setting off several bombs in the south.
It’s not surprising that factions within the MILF oppose the peace deal. It’s happened before. Many MILF members still want a separate Moslem state. It's feared that these factions will again splinter off and keep the separatist violence going. That's what happened in the 1990s, when the separatist group MNLF made a peace deal with the government. Their rival, the MILF, kept fighting. This time, the elected Bangsamoro government in the south will handle law and order and will have to deal with the “new MILF” (currently BIFF).
Peace talks with the NPA are stalled over rebel demands that twelve of their jailed members be released first. The NPA continues to cause mayhem through criminal activities (to raise money for operating expenses) and the use of force to keep development projects out of rural areas.
October 21, 2012: In the central Philippines (Samar), troops clashed with the NPA, leaving four soldiers dead and as many as ten soldiers and rebels wounded. In the south (Mindanao) two clashes with the NPA left four soldiers and two rebels dead.
In the south (Maguindanao), Islamic militants from MILF and BIFF clashed, leaving three dead. The fighting was not political but the result of a long-standing clan feud. Elsewhere in the south (Mindanao), a bomb went off near a bank in Tacurong City. BIFF was suspected. In the south (Basilan), Abu Sayyaf leader Abdula Alad was found and arrested. Alad has been involved with the Islamic terror group for over 12 years and had a $75,000 price on his head.
The long-sought peace deal with Islamic separatists (MILF) was eventually signed. Although there are still Muslims hostile to the deal, MILF has agreed to demobilize their 10,000 armed men and allow elections to determine which parts of the south will be part of Bangsamoro (the new autonomous Muslim area). Muslims are a small minority (8 percent) of the Filipino population, and only about a third of the 22 million people in the south (Mindanao and the smaller southern islands) are Muslim. The rest are Christians, many of whom do not want to share the island with an independent Muslim state but might be persuaded to accept an autonomous Muslim area. Most of the Muslim population in the south is intermixed with Christians, and the radical Muslims wanted these Christians expelled. But the radical Moslems were not strong enough to force the majority Christians out. Many Muslim-majority areas have become largely Christian in the last few decades. The Christian majority has been encroaching on the sparsely populated areas of the Moslem south for over a century. This movement has accelerated as the economy has improved over the last decade. Many Moslems see their culture threatened, but armed resistance has not done much to help. Moslems are outnumbered and have lost battles for decades. Radical Islam has not been able to halt this process, and fewer young Moslems are willing to die for that cause. But many young Muslims are willing to become bandits and outlaws, and that is what many of the rebels down south are becoming. The new autonomous government will have major problems with outlaws, Islamic radicals, dissident separatists (like BIFF), corruption, and clan feuds. Many of the armed MILF members want to keep their weapons (there are estimated to be over three million firearms in the Philippines, which has a population of 117 million). Bangsamoro was off to a tumultuous start, which may end badly.
James F Dunnigan