[Keynote Address of Sen. Aquilino Q. Pimentel, Jr. at the Kusog Mindanao sponsored forum on federalization at the New World Renaissance Hotel, Makati City, November 30, 2001]
The recent rebellion staged by Mr. Nur Misuari and his followers against the forces of the government in Sulu and Zamboanga city has apparently caught the government by surprise.
It is now in tenterhooks trying to figure out what to do with Misuari who has slipped out of the country and is now in Malaysia.
Should the government ask that Misuari be deported back to the country or should he be imprisoned in Malaysia or allowed to go elsewhere, perhaps, to the Middle East?
Superficial answer
While the questions are relevant, the answer whatever it is, will only superficially address the problem of Muslim unrest in Southern and Central Mindanao.
Misuari is not the cause of the incessant and recurring Muslim rebellion in the island. Misuari is merely a symptom of the malaise afflicting Mindanao since the Spanish colonial era up to the present.
The search for a just and lasting peace in southern and central Mindanao has proven to be intractable over the last five centuries. The Spanish and American colonizers had, in fact, failed to bring peace to the area. Indeed, even our own government has not solved the recurrent Moro armed uprisings in that part of Mindanao.
Oversimplifying problem
The reason is that the various governments – the present included - have tended to oversimplify the so-called Moro problem and they have thus proposed shallow solutions that scratch the surface of but do not address the fundamental issues inherent in the problem.
For instance, the government has responded to the Misuari challenge by using its superior force to quell the rebellion. There is nothing inherently wrong with that response. As Lincoln once said, the State must not hesitate to use arms to keep itself safe from the assault of those who resort to violence. But the use of government force to suppress the just aspirations of the Moro people is good only up to a point.
Guns, not the answer
For the gun has never succeeded in establishing peace in central and southern Mindanao. The historical experience of our country bears out this conclusion.
For almost four hundred years, the Spanish colonial government (1521-1898) attempted to impose its will by force upon the Moros in Mindanao. They failed. For almost fifty years, the American commonwealth government (1898-1946), tried to do the same by force and guile. They did not quite succeed. And for the last 55 years or so, our own independent government (1946 to the present) has been struggling to address the so-called Moro problem in central and southern Mindanao. Neither have we had much success.
In my own limited experience, alone, I recall five incidents involving the government’s resort to force to counter and suppress Moro armed uprisings in central and southern Mindanao. In all five incidents, the just and lasting peace desired by the government had failed to materialize.
1. Dimakaling of Lanao
Let me now elaborate on the five incidents. As boy in short pants, I remember a ballad about Dimakaling who had led a rebellion against the American regime to demand a different treatment for the Moros from that accorded to the rest of the people.
The American government called Dimakaling a bandit, ran after him, killed a lot of people and crushed his rebellion. Dimakaling was from Lanao in mainland Mindanao.
2. Kamlon of Sulu
Then, when I was in high school, I remember the uprising of Datu Kamlon against our government. Kamlon rallied his people to fight the government and assert the differentness, if there is such a word, of the Muslim people. The government had to send battalions of soldiers to capture Kamlon. After the loss of so many lives and the destruction of so many properties, the government captured Kamlon, imprisoned him and ended his rebellion. Kamlon was from Sulu.
One would think that the sheer superiority of government guns that had crushed Dimakaling’s and Kamlon’s rebellions would have taught the Moros in Mindanao the futility and uselessness of rebelling against the government.
3. Udtog Matalam of Cotabato
Not so. For in my early years as a lawyer, I saw the eruption of another Moro rebellion in Mindanao. This time the armed uprising was led by Datu Udtog Matalam. Matalam’s Mindanao Independence Movement said what his uprising was all about. It was anchored mainly on his grievance that the Moros of Mindanao and consequently Mindanao, itself, were discriminated against by “imperial Manila.”
Again, the government unleashed its military might against Matalam. It was the first time I saw on TV a live newscast showing government howitzers shelling the rebels. And again, after causing the loss of several lives and destroying several properties, the government finally neutralized the Matalam rebellion. Matalam was from Cotabato.
4. Misuari of Sulu
Then, at the onset of the Marcos martial law years, another Moro armed uprising challenged the government. This time it was led by Nur Misuari of the Moro National Liberation Front.
The MNLF insurrection proved to be the longest lasting Moro led armed uprising (1973-1996), we have thus far witnessed as a people.
The government tried to use force to suppress the MNLF uprising. It did not work.
It was only after the MNLF war had killed more than 100,000 people and uprooted more than 200,000 people in the areas of conflict that the government realized that we should talk things over, not shoot it out, with the MNLF to bring peace to central and southern Mindanao.
The government, then, resorted to diplomacy and guile to bring the MNLF to the negotiating table. Misuari told me some months ago that he is probably the only rebel leader in the world who had signed three peace agreements with the very government he had been fighting against. But up to this very day, he feels betrayed by the government in that he says there are some provisions of the last peace agreement he had signed in Jakarta in 1996 that had been, to use his words, “smuggled” into the treaty without his consent.
As Misuari sat out his frustrations, another Muslim group rose up in arms against the government.
5. Salamat of Maguindanao
Now it was the turn of Salamat Hashim of Maguindanao, chairman of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) to challenge the government.
Shooting erupted when government troopers upon orders of President Joseph Ejercito Estrada tried to evict MILF rebels manning checkpoints on a road from Cotabato to Lanao and to dismantle the so-called military camps in Maguindanao, Cotobato and in the Lanao provinces.
The resistance of the MILF rebels upset the government’s plan for the development of Central Mindanao.
As in previous government campaigns, the various encounters between the government troops and the MILF rebels resulted in the loss of several lives and the destruction of so many properties.
When the Estrada government fell in January 2001, the new government decided to negotiate with the MILF. Talks were held in Malaysia and recently a cease-fire agreement was hammered out by the MILF and the government. The agreement is holding at this writing but for how long, nobody knows.
But just as people were beginning to raise their expectations that peace in Mindanao was at hand, all of a sudden, the guns of Muslim rebels started to bark again.
Misuari again
I am talking, of course, of the Misuari rebellion repeat that is at the moment still hugging the headlines.
This time the uprising was actually a repeat of the Misuari-led rebellion against the government.
Giving vent to his frustrations, Misuari had apparently ordered his rebel soldiers to attack a government camp. In the firefight that ensued, several lives were lost and as already adverted to earlier Misuari had to flee to Malaysia leaving the Jakarta peace agreement in tatters.These incidents show one thing: the resort to force by the government to quell the rebel guns of Moroland has not quite succeeded.
Fundamental grievances
Our experience as a nation dealing with the Muslim rebels teach us that the use of all out force against Moro arms has never brought and will never bring peace to central and southern Mindanao unless a comprehensive plan is put in place that would address not the seasonal, tribal complaints of the Tausugs or the Maranaos or the Magindanaos or any other Moro group but the fundamental grievances of the Bangsa Moro as a people.
This is not to say that the government should merely sit idly by while tribal Moro arms challenge it. The government, of course, has the right and the duty to assert its superiority over those who challenge it by the use of force. But the use of superior government arms should only be tactical, not strategic, in the matter of dealing with Moro armed uprisings. Otherwise, the use of force will result only in establishing the peace of the graveyard, not the just and lasting peace that we all want for Mindanao and the rest of the country.
Divide and rule policy, ineffective
That the use of force has not solved the so-called Moro problem in Mindanao is plainly evident. In all the Moro uprisings that I have witnessed vicariously or actually, I have seen the government fail in bringing about a just and lasting peace in central and southern Mindanao. As pointed out earlier, the government killed Dimakaling of Lanao; subdued Kamlon of Sulu; pacified Matalam of Cotabato, and alternately warred against and talked peace with Misuari of Sulu and with Salamat of Maguindanao. A clearer case against the use of force and of the tactic of divide and rule as a policy could hardly be established. But what is abundantly clear is that the policy of force and of divide-and-rule has never worked to achieve a just and lasting peace in central and southern Mindanao in the past. Neither will it work today as against the MNLF or the MILF. Every day, the pages of the dailies and the air lanes of radio and television report killings that are obviously spawned by the violence unleashed by extremists of both sides of the war now raging in central and southern Mindanao.
What, then, is the solution?
Proposed solutions
I suggest the following steps: (a) in the short run, we should at the opportune time declare a cease-fire; (b) in the middle run, we should negotiate with the MNLF and continue the negotiations with the MILF rebels – but not with the Abu Sayaff bandits - and bring development to Mindanao; and (c) in the long run, we have to offer to the Bangsa Moro a federal state of their own that will remain as a part of the federal republic.
The proposal to adopt the federal system of government is meant primarily to provide the foundation for a just and lasting peace in central and southern Mindanao and secondarily to provide an equal opportunity for the development of the regions of the country to counter the perception, if not the reality, that Metro Manila is favored over other regions in matters of development.
Briefly, the proposal to adopt a federal system of government for the country will establish federal states to cover the various parts of the country.
Federal states
Luzon may have four federal states. One, the federal state of northern Luzon; two, the federal state of central Luzon; three, the federal state of southern Tagalog; and four, the federal state of Bicol. Metro-Manila may be converted into a special federal administrative center, like Washington, D.C., or Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.
The Visayas may have three federal states. One, the federal state of eastern Visayas; two, the federal state of Western Visayas; and three, the federal state of central Visayas.
Mindanao may have three federal states. One, the federal state of northern Mindanao; two, the federal state of northeastern Mindanao; and three, the federal state of the Bangsa Moro.
Sharing of powers
As for the powers of government, the federal states may have powers over matters that are not reserved to the federal republic. The powers of the federal republic may cover, among other things, foreign affairs, national defense, federal taxes, customs and immigration, basic education curriculum, basic justice.
Other powers may be assigned by the Constitution to the federal states, including primacy in matters of development, environment, local taxes and police.
The enumeration is not all-inclusive or exclusive. In other words, the Constitution will be final repository of what powers should be exercised by the federal republic, itself, and those powers that should be exercised by the federal states.
The Constitution may also provide that certain powers be placed under the concurrent jurisdiction of the federal republic and the federal states. Whoever exercises a certain power first precludes the other from exercising it.
Effect on local governments
What will happen to the local governments if the federal system is adopted? It depends on the way the Constitution would deal with the matter. If the Constitution would empower federal states to deal with local government units as they please, then, the present structure and powers of provinces, cities, municipalities and barangay - as we now know them - may be modified, retained or altogether abolished by the federal states.
Revision of the Constitution
It is important to state that the adoption of the federal system of government needs the revision of the Constitution. And that to my mind is the hardest obstacle that we have to overcome. People are wary of attempts to amend or revise the Constitution. Thus, it is safe to assume that even if we are able to get the Senate to agree to push for the adoption of a federal system of government, it will take a lot of time before that can realistically be achieved.
Benefits of federalization
Before we leave the matter of federalism, I would like to state that the adoption of the federal system of government would enable the Bangsa Moro a fuller opportunity to promote their own identify and culture and their own economic development at their own pace without the need of seceding or declaring their independence from the republic.
Hopefully, the federalization of the Republic will lead to a just and lasting peace in the provinces and cities of central and southern Mindanao which will compose the federal state of the Bangsa Moro.
The adoption of the federal system of government would, likewise, address the concerns of the rest of the country that their respective development efforts are being thwarted by the bias shown by Manila-based bureaucrats in favor of what is now popularly called “imperial Manila.” In their own federal states, the state governments, including that of the Bangsa Moro, would have greater leeway to plan, push for, fund and implement projects that will speed up the development of their own regions. Can Muslims and Christians co-exist? My answer is why not?Muslims and Christians do peacefully co-exist in my city, Cagayan de Oro city; in Davao city; in Cotabato city; in Tagbilaran city; in Cebu city; in Manila, in Taguig, in Tuguerao city as well as in hundreds of communities throughout the land.
Living together as neighbors
The fact that in those communities, Muslims and Christians live together as neighbors without killing one another shows that, indeed, no religious divide categorizes our people into irreconcilable, hostile blocs.
It is true that violence has occasionally rocked the serenity of other communities where Muslims and Christians live side by side as in Marawi city, Basilan and Sulu where Muslims predominate. But it is also true that one has yet to hear of the Muslim majority oppressing the Christian minority in Tawi-Tawi. Unless that is the best kept secret in this country.
One father: Abraham
Moreover, I am most optimistic that sooner than later, the Christians and the Muslims of this country will realize that we belong to one country and are descended from one and the same father: Abraham. And that our two religions instead of separating us should bind us to the same Supreme Being and lead us to respect one another. After all, Muslims do proclaim that Islam is a religion of peace and all Christians believe that Christianity is a religion of love. If that is so and I have no reason to doubt that it is so, it is only a question of time before we will be embracing one another as children of the same God and as brothers and sisters of the same race and the same nation.
I pray with all my heart that we will get to that situation before more lives are lost and things get worse. And we can get there sooner than later if we adopt the federal system of government as the ultimate legal solution to the problem of the cyclical uprisings of the Moro rebels of central and southern Mindanao.