COTABATO CITY: Leaders of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and officials of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) are now cooperating on how to address nagging concerns related to the former rebel group’s domains in Mindanao, officials said yesterday.
The joint ARMM-MNLF peace and development efforts are supported by the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process (OPAPP), according to Marlon Dedumo, supervising chief of the Office’s press bureau for Mindanao.
Senior officials of MNLF, which signed a final peace pact with the government on September 2, 1996, held an initial brainstorming session on Thursday with ARMM Governor Mujiv Hataman in Cotabato City, where they discussed strategies on how to improve living conditions in former rebel enclaves, now protected by the 17-year accord.
ARMM’s executive secretary, Laisa Alamia, said the meeting was an offshoot of last week’s Senior MNLF Leaders’ Forum in Zamboanga City, which was jointly organised by OPAPP and Hataman’s office.
The forum led to the signing by participating MNLF officials of a manifesto reaffirming their continuing recognition of their 1996 peace accord with government.
The signatories also stated in the document their desire for a peaceful exhaustion of all possible solutions to misunderstandings on the implementation of the peace agreement, through its ongoing tripartite review involving officials from Malacañang, ARMM, and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.
The three-way evaluation process started in 2007 and has, so far, resulted in the acknowledgement of “42 consensus points” on how to improve the truce, based on five parameters — education, regional security, political representation of the Moro communities, natural resources, and the Shariah system of justice.
Senior MNLF officials who attended last week’s forum in Zamboanga City, among them Abu Amri Taddik, former Sulu governor Yusoph Jikiri, and Abebakrin Lucman, an erstwhile ARMM regional information director, also stated in their manifesto their continuing support to the tripartite review of the peace agreement.
Hataman, who was elected ARMM governor last May 13, after serving as caretaker of the autonomous region from December 22, 2011 until his election as the area’s duly-mandated chief executive, said he would task local government units to help in implementation of socio-economic projects for former MNLF combatants.
“The doors to the seat of the ARMM’s executive department in Cotabato City are wide open to all members of the MNLF,” Hataman said via text message yesterday.
Alamia said the ARMM government was keen on pushing socio-economic growth forward in MNLF enclaves in the autonomous region through OPAPP’s Payapa at Masaganang Pamayanan (PAMANA) programme, which has social welfare, health and livelihood components.
Alamia said they wanted to fuse together the efforts of all agencies and support offices involved in projects meant to address underdevelopment in many MNLF communities.
The ARMM government has been helping OPAPP implement the PAMANA’s Camp to Communities, or “C2C”, project, whose funding for 2014 has been integrated into the autonomous region’s budget for the same fiscal year. The C2C project will help transform these once conflict-stricken areas into peaceful and productive communities, Alamia said.
The adverse impacts of 30 years of bloody conflict between the MNLF and the government, which started in the early 1970s, are blamed for much of the socio-economic problems causing poverty in many parts of ARMM.
“These are what the regional government and Malacañang are now trying to address through bilateral interventions,” Alamia said. The national government, Alamia said, had earmarked P1.4bn to P2.6bn, for PAMANA projects for fiscal years 2013 and 2014.
The Philippine star
