ILIGAN CITY -- The government is looking forward to a convergence in the implementation of the peace agreements it separately forged with two Moro rebel groups following a meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia facilitated by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
On Tuesday, representatives of government, the OIC, and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) concluded an eight-year Tripartite Review Process (TRP) on the implementation of the 1996 Final Peace Agreement (FPA), setting the stage for carrying out the remaining measures that are still to be done.
“This is an important milestone we have reached as it sets the convergence of the two Bangsamoro peace processes,” Secretary Teresita Quintos-Deles, presidential adviser on the peace process, was quoted as saying in a news release from the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process (Opapp).
Deles headed the government delegation to the two-day meeting.
Started in 2006 under the auspices of the OIC, the review process sought to assess progress of and thresh out issues hounding the full implementation of the pact which the pan-Islamic body, through its
member Indonesia, brokered.
Four tripartite meetings and two “ad-hoc high level group meetings” have been conducted since the review process began.
The recent Jeddah meeting is the fifth ministerial-level meeting which was supposedly scheduled September 2013 but was called off by the OIC due to the Zamboanga siege which involved armed men belonging to a faction of the MNLF loyal to its founding chair, Nur Misuari.
The FPA had two phases: the three-year transition to prepare the MNLF to take over the reins of governance, and the overhaul of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) by amending its Organic Act to encompass the consensus of the parties on how to strengthen Moro self-rule.
Among the key output of the review process is the so-called 42 consensus points, which OPAPP said “were intended to be amendatory provisions for Republic Act 9054,” the amended charter of the Armm that took effect in early 2001.
Government has been looking at the creation of the Bangsamoro autonomous entity to replace the Armm as a key point of convergence of the 1996 FPA and the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (CAB) which it forged with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) on March 2014 through the facilitation of Malaysia, another OIC member.
Deles has expressed confidence that the framework of the proposed Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL), which is currently pending in Congress, is broad enough to accommodate the issues laid out in the FPA review process.
The BBL was drafted by the 15-member Bangsamoro Transition Commission (BTC) based on the CAB. It sought to embody more devolved powers from the central government hence, providing the Moro people with greater leeway to manage their own affairs.
The 42 consensus points reached in the FPA review were also fed into the process of writing what would become the charter of the Bangsamoro when enacted and ratified by the affected population.
The joint communiqué of the parties to the review identified four key initiatives in relation to further strengthen FPA implementation.
These include the establishment of the Bangsamoro Development Assistance Fund (BDAF) to be used for socio-economic development projects in MNLF communities; participation of the MNLF in the transitional body that will govern the Bangsamoro until a regular parliament is elected, and the continuation of the process of devolving powers into the Armm to achieve co-management of strategic minerals found within its jurisdiction.
The parties also agreed to create a Tripartite Implementation Monitoring Committee (TIMC) to oversee implementation of all points of consensus arrived at by the review process.
The communiqué was signed by Opapp Undersecretary Jose Yusuf Iribani Lorena for the Philippine Government, lawyer Randolph Parcasio and Muslimin Sema for the MNLF, and OIC Secretary General Iyad bin Amin Madani.
Signing as witnesses were Deles and Samsula Adju of the MNLF.