PASIG CITY (MindaNews / 31 March) — MILF Vice Chairman Mohagher Iqbal said something significant recently. The UBJP, the MILF’s political party, will accept the results of free, fair, and honest elections.
That is a meaningful democratic commitment. Let me explain why it is not enough.
The scenario no one wants to name
The September 2026 elections will be the Bangsamoro’s first. The UBJP enters as the organizational descendant of a liberation movement that negotiated the CAB and built the architecture of self-governance. But winning is not guaranteed.
The Bangsamoro parliament has 80 seats. A majority requires 41. The UBJP has organizational strength but faces significant competition—from traditional political clans, from parties backed by Manila, and from smaller parties that proliferated since the electoral code was amended in January. If the UBJP wins 15 solid seats and cannot build beyond that, someone else forms the government.
Macacua is the most plausible Chief Minister in that scenario. He already holds the position, appointed by President Marcos in March 2025. He has the support of all five provincial governors, the backing of OPAPRU, and a growing coalition of political parties—including Adiong’s SIAP and the recently formed Bangsamoro Federalist Party—positioning themselves around his candidacy. A coalition built around him—UBJP excluded or marginalized—is not hypothetical. It is already the current political baseline.
What Iqbal’s promise covers, and what it doesn’t
When Iqbal says the UBJP will accept the results, he is making a statement about democratic legitimacy. The MILF will not use the BIAF to contest an outcome it loses. That is significant.
But accepting the result and implementing the peace agreement are different obligations.
The CAB is a document the MILF signed. Its normalization track—decommissioning of combatants, disposition of weapons, integration of fighters into civilian life—is an MILF obligation. No other party can fulfill it on the MILF’s behalf.
Here is what Iqbal’s statement does not cover: whether the MILF will accelerate those commitments from a position of political marginalization. Whether combatants who watched the MILF lose power will trust a coalition government to deliver the socioeconomic packages they were promised. Whether MILF leaders who believe Manila engineered their removal from the Chief Minister’s office—Iqbal himself called Macacua’s 2025 appointment a “regime change”—will now hand over 14,000 combatants and 2,450 weapons to a government built partly on that same political engineering.
The decommissioning problem is already live
This is not speculation. In July 2025, the MILF suspended the fourth phase of decommissioning. The reasons were specific: unfulfilled socioeconomic packages, undissolved private armed groups of traditional politicians, and non-proceeding military withdrawal. The MILF stopped the process because the government stopped keeping its word.
That suspension means the normalization track is already broken. An MILF electoral loss does not fix those government failures. But it changes the MILF’s calculation about whether compliance is in its interest.
An armed movement that accepts electoral defeat gracefully but retains its armed wing is not fully demobilized. It is strategically patient. The BIAF becomes the MILF’s last leverage—not to seize power, but to ensure that in political defeat, the movement cannot be ignored entirely.
That is a rational calculation. It is also incompatible with completing normalization.
What a coalition government means for the CAB
Macacua comes from inside the peace process. His appointment was not a rejection of the CAB. But a coalition built to govern around a weakened MILF carries structural problems.
Coalition partners will include traditional political families whose interests cut against the CAB’s most transformative provisions. Transitional justice requires investigating historical dispossession—some of that dispossession involved the same elites now positioning for September. The normalization track requires disbanding private armed groups. Some of those groups belong to the people a coalition would need to hold its majority.
A government that depends on those actors cannot deliver on the provisions that most threaten them. Not without destroying the coalition that put it in power.
What must happen before and after September
The national government must publicly reaffirm its CAB obligations regardless of the election outcome. The CAB is not an MILF-government agreement alone. Manila signed it. Manila must make clear that compliance does not depend on which party governs in Cotabato City.
The remaining normalization commitments—socioeconomic packages, private armed group disbandment, transitional justice, phased military adjustment—must be fulfilled or credibly scheduled before the vote. Asking the MILF to accept political marginalization while government obligations remain unmet is asking for compliance it has no incentive to give.
The international monitoring mission must be renewed and strengthened. An elected BARMM government will face pressure to close the transition period and declare the peace process complete. Independent monitoring of normalization cannot be treated as a transitional measure. It must survive the elections.
The test Iqbal’s statement actually sets
Iqbal’s promise is democratic. The UBJP will play by the rules. That is worth honoring, and worth holding him to.
But democratic acceptance of electoral results is not the end of the peace process. It is the beginning of the harder question: whether a peace agreement survives the political defeat of the armed group that signed it.
If the institutions hold — if normalization proceeds, if the new government delivers on its obligations, if the MILF completes decommissioning despite its loss — then the CAB will have proven something remarkable: that this peace process is bigger than one party’s fortunes. That it was institutionalized, not just personalized.
If the institutions don’t hold, the Bangsamoro will have answered a different question. And it will not be the answer anyone signed up for.
The window is still open. But it requires more than a promise to accept results. It requires both sides to honor what they agreed to—before, during, and especially after September.
(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.)
