by Aya Fabros
Last month, FOP took a first stab at the MOA-AD and the Mindanao question. Since then, the MOA-AD has been scrapped and the negotiations descended into an indefinite impasse spiked with armed hostilities escalating in Muslim Mindanao. In this issue, we put together a virtual forum to keep the discussions going. Reflections from Sol Santos, Rufa Cagoco-Guiao, Nathan Quimpo, Octa Dinampo, Mon Casiple, and Herbert Docena offer handles for all of us who are trying to make sense of this recent MOA episode and the larger dilemmas that remain unresolved.
The MOA itself is seen by most as a crucial step that puts forward important concepts such as “shared sovereignty” and “associative relationships”, demonstrating that a “compromise” is possible and a middle ground that addresses historic injustice and larger nation-building issues can be forged. Several authors stressed the importance of reviving the MOA in future discussions, in order to resuscitate a moribund process, pointing to the dangers of a deadlock that would push parties to engage in war rather than continue discussion on peace and justice. However, given the fierce reaction to the document, hinging future talks on the MOA is also deemed difficult and ‘unrealistic’. This also underscores the critical role of the state in disseminating information and rallying public support, a key parallel process that was absent in this and previous rounds of negotiations. Such processes are vital given the strong, insidious anti-Moro prejudice and chauvinism that’s gleaned from the violent response to the peace talks and the MOA.
These are just some of the key points presented in the articles below; all of which reiterate: The MOA-AD may be dead, but it points to a lot of issues that need to be discussed, lessons to take stock of, debates to pursue as we explore ways forward.
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by Prof. Octa Dinampo*
Eleven years of a long and arduous journey exploring peace. Three presidents were involved, each performing a different role and with a different perspective regarding peace in Muslim Mindanao. President Fidel Ramos opened the ceremonial search for peace barely a month before the signing of the 1996 Final Peace Agreement with the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF). Later, President Joseph Estrada, a former actor who played tough guy roles in his movies and later portrayed a similar rough impatience for a long peace process as president, tried to take a detour by smashing the peace process with an all-out war against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). With the use of US-supplied gadgets and superb intelligence networks, the government took many of the MILF’s major camps and the MILF’s venerated leader Chairman Salamat subsequently died. But the MILF did not lose its lethal force.. On the other hand, Erap – who feasted on pork and liquor on the very graveyard of Moro martyrs – was removed from office and became a true-to-life ex-convict.
President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA) came next. The journey to peace became a road of exploratory talks and pitched battles. In 2003, she even tried to ape Erap by coming up with her own version of an all-out war, followed by a pronouncement about the "primacy of the peace process." In 2006, the much-feared outbreak of an "all-out war" finally happened. Then, there was a serious impasse in 2007 and finally, the controversy brought about by the aborted signing of the Memornadum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD) last August 5.
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Towards a memorandum for self-determination |
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by Herbert Docena
Force has kept the Moro people within the Philippines: Against their will,
the Moros, who were already living in their own states in the south, were
incorporated beginning in the early twentieth century into what became the
Philippine nation-state by American colonizers and their Filipino partners from
the north.[i] Without their
consent, the Moros’ and the indigenous peoples’ (IP) lands were declared
Philippine property. Tens of thousands of hectares were sold or leased to
foreign and Filipino-owned corporations. Dominated by Filipino landlords
seeking to douse mounting demands for land redistribution in the north, the
Philippine government set off massive resettlement programs that encouraged and
pushed millions of landless, impoverished peasants to the region where the
Moros and the IPs lived. Laws discriminated against the Moros and the IPs: In
the 1920s, for example, corporations were allowed to own up to 1,024 hectares
of land each, Christian settlers could claim up to 16 hectares each, but
non-Christians were allotted only four.[ii]
But it was not the settlers who benefited most. By the late 1980s,
more than half of the lands in the region were in the hands of a few plantation
owners, multinational corporations, and logging concessionaires that extracted
the area’s resources but plowed the wealth out of the region.[iii]
At one point, it was estimated that the region provided half of the products
being exported by the Philippines. The Moros, meanwhile, have become among the
poorest in a poor country: Up to 80% of them are now landless and they have
among the shortest life expectancy, the lowest literacy rates, and the least
access to education, health, and other services in the country. If, before,
they made up the majority of the region’s population, now they account for less
than a fifth.[iv]
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On the botched MOA-AD: Lessons never learned |
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by Rufa Cagoco-Guiam*
History is repeating itself in the current uproar generated by the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD). It is the history of never learning lessons from a previous peace process. The MOA-AD was supposed to have been signed by both Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) panels on the first week of August – a significant breakthrough in the more than decade-old peace process between the two parties.
In the protracted peace and conflict processes in Mindanao, the MOA-AD stands as a progressive document that has elevated the Bangsamoro aspirations for self-determination via “associative” governance of their ancestral domain, something that has been glaringly absent in the previous peace process with the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF). For the first time, a Philippine government administration seemed to be opening the door toward the recognition of the reality of a significant other identity in the Filipino nation – the Bangsamoro. For them, it was more than a pyrrhic victory – it was a gesture, albeit a delayed one, of finally coming to terms with a significant other in the ethnically diverse Philippine society.
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