PASIG CITY (MindaNews / 25 March) – The MILF gave up independence for genuine autonomy and parity of esteem. What it got was control.

Among the many misunderstandings that have accumulated between the Philippine government and the MILF over the past two years, one stands apart from the rest. Not because it is the most visible, but because it strikes at the moral foundation on which the entire peace process rests.

The MILF did not enter the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro as a defeated party accepting terms. It entered as a negotiating party making a historic concession: trading the aspiration for independence — the political claim that had animated decades of armed struggle — for two things it considered an acceptable substitute. The first was genuine autonomy: the real power to craft and govern the Bangsamoro on its own terms, under the Philippine Constitution. The second was parity of esteem: the recognition that the Bangsamoro was equal to the Filipino, not a subordinate to be managed or a security problem to be administered.

This distinction matters because it tells us what kind of error OPAPRU’s interventionist approach represents. It is not primarily a failure of implementation. It is a misreading of what kind of relationship the peace process was supposed to create.

Three episodes over eighteen months give shape to the concern.

In March 2025, President Marcos — with OPAPRU playing a central role in the decision — appointed Abdulraof Macacua as BTA Chief Minister, replacing MILF Chairman Al Haj Murad Ebrahim. It was the first leadership change since BARMM’s creation in 2019, and it was made without formal engagement through the bilateral panels. MILF Vice Chairman Mohagher Iqbal, speaking from Davao in August, called it a “regime change engineered by OPAPRU.” The government’s view was that it was an ordinary executive appointment. The MILF’s view was that it bypassed the architecture of the peace agreement. Both perspectives say something true about what happened.

In July 2025, the MILF suspended Phase 4 decommissioning of its remaining 14,000 combatants. The resolution signed by Murad Ebrahim cited a specific grievance: “not a single one” of the 26,145 combatants who had already been decommissioned had successfully undergone “transition to productive civilian life.” Under the CAB’s Annex on Normalization, Section C, Item 9, decommissioning is meant to be “parallel and commensurate” with the government’s delivery on its own obligations. The MILF was not repudiating the agreement. It was invoking it.

In February 2026, the Chairman of the GPH Peace Implementing Panel resigned following policy differences with OPAPRU. The MILF declared a temporary pause on all substantive peace engagements, citing the absence of a duly mandated government counterpart. The ceasefire held. But the bilateral mechanism — the institutional architecture through which the CAB’s commitments flow — stopped.

Taken together, these episodes reveal a structural tension at the heart of the current approach: OPAPRU has operated less as a facilitator of the peace agreement and more as a governing presence in Bangsamoro affairs, with effects that the MILF has consistently and formally resisted.

What makes this more than an institutional dispute is the logic of the original bargain.

Most peace process difficulties are implementation problems — delayed timelines, unfulfilled socioeconomic commitments, bureaucratic inertia. These are serious, but they are correctable. Commitments can be renewed, budgets reinstated, timelines reset.

What genuine autonomy and parity of esteem represent is different. They were the terms on which the MILF accepted the legitimacy of the peace framework itself. When the MILF chose constitutional autonomy over continued armed struggle, it did so on the understanding that autonomy would be real — that the Bangsamoro would govern itself, and that its principal peace partner would be treated as an equal, not supervised from Manila.

The MILF’s constituency now asks a reasonable question: what, in practice, distinguishes the current arrangement from the old one? The question is not rhetorical. It is political, and it has implications. The moderates who argued for the peace process staked their credibility on the answer. The skeptics who always doubted Manila’s intentions are watching how the answer unfolds.

Add to this the human dimension. The 26,145 combatants who were already decommissioned were promised support for transitioning to civilian life. Most are still waiting. Not one, according to the MILF’s own assessment, has been successfully transitioned. The 14,000 who remain to be decommissioned are watching what happened to those who went first. Peace dividends, when they fail to materialize, do not simply disappoint — they delegitimize.

None of this means the government acted in bad faith, or that there are no legitimate reasons for some of its decisions. Governance of a post-conflict transition region is genuinely difficult. Leadership questions in the BTA have no clean answers. OPAPRU operates under real political constraints.

But good faith and sound judgment are separate questions. The concern here is not motivation — it is structural. An approach to the Bangsamoro that concentrates decision-making in OPAPRU, bypasses the CAB’s bilateral mechanisms, and treats the MILF’s institutional role as negotiable rather than foundational produces predictable results: the MILF enforces the agreement through suspension rather than compliance, trust erodes, and the formal architecture that was designed to make the peace process durable begins to weaken.

The path forward is not complicated, even if it is politically difficult.

Changes must happen at OPAPRU. Its mandate should be clarified and respected: facilitating the government’s compliance with the CAB, not managing Bangsamoro governance. The bilateral mechanism needs to be restored through a GPH Peace Implementing Panel Chairman with genuine independence and a direct mandate from the President. The four normalization obligations the MILF identified in July 2025 — socioeconomic packages for decommissioned combatants, transitional justice, disbandment of private armed groups, gradual military withdrawal — need to be addressed concretely, not deferred indefinitely. And the MILF’s role as an institutional peace partner needs to be treated as a feature of the peace architecture, not a problem to be managed around.

The history of the MNLF peace agreement offers a caution worth heeding. The 1996 accord also produced a form of autonomy. What eroded it was not a single dramatic failure, but the gradual displacement of the agreement’s institutional logic by Manila’s governing preferences. The consequences took a generation to fully materialize.

The Bangsamoro peace process is still recoverable. The mechanisms are intact. The ceasefire holds. The MILF has not abandoned the CAB — it has repeatedly invoked it. That is a form of commitment, even if it does not look like one.

The question is whether President Marcos will treat that commitment as an opportunity — or continue an approach that makes it harder for the MILF to sustain.

(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.)