PASIG CITY (MindaNews / 13 March) – Six misconceptions are costing us the peace process.
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When the MILF suspended its decommissioning commitments in July 2025, the immediate response from many quarters was predictable: calls for dialogue, assurances of commitment to the peace process, and a wait-and-see posture. What was largely absent was an honest reckoning with why the process keeps arriving at these moments of crisis.
The Bangsamoro peace process is in trouble not primarily because of spoilers or funding shortfalls or institutional capacity gaps. It is in trouble because the people with the most power to support it have consistently misunderstood what the conflict is actually about.
Six misconceptions drive this misunderstanding. They matter because wrong frames produce wrong responses.
It is not about development. The dominant intervention logic for decades has been: the Bangsamoro are poor, poverty breeds conflict, fix the poverty and the conflict resolves. This frame has generated real investments — BARMM’s poverty rate fell from 52.6% to 23.5% between 2018 and 2023. But the peace process is still in crisis. Poverty reduction does not dissolve a political and rights-based grievance. The Bangsamoro didn’t pick up arms because they lacked infrastructure. They did so because their lands were taken. Colonial law made the bias explicit: a 1913 public land act gave Christian settlers 16 hectares; Moros received 8. By 1919, non-Moros could claim 24 hectares while Moros were capped at 10. Forty-two government resettlement projects followed, transferring roughly 750,000 hectares to settler families. Between 1903 and the 1960s, Muslims went from over 75% of Mindanao’s population to a minority across the island that had been their homeland. Development programs that skip this history treat the symptom and let Manila off the hook for the rights violations at the conflict’s root.
It is not about religion. The Philippines is predominantly Catholic; the Bangsamoro are Muslim. The religious conflict frame writes itself. It is also wrong. The MILF’s foundational documents speak of ancestral domain and political self-determination, not theological grievance. The Moro claim to their territory predates Islamic arrival in Mindanao in the 14th century. Treating this as a religious conflict produces counterterrorism responses where political engagement is what’s needed — and it provided dangerous cover in the post-9/11 period for those who wanted to collapse the distinction between the MILF and armed criminal groups like the Abu Sayyaf.
It is not about stopping armed conflict. The Bangsamoro has had ceasefires before. The 1976 Tripoli Agreement produced silence, then collapsed. The 1996 peace deal created ARMM — which became a textbook case of autonomy captured by political dynasties and starved of real power. The architects of the 2014 CAB understood this; they designed an architecture for structural transformation, not a ceasefire. Seven years after the foundational legislation, normalization is stalled, transitional justice is largely unimplemented, elections scheduled for 2022 have still not occurred, and decommissioning is suspended. The ceasefire holds. The conflict remains unresolved.
It is not solved by the establishment of the BARMM. There is a narrative circulating in development and diplomatic circles: the peace process succeeded, BARMM was established, and now it’s governance and development. BARMM is a vehicle, not a destination. The replacement of Murad Ebrahim as Chief Minister in March 2025 — the Amerul Muhajideen of the MILF — was not an administrative transition. According to the MILF, it was a regime change. It altered who leads the BARMM and whose interests it serves. Elections remain suspended. The normalization commitments are badly behind. You can have a region named Bangsamoro while the substance of Bangsamoro self-governance is progressively hollowed out.
It is not about holding elections. A version of this misreading is circulating right now: hold the BARMM parliamentary elections in September 2026, and the peace process gets back on track. The Bangsamoro, the argument goes, just need to elect their own leaders.
The Bangsamoro have been electing leaders for generations — through national elections, ARMM elections, local elections across Muslim Mindanao. Electoral participation is not what the conflict is about. What the CAB promises is self-determination: the right of a people to govern themselves on their ancestral territory under a framework of genuine autonomy. Elections are a necessary feature of that framework. They are not its substance. Holding elections while normalization remains stalled, transitional justice is unimplemented, and BARMM’s political direction is controlled by forces outside the peace agreement is not resolution. It is democratic scaffolding around an unresolved rights claim.
And it is not Manila’s problem alone to solve. The CAB is an internationally witnessed agreement. The parties built accountability mechanisms into its structure deliberately — because bilateral agreements between a powerful state and an armed group, without external witnesses, have a poor track record here. When international partners disengage, Manila can quietly renegotiate, delay, or underfund shifts.
What all six myths share is this: they allow the political roots of the conflict to remain unaddressed. The Bangsamoro conflict is about dispossession, oppression, and tyranny. It is about grave human rights violations that were never accounted for. It is about a people’s claim to govern themselves on their ancestral territory — a claim that predates Philippine statehood and will outlast any individual administration’s patience with it.
Until that is understood, prescriptions will keep landing wide off the mark.
What is needed now is specific. The Philippine government must honor the CAB’s normalization timeline, not manage it to its own political convenience. Transitional justice must move from paper to implementation. The September 2026 elections should be held — but as one part of a genuine transition, not as a substitute for the structural commitments the CAB requires. International partners must not treat the signing of the CAB as the conclusion of their accountability — they witnessed it, and they must witness its implementation with equal seriousness.
The Bangsamoro people have been patient. They accepted the CAB’s framework as a pathway to self-determination. They watched elections get deferred, normalization stall, and political control over their region shift in ways the agreement never envisioned.
That patience is not unlimited. And when it runs out, we will not be able to say we didn’t understand what was at stake.
(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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