PASIG CITY (MindaNews / 23 March) – The MILF’s unaddressed grievances are real. What is being built around them in the political shadows is the more urgent problem.

The Marcos-Duterte UniTeam ended in disaster. What will replace it is being assembled quietly, and the Bangsamoro is where some of that assembly is happening.

The current BARMM leadership — Chief Minister Abdulraof Macacua, most of the reconstituted BTA — is aligned with Malacañang. Marcos controls the BARMM apparatus. That makes it a target for anyone trying to build a political counterweight to Marcos before the next election cycle. Sara Duterte and her camp are looking for factions unhappy with the current management of the Bangsamoro transition. They will not have to look hard.

The MILF, under Al-Haj Murad Ebrahim. carries a documented list of grievances against the Marcos administration. It is worth remembering that the MILF, as an organization, officially supported Leni Robredo in the 2022 presidential election. They did not back Marcos. But when the people’s choice was clear, the MILF chose to work with him — in good faith, as peace process partners committed to the CAB regardless of who sat in Malacañang. What they received in return is the record now before us.

In March 2025, Marcos replaced Murad as BARMM Interim Chief Minister, installing the MILF Army Chief Abdulraof Macacua. MILF First Vice Chairman Iqbal called it a “regime change” — executed outside the bilateral panels that the CAB designates as the proper channels for decisions affecting the Bangsamoro’s governance. The MILF was simultaneously reduced to a minority in the reconstituted BTA.

In July 2025, the MILF formally suspended Phase 4 decommissioning, leaving roughly 14,000 combatants waiting for commitments that never came — socioeconomic packages, transitional justice, military withdrawal, disbandment of private armed groups. Seven hundred eighty-eight million pesos earmarked for that phase had to be returned to the Treasury.

In February 2026, the GPH Peace Implementation Panel Chairman resigned due to policy differences with the head of OPAPRU. In March, the MILF paused all substantive bilateral engagements.

These are not grievances the Duterte camp invented. They are real, documented, and publicly on the record. What the Duterte camp is doing — or preparing to do — is offer a political home to the constituencies that carry them.

The narrative being assembled runs like this. Marcos Sr. signed the 1976 Tripoli Agreement with the MNLF but never intended to implement it using the artifice of “subject to constitutional processes” to justify non-implementation.  The Bangsamoro Organic Law passed on his watch. The BARMM was established on his watch. Murad led the transition from the start. Further implementation of the CAB now rests on the shoulders of Marcos. 

Marcos, the counter-narrative goes, has done the opposite — systematically. He sidelined the MILF’s leadership from the region they were supposed to lead. He allowed OPAPRU to manage the peace process through channels that the CAB’s bilateral architecture does not authorize. He left normalization frozen for the better part of a year. He has not appointed a permanent peace panel chair. He has not addressed transitional justice. The implementation gap between commitment and delivery widened on his watch.

Among constituencies inside and around the MILF’s political networks who have lost confidence in Manila’s seriousness, this narrative will land. The Duterte camp knows how to speak to Mindanao audiences. They are preparing to speak to this one.

When national political rivalries begin to court peace process actors, the process stops being driven by its own logic — implementation, bilateral compliance, institutional integrity — and starts responding to the logic of political positioning. Factions calculate allegiances based not on what serves the agreement but on what survives the next election. That is a different calculation, with different outcomes.

The Bangsamoro communities that have waited through four postponements of their parliamentary elections, through a decommissioning suspension now nine months old, through a formal bilateral mechanism that has been paused for weeks — they did not ask to become political resources in a Manila dynasty war. They asked for the peace they were promised.

Marcos can still close this opening. Four things are required.

He must address directly — not through OPAPRU, not through a press release — why Murad was replaced and why the MILF was reduced to a minority in the BTA. These decisions were never properly explained. Silence has been read as contempt. In the Bangsamoro, contempt has a long memory.

He must declare a real reset on CAB implementation: specific commitments, specific timelines, specific accountability. Not another general reaffirmation of support for the peace process. A concrete list of what the government will deliver and when.

He must appoint a permanent GPH Peace Implementation Panel Chairman with a direct mandate from the President and a direct reporting line to the President — independent of OPAPRU. An appointment routed through OPAPRU replicates the structural problem that drove the previous Chairman to resign. The MILF will see it for what it is.

And he must do this visibly, with international partners as witnesses, before the maneuvering in the shadows becomes something harder to reverse.

Trust, once spent, is incredibly hard to earn back. The Marcos administration has spent a significant amount of it over the past year. The cost so far has fallen on the communities in the BARMM still waiting for normalization to resume, for packages to arrive, for transitional justice to begin.

The Duterte camp did not create those conditions. Political actors do not need to create grievances. They only need to find them, name them, and offer an alternative.

The operatives are already circling. The grievances are already there. The narrative is already being assembled. What is not yet determined is whether Marcos will act before it hardens into something the Bangsamoro peace process cannot survive.

(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.)