We hope you and your family remain safe after Super Typhoon Pepito, as it weakened over the West Philippine Sea early hours of Monday, November 18. The provinces of Catanduanes and Aurora have been badly hit. Affected communities need your help. Here’s how to send it.
But first, a perennial question: Why is the Philippines experiencing back-to-back strong typhoons? Watch physicist Dr. Gerry Bagtasa, the “storm seer,” explain this to us in this Be the Good episode airing Monday, November 18, at 7pm.
Buried in disasters and the latest Duterte tragi-comedy in Congress (if you missed that, it’s here) are the strong undercurrents in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM), which is scheduled to hold its first parliamentary election in May 2025. This coincides with the senatorial and local polls next year.
By all indications, and despite the President’s previous vigorous declarations to the contrary, Malacañang now wants the BARMM elections postponed. Why? And why does this matter?
BARMM is the result of the historic peace agreement signed in 2012 by the administration of the late president Benigno Aquino II and the erstwhile rebel movement, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The regional body that it replaced, through a successful plebiscite in 2019, was previously led by a rival organization, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), which was dominant in the island provinces of Western Mindanao — Sulu, Tawi-Tawi, Zamboanga, Basilan. (See all the news, analyses, features, and videos about how BARMM came about in this page.)
Led by Nur Misuari, the MNLF bungled all the big opportunities and massive funding they got in the past to make the autonomous region work. Mismanagement, corruption, absenteeism — you name it, the MNLF was guilty of it. And don’t forget the bloody 2013 Zamboanga siege that was triggered by Misuari’s agitation.
So it was with high hopes that the Ebhrahim Murad-led MILF, which controls the landlocked Muslim provinces in Central Mindanao, took the helm of the new autonomous region. They were given a five-year transition period — from 2019 to 2024 — to set up the country’s first parliamentary regional government; keep the peace and demobilize; ensure better access to health, education, markets; and govern well.
Did Murad and his team achieve this? The scheduled May election would allow BARMM voters to answer that. And their answer would be no, gauging from my talks in the last two years with local officials and peace advocates in the region.
Top-of-the-line SUVs, flashy high-powered firearms, designer clothes and shoes, business class travels, mansions, hidden properties of the MILF’s top echelons and their favored people — these have been whispered about in the last three years that hearing them aches, because they are an old refrain from the discredited regional body that they had been mandated to reform.
Worse, the MILF-led region has failed to curb violence there, according to the independent monitor Conflict Alert. Data “indicates news sources of instability and a conflict rebound,” an “upturn” in the number of attacks and deaths since 2021.
The MILF, too, has not done any meaningful decommissioning of its troops, with rogue commanders causing mayhem in certain areas, the same report said. Read the story here.
All this is the elephant in the room amid the legal challenges and political jostling that would now lead to a likely postponement of the BARMM election.
- Senate President Francis Escudero has filed a bill deferring the election to 2026. He said this has the support of Malacañang.
- But the Supreme Court said the election cannot be postponed. Ironically, Escudero cited the SC’s recent ruling as the basis for his bill. The Court threw a monkey wrench into the scheduled polls after it ruled that Sulu, which voted out of BARMM but was still included in it because of the law’s provisions, should now be excluded from the region.
- Warlords and political leaders warned that the verdict would cause tremors in the region. Sulu’s kingpin, Abdusakur Tan, had already been named by clans opposed to the MILF to run for BARMM and unseat the MILF. A new breed of leaders has also been wanting to make their voices heard in the planned election.
- What happens now? The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism lays out some scenarios for BARMM in the coming months.
Here’s to a sunny week ahead! – Rappler.com
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