Pimentel: use of force won't serve Moro rebellions

"The (use of the) gun has never succeeded in establishing peace in central and southern Mindanao. The historical experience of our country bears out this conclusion," Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel told a gathering of Mindanawons at the New World Renaissance Hotel in Makati City last Friday.

Pimentel said that the Arroyo administration's response to the challenge posed by Nur Misuari was to use its superior force to quell the rebellion. "There is nothing inherently wrong with that response," he said, "but the use of government force to suppress the just aspirations of the Moro people is good only up to a point."
Misuari, he said, "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 Spaniards and Americans failed, and various Philippine administrations, including the present, failed, he said, because they "tended to oversimplify the so-called Moro problem and ..have thus proposed shallow solutions that scratch the surface of but do not address the fundamental issues inherent to the problem."
Pimentel recalled before participants to Kusog Mindanaw's Roundtable
Conference on "Mindanao Lobby in-the-works" five incidents involving the government's resort to force to counter and suppress armed Moro uprisings.
He said 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."

"In all five incidents, the just and lasting peace desired by the government had failed to materialize," he said.

Pimentel said the nation's experiences in dealing with Moro 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 Maranaos or the Magindanaos or any other group but the fundamental grievances of the Bangsamoro as a people," he said.

"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," he said.
Pimentel said the use of force and "divide-and-rule" had "never worked to achieve a just and lasting peace.. in the past" and "neither will it work today as against the MNLF (Moro National Liberation Front) or MILF (Moro Islamic Liberation Front)."
Pimentel then suggested a three-step solution:

- in the short run, at the opportune time, declare a ceasefire;
- in the middle run, negotiate with the MNLF and continue the negotiations with the MILF but not with the Abu Sayyaf and bring development to Mindanao; and
- offer to the Bangsamoro a federal state of their own that will remain as part of the federal republic.

A staunch advocate of federalism, Pimentel said the shift to this system of government "is meant to primarily 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."

The shift to another system of government, however, can be done only by amending the Constitution.

Advocates of federalism have, in fact, come up with a paper titled, "towards a federal Republic of the Philippines with a Parliamentary Government by 2010." The paper even contains a proposed Constitution of the federal republic.
Pimentel said that under the proposal, Luzon may have four federal states, Visayas three and Mindanao, three, including the "federal state of the Bangsamoro."

— Carolyn O. Arguillas / MindaNews