The recent massacre of police personnel in Maguindanao who never thought they would end up dead brings anew into sharper focus the problems besetting the search for peace and order in Mindanao. There is a good term for it: The Never-Ending Story.
Those who think that the current attempts to end decades of armed conflict via the passage of the Bangsamoro Basic Law are only deluding themselves. Short of giving Mindanao up to the Bangasamoro, no amount of legal maneuvering will work as shown by the recent clashes where both the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the breakaway Bangasamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) were, in their own words, accidentally present when personnel from the Philippine National Police were sent to serve an arrest warrant on suspected terrorists connected to the Jemaah Islamiyah.
The history of the armed conflict in Mindanao is a story that is close to me personally, having witnessed the conflict firsthand in the early 1970s when war broke out in the towns of Zamboanga del Sur, sending thousands of Muslim and Christian refugees to the fledgling city of Pagadian where I had spent the first eight years of my life.
This history is also wrought in deceit and deception on both sides of the conflict. There is so much distrust on both camps that all this talk of peace after the passage of the BLL is all but illusory. Consider the history of this conflict: every time a law is passed ostensibly to end it, another armed group emerges to break away from the one that signed the law on the opposite side of the negotiating table.
Today it is the MILF that is negotiating for peace. But lurking in the shadows is the BIFF whose membership may have blood relatives within the MILF but whose leadership sees the negotiations differently. Once the BLL is deemed operational, who knows who else might come out in the open to wage war anew against the republic so that it gets noticed, gets to the negotiating table, and gets its own slice of the Mindanao pie? This vicious cycle of attack-negotiate-sign-attack has to end sometime somewhere.
There is one radical solution to end all this conflict in Mindanao, one that is whispered in dark corners but never said out in the open. Just as Indonesia eventually let go of East Timor and carved it out of the republic as an independent state for Christians, is it time for the Philippine Republic to let go of a piece of the South? Would it be more prudent to give, for example, the Sulu Archipelago, including Basilan, to Muslims and lose potential oil reserves waiting to be tapped?
The BLL seems to suggest this as a future scenario but not only for Sulu but for Mindanao as well. Given that majority of Mindanao is non-Muslim, a civil war will surely and most certainly erupt should the BLL be used to carve an Islamic state out of that huge island so full of untapped mineral resources. I understand it is not just the MILF and the BIFF who are armed to the teeth right now in Mindanao. Even non-Muslim residents of that island have long been stacking arms preparing for any eventuality. Some long-time Chinese families are even gradually moving their investments out of Mindanao. I am no warmonger but if this is true, then no one is deluding himself or herself that the BLL is the be all and end all of this conflict.
Therein, therefore, lies the rub and therein lies the irony of it all: Mindanao, with all its vast human and natural resources, is still waiting for the promise of progress and development because some people just do not want to accept that it is time to give peace a chance.