THE ambush of the convoy of BARMM Chief Minister Abdulraof Macacua in Maguindanao del Norte last Saturday casts an ominous shadow over the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao parliamentary elections scheduled for Sept. 15.
Macacua had just come from the general assembly of the Bangsamoro Federalist Party in Kabuntalan town and was on his way back to Cotabato City.
As the three-vehicle convoy was passing through Datu Odin Sinsuat town, it came under a hail of gunfire.
No one was hurt in the attack, but it highlighted the surge of violence as the elections, a historic episode in the Muslim Mindanao people’s quest for peace, economic prosperity and self-governance, approach.
The Macacua ambush is the latest in a string of violent incidents this year that are believed to have been triggered by fierce political and clan rivalries that have long convulsed the region.
Last May, a bomb exploded just outside the residence of a vice gubernatorial candidate in Bulan, Maguindanao del Sur.
The independent monitoring group Climate Conflict Action also reported that 235 people were killed in BARMM between January and July this year.
Curiously, the Philippine National Police (PNP) and the Commission on Elections (Comelec) insist they have validated no election-related incidents, or ERIs, in BARMM so far. PNP chief Jose Melencio Nartatez Jr. explained that the incidents — including the Macacua ambush — do not fall under the PNP’s “election-related” classification, unless they can be officially attributed to partisan political activity.
About the only noteworthy developments, as far as the PNP is concerned, are the arrest of 12 people for violating the election gun ban, and the confiscation of 23 illegal firearms and explosives.
We have to be careful, however, not to be lulled into believing that the BARMM elections will not be tainted by violence.
Historically, the region has the biggest concentration of election “hotspots” in the country. Twenty-one towns in Lanao del Sur are classified as a “red zone,” where the risk of violence is highest. That is almost 78 percent of the country’s red-level election hotspots.
Eleven towns in Maguindanao del Sur are “orange zone” areas because security threats from rogue rebel factions and private armies persist.
To understand why violence is indelibly woven into Muslim Mindanao’s political and social fabric, we need to go back to the emergence of Nur Misuari as the acknowledged leader of the Muslim secessionist movement.
For decades, civil unrest seethed in Mindanao as the call for self-rule grew louder. One group, Misuari’s Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), fought the government for 31 years in a war that ultimately killed 120,000 people, and displaced hundreds of thousands.
In 1976, the Tripoli Agreement, brokered by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Libyan leader at the time, Moammar Gadhafi, not only ended the fighting, but decreed the establishment of an autonomous Muslim region in Mindanao made up of 13 provinces.
The treaty collapsed following unresolved disagreements over the interpretation of what an autonomous region encompasses.
The Jeddah Accord of 1987 revived the autonomy initiative, decreeing that an Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) be carved out from 13 provinces. In the end, however, only Lanao del Sur, Maguindanao, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi, decided to join the new region.
ARMM, under Misuari’s helm, was a failed experiment, becoming what critics described as “a mechanism for political accommodation rather than genuine empowerment.”
Basic services were at their barest. Food insecurity was 17 times higher than the least-food-insecure region.
In 2014, the government ended the experiment and signed the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which supplanted the MNLF as the region’s dominant political force.
Eventually, the Bangsamoro Organic Law was ratified, creating the framework for a parliamentary government.
The mandated parliamentary elections hit a constitutional snag after Sulu province opted to pull out of the region. The polls were postponed several times before the Sept. 14 date was finalized.
To maintain BARMM’s “zero-ERI” status, the PNP said it would deploy 9,463 of its personnel come election day. Comelec will set up more than 18,000 checkpoints.
We can only hope the government is up to the task. There is no room for complacency. The fate of the Muslim people of Mindanao is at stake.
