WHILE national attention remains fixed on the Senate sessions surrounding the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte, another kind of political tension is quietly unfolding in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM), one that may have profound implications for the future of the peace process itself.
On May 18, thousands of Moro residents, supporters of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), members of the United Bangsamoro Justice Party (UBJP), educators, students and sympathizers gathered in Cotabato City in what observers described as one of the largest political rallies in the region in recent years. The gathering reflected growing unease within sections of the Bangsamoro over recent political developments affecting the region.
Mussolini Sinsuat Lidasan, director of the Al Qalam Institute at Ateneo de Davao University and former commissioner of the Bangsamoro Transition Commission, as well as a former member of the Bangsamoro Parliament, described the rally as emotionally charged and unprecedented in scale, recalling how some MILF leaders openly wept during the mobilization. For many participants, the gathering reflected not merely partisan anger, but deeper anxieties over the direction and integrity of the Bangsamoro transition process.
At the center of the controversy is the removal of Mohagher Iqbal as head of the Ministry of Basic, Higher and Technical Education (MBHTE) by Interim Chief Minister Abdulraof Macacua amid an ongoing Commission on Audit review involving questioned education fund disbursements.
Supporters of Iqbal insist that the audit process has not yet been completed and that no final liability has been established. Outside Mindanao, this may appear to be another controversy involving public funds. Within the Bangsamoro, however, the issue runs much deeper.
Iqbal is not simply a Cabinet official. Alongside Al Haj Murad Ebrahim, he belongs to the core generation of Moro leaders who negotiated the long and difficult peace process with the Philippine government. Under then-president Benigno Aquino III, negotiations produced the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro in 2014 after decades of armed conflict that displaced communities and claimed thousands of lives.
The peace process survived enormous political obstacles. The January 2015 Mamasapano clash nearly derailed negotiations and weakened support for the proposed Bangsamoro Basic Law. Yet Aquino continued backing the framework, believing that the Mindanao conflict could not be resolved purely through military means.
It was under Rodrigo Duterte, the country’s first president from Mindanao, that the Bangsamoro Organic Law was enacted in 2019, formally creating the BARMM and replacing the old Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. Duterte subsequently appointed Murad Ebrahim as interim chief minister, placing the former revolutionary leadership of the MILF at the center of the transition government.
For many Moro communities, Murad and Iqbal embody the long struggle for Moro self-determination, autonomy and peace. This explains why recent developments are deeply unsettling across the region.
The controversy is no longer viewed merely as an audit issue or bureaucratic reshuffling. Increasingly, it is interpreted as part of a larger struggle over leadership, legitimacy and the future direction of the Bangsamoro transition. Some Bangsamoro intellectuals and former transition officials now warn that internal divisions within the MILF, combined with perceived political intervention from Manila, risk weakening the fragile trust sustaining the peace process.
Influence shifting
The anxieties intensified when President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. replaced Murad last year with Macacua as interim chief minister. Macacua himself is a veteran MILF commander and former chief of staff of the Bangsamoro Islamic Armed Forces. However, some observers fear that political influence within the BARMM is gradually shifting away from the original peace-negotiating leadership associated with Murad, Iqbal, and sections of the MILF Central Committee.
Whether these perceptions are entirely accurate or not, they matter politically because the Bangsamoro transition depends heavily on legitimacy and institutional confidence.
The deeper dilemma confronting the BARMM today is one faced by many post-conflict societies: Can revolutionary movements built through armed struggle successfully evolve into stable democratic institutions?
That transition is rarely smooth.
Revolutionary movements derive legitimacy from sacrifice and collective memory. Governance, however, requires bureaucratic discipline, transparency, fiscal accountability, and the management of competing political interests. As the BARMM prepares for its first parliamentary elections later this year, these tensions are becoming increasingly visible.
The election is historically significant. For the first time, the Bangsamoro leadership will derive authority not primarily from revolutionary legitimacy or presidential appointment, but from a direct regional electoral mandate. Ideally, this should represent a democratic consolidation of the peace process itself.
Ironically, the success of these elections could become one of the most important contributions of the Marcos administration to the Bangsamoro peace process. If conducted peacefully and credibly, with minimal political interference, the elections could strengthen BARMM institutions and demonstrate that democratic transition in a former conflict region is possible.
Yet many Moro intellectuals, civil society leaders, and ordinary residents worry that excessive intervention from Manila could weaken precisely the institutional confidence needed during this fragile phase.
The danger is not necessarily a return to large-scale armed conflict. The greater risk may instead be political fragmentation, erosion of trust, weakened institutions, and growing cynicism toward the Bangsamoro project itself. More worrying is the possibility that frustrations among younger generations confronting poverty, unemployment, and weak services could revive radical narratives claiming that peaceful democratic engagement offers little real change.
Peace agreements are easier to sign than to institutionalize.
The Bangsamoro project was never only about ending armed conflict. It was also about proving that a region long marked by war, displacement, poverty, and marginalization could govern differently — more peacefully, more justly, and more democratically.
The uneasy transition now unfolding in Bangsamoro may, therefore, become one of the country’s most important political tests today, even if much of the nation remains distracted by the latest political spectacle in Manila.
