PASIG CITY (MindaNews / 08 March) — On July 26, 2018, Republic Act 11054 was signed into law. On January 25, 2019, the Bangsamoro people ratified it. The applause — in Malacañang, in Camp Darapanan, in the offices of international donors — was genuine. After fifty years of war, a legal architecture had been built.
Seven years later, that architecture is intact. What it was supposed to house is still under construction. We owe an honest account of why.
We declared victory before the peace was built
The earliest and most consequential failure was a failure of attitude. Within months of the Bangsamoro Transition Authority’s (BTA’s) constitution, government implementors had shifted their framing: the peace process, they suggested, had been concluded. The political track delivered. What remained was governance.
That posture had real consequences. The Malaysian facilitator, the International Monitoring Team, and the International Contact Group — mechanisms built precisely for the implementation phase, when risks are highest and attention is lowest — were quietly downgraded. Their access narrowed. Their findings received less attention from the people who needed to act on them. Everyone turned to Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) politics: appointments, budgets, internal maneuvering.
The peace process machinery atrophied. And without it, the problems that accumulated had no institutional home to surface through before they became crises.
We delayed elections when speed was everything
The transition period was supposed to be temporary. Elections scheduled for 2022 were postponed. Then postponed again. As of today, the BARMM has never been tested at the ballot box.
The argument for delay — the region wasn’t ready, normalization needed more time — missed the central point. Political legitimacy in post-conflict transitions cannot be sustained indefinitely without a popular mandate. The BTA governed on borrowed authority. Every decision it made could be questioned not on its merits but on its right to decide.
The delay also cost the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The moment after a peace agreement is the moment when a liberation movement’s credibility peaks. That capital can be converted into electoral legitimacy — but only if elections come quickly enough to channel it. Without that forcing function, the movement’s internal cohesion frayed. Factions maneuvered. Divisions deepened.
And the delay gave spoilers exactly what they needed: time. A transition that moves fast leaves opponents of the agreement less room. A transition stretched across years gives them space to organize, to build alliances, and to chip away at a governing body too provisional to push back.
We sidelined the MILF from its own peace
The Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro’s (CAB’s) logic was co-ownership. Two parties who had fought each other for decades would build the peace together. That logic did not survive contact with implementation.
The Office of the Presidential Adviser on Peace, Reconciliation and Unity (OPAPRU) controlled the normalization budget and commanded a large pool of personnel. It had the institutional machinery and the government mandate. And it used them unilaterally — designing and implementing the normalization program without genuine MILF participation in the decisions that mattered. The MILF, whose core interest in the entire agreement was the transformation of its fighters into citizens, became a passive onlooker.
Mistrust followed. Resentment followed. The MILF leadership watched programs being designed for its combatants without meaningful input, budgets managed by a government office over which it had no influence, and decisions made in Manila about a process that was supposed to belong to both parties.
The CAB assumed co-ownership. What was built was a government-run program with MILF tolerance. Those are not the same thing, and the Bangsamoro is living with the difference.
We left normalization unfinished
Many aspects of Normalization remain undelivered – transitional justice and reconciliation, amnesty, dismantling of private armed groups, camps development, packages for decommissioned combatants, etc.
Demobilization remains incomplete. The reasons were familiar — funding shortfalls, logistical challenges, verification disputes and lastly, demobilization was suspended because of actions relating to what the MILF refers to as “regime change” and lack of commensurate movement in other aspects of Normalization. Together, they produced a normalization process that became a slow-moving background project rather than the urgent priority the transition required.
Former combatants who signed agreements received no viable alternative livelihood. Communities remained armed. The MILF’s authority over its own forces became harder to maintain as peace dividends failed to materialize. The international community’s attention peaked early and faded. The hardest work was left undone at precisely the moment it needed to be completed.
What must happen now
Elections must be held. The region cannot remain under an appointed body indefinitely. The political cost of continued delay is higher than the cost of an imperfect electoral contest.
The partnership with the MILF must be reconstituted. The normalization program must be redesigned as a genuinely bilateral effort — with MILF co-management of the programs that concern its former combatants. Government control of the budget is not a substitute for MILF ownership of the process.
The peace process mechanisms must be revived. Downgrading the IMT, the ICG, and the Malaysian facilitator was a mistake. Reverse it while external accountability can still matter.
And stop declaring the process complete. Every time a government official frames the BOL as the conclusion of the peace process, they are announcing that accountability mechanisms are no longer necessary. They are wrong. Agreements are not peace. Implementation is.
Seven more years
The BOL was a genuine achievement — I have said so and I mean it. But genuine achievements can be squandered. The Bangsamoro people ratified this agreement because they believed in what it promised. Seven years later, many of those promises are still outstanding.
What we do in the next seven years will determine whether the BOL becomes the foundation of durable peace, or a record of what we almost built. We know what went wrong. The question is whether we are honest enough to say so — and accountable enough to fix it.
(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Camilo “Bong” Montesa of Cagayan de Oro is a lawyer and professor based in Pasig City. He has spent three decades in conflict and peacebuilding work in the Philippines.)
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