Enrile cautions vs premature celebration of peace deal

Senate Minority Leader Juan Ponce Enrile. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

Senate Minority Leader Juan Ponce Enrile on Monday cautioned the public against prematurely celebrating the deal deactivating the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), saying this should be seriously studied because it could raise constitutional issues.

But the normalization deal drew support from some senators, who agreed this was a “good start” and urged critics to allow it to work.

“We have to study that very carefully. It involves a very major security and political issue and constitutional problem for the country so we cannot just make a judgment on that until you have seen and read the whole text of the agreement,” Enrile told reporters.

Under a peace deal signed by government and MILF negotiators in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Saturday, the MILF agreed to end violence in exchange for broader autonomy.

The existing five-province Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) will be replaced by a more powerful, better-funded and potentially larger region to be called Bangsamoro.

The normalization deal and three other annexes to the Framework Agreement on the Bangsamoro signed last year make up the comprehensive peace agreement that will end four decades of Moro insurgency in Mindanao.

The MILF deactivation deal includes the grant of amnesty to MILF rebels with pending warrants of arrest or already in jail, but not to rebels who had committed other crimes like rape.

Chief government negotiator Miriam Coronel-Ferrer told reporters in Malacañang on Monday that she expected the final peace agreement to be concluded no later than March.

Territory question

Enrile said the final agreement could raise constitutional questions because it involved the country’s territory and its subdivision, and because of the 1996 agreement with the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF).

“There’s so many ifs,” he said.

Enrile said Filipinos should not be swayed by the plaudits that the agreement had received from countries and international organizations.

“We’ll have to study the problem very carefully because this [will have a] lasting impact on the future of this republic,” he said.

“Well, everybody hopes for a peaceful settlement of the problem but at what price? What’s the price for that peace settlement? Is it commensurate to the peace that we want or is it going to be just like what PM [Neville] Chamberlain of England concluded with Hitler,” he added, referring to the Munich Agreement between Germany, Britain, France and Italy that allowed Germany to annex the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia.

Senate President Franklin Drilon on Sunday said he looked forward to tackling the proposed Bangsamoro organic act that would establish a Bangsamoro autonomous region in Mindanao, vowing that this would be given “utmost priority.”

Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV, chair of the defense committee, described the deactivation deal as “a good start” in the otherwise long process of achieving peace.

“As for the [other] armed groups, we will have to deal with them militarily. The Armed Forces is on top of that. That should be contained so that no group will take the place of the MILF,” Trillanes told reporters.

Senators Gregorio Honasan II and Vicente Sotto III urged critics to give the normalization deal and, eventually, the comprehensive peace agreement a chance to work.

Honasan said he hoped the normalization deal would lead to a comprehensive peace agreement and a national peace policy, but acknowledged that this was a “work in progress.”

“Let’s not make a preemptive judgment on a very dynamic process, unwarranted prejudgment. Nobody said it would be easy from the start,” he said by phone. “We should have a positive outlook because so much is at stake.”

Sotto agreed the normalization deal was a “big step” toward the government’s goal, but said a “lot of work” lay ahead in achieving “lasting peace.”

To the critics, he said: “Give suggestions on how to make the undertaking a success.”

The challenge now facing the government was to make the residents of southern Philippines understand the salient provision of the agreement, Honasan said.

A faction of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) said the MILF deal amounted to abrogation of the 1996 peace agreement.

This meant that the group was back to the “clamor for independence through peaceful political means, the faction said.

Habib Hashim Mudjahab, head of the MNLF’s Islamic Command Council, claimed that more MILF commanders were leaving to join the MNLF or the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF), which broke away from the MILF in 2008 and vowed to continue fighting for an independent Moro homeland in Mindanao despite the peace deal.

Bipartisan support

Honasan, a member of the minority bloc like Enrile and Sotto, said the proposed Bangsamoro act should get bipartisan support in the Senate.

“This issue of peace is not generic to the minority or the majority. What is important is the interest and the lives of the people,” he said.

“I suppose it doesn’t violate the Constitution and serves public interest. Whoever is the President in the future, even the minority at that point will be morally bound to support it.”

Members of the House of Representatives on Monday vowed to give top priority to the Bangsamoro basic law, which they said might need an amendment to the Constitution.

Majority Leader Neptali Gonzales II said that in handling the Bangsamoro basic law, the House would have to make sure it reflected the intent of the peace agreement.

Charter change

The House will also have to determine if the bill is sufficient or if a constitutional amendment is necessary, Gonzales added.

“Whatever it is, whatever is needed [to implement the deal], we should give it. We have to make that further step. If and when it would require a constitutional amendment, so be it,” he told reporters.

Asked what aspects of establishing the Bangsamoro autonomous region might require amendments to the Constitution, Gonzales said this would depend on the House scrutiny, but there were parties saying that the power-sharing and territory aspects might necessitate changes to the Charter.

Muntinlupa Rep. Rodolfo Biazon said the House would need to keep a close watch on the basic law and the deal to prevent any future troubles, especially incidents like the MNLF attack on Zamboanga City last September.

“We must learn from the decommissioning of forces with the MNLF. Twenty or so years after the peace process, what happened in Zamboanga? What happened in Zamboanga could only happen because I think this was not addressed by the previous agreement,” Biazon told reporters.

Former European Ambassador to the Philippines Alistair MacDonald said more work awaited the government and the MILF now that they had agreed to peace.

“There is still much hard work ahead, and there will certainly be many challenges to be faced in implementing the framework agreement and its annexes,” said MacDonald, now head of the independent Third Party Monitoring Team for the Mindanao peace process.

“My colleagues and I congratulate the government and MILF panel chairs on the successful conclusion of the annex on normalization, and welcome the path which this sets toward sustainable peace in Mindanao,” he said.

Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Socrates Villegas, president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, welcomed the agreement between the government and the MILF, calling it a positive development in the efforts to end four decades of conflict in Mindanao.

“Any step toward peace is a positive step. … And any step toward peace is blessed by God and is blessed by the Church,” Villegas said.

He said, however, that he was worried about the eruption of fresh violence in Maguindanao on Monday.

Cotabato Archbishop Orlando Quevedo rushed to Maguindanao on Monday to see how the Church could help the people displaced by the fighting between government troops and rebels from the BIFF, who opposed the government’s peace deal with the MILF.—With reports from Gil Cabacungan, Leila B. Salaverria and Niña P. Calleja; with Ryan D. Rosauro, Inquirer Mindanao; and AP

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