The MILF paused the peace process this week. Manila needs to understand why — and what kind of appointment will actually fix it.
In a Statement dated March 12, 2026, the MILF declared a temporary pause on all substantive peace process engagements. The immediate trigger was the long-standing vacancy of the Chairman of the GPH Peace Implementation Panel when Gen. Cesar B. Yano (Ret) resigned.
The government’s response, predictably, will be to fill the vacancy. Name someone, announce the appointment, declare the mechanism restored.
That would be the wrong lesson.
What Actually Happened
Government Peace Implementing Panel Chair Gen. Cesar B. Yano (Ret) didn’t leave because he was fired or reassigned. Based on conversations with him, he resigned because, according to him, he was not empowered to exercise his mandate and prerogatives as Chair. That in fact, OPAPRU — an office that holds no bilateral authority under the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro — was functionally directing the GPH’s peace process engagement over the head of the person whose job it was to lead it.
When the head of the government’s own bilateral mechanism resigns because he feels he is not empowered to exercise his office, the marginalization the MILF has been flagging is no longer a risk. It is an established fact.
The MILF’s statement is precise about this. The pause covers everything that requires “jointness, bilateral actions, and mutuality” — the operational principles baked into the CAB’s design. Without a duly mandated GPH Panel Chairman, there is no authorized government counterpart for formal bilateral engagement. The MILF will not negotiate across an empty chair, nor will it make binding commitments to officials who cannot make binding decisions.
The ceasefire is intact. The CCCH and AHJAG continue operating. The MILF is not withdrawing from the peace process. It is enforcing the terms of the agreement.
The Pattern
This is not an isolated incident. I’ve watched this sequence build for over a year.
March 2025: President Marcos appointed Abdulraof Macacua as BARMM Chief Minister, displacing the MILF Chairman who had led the region since its creation. MILF Vice Chairman Mohagher Iqbal called it a “regime change engineered by OPAPRU.” The formal bilateral panels had no role in that decision.
July 2025: The MILF suspended Phase 4 decommissioning — freezing the fates of roughly 14,000 remaining combatants — because the government had not fulfilled its normalization obligations. PHP 788 million earmarked for that phase had to be returned to the Treasury.
March 2026: The GPH Peace Implementation Panel Chairman resigns under pressure from OPAPRU, and the formal mechanism goes dark.
Each episode follows the same logic: when the government acts through channels that bypass the CAB’s bilateral architecture, the MILF stops. It has done this consistently, at cost to itself, across three separate trigger events. This is a strategy, not a reaction. The MILF is refusing to allow the agreement’s implementation framework to be informally rewritten through practice.
What Is Actually at Risk
Thousands of MILF combatants went through decommissioning on the promise that Phase 4 would follow. It hasn’t. The Joint Normalization Committee, the Joint Task Force for Decommissioned Combatants and their Communities, the Joint Task Force on Camps Transformation, the Transitional Justice and Reconciliation processes — all formally paused now, most of them already stalled since July.
These are not bureaucratic structures. They are the pipelines through which commitments to communities in former conflict zones flow: livelihood programs, camps transformation, small infrastructure, land tenure, transitional justice for families who lost members in a war that lasted decades. The longer the pause, the longer those communities wait. And in communities that have been waiting since 2019, additional delay has a specific weight.
The BARMM budget for 2026 is PHP 114.7 billion — the highest in the region’s history. Development programming continues. But the normalization track, which is the mechanism for converting the peace agreement into actual transformation for the people who bore the cost of the conflict, is frozen. That asymmetry is its own kind of message.
What Must Change
The President needs to appoint a GPH Peace Implementing Panel Chairman. But the quality of that appointment will tell us whether Manila understands what happened, or whether it is simply filling a slot.
A full-fledged chairman means a person with a direct mandate from the President and a direct line to the President — not an OIC, not an acting official, and not someone whose authority runs through OPAPRU. The last chairman’s fate demonstrates exactly why this matters. An appointment that routes the new chairman’s authority through OPAPRU replicates the conditions that drove his predecessor out. It does not restore the mechanism. It restores the appearance of a mechanism while confirming the structural problem.
The MILF has been explicit about this condition. Manila should take it at face value.
Beyond the appointment, there is a harder question about whether OPAPRU and the Office of the Special Assistant to the President will continue to play a parallel role in peace process engagement. The MILF is not asking these offices to disappear. It is asking that the formal bilateral panels — the bodies the CAB designates as the primary implementation machinery — be treated as primary, not ceremonial.
International partners should be paying attention here too. Partners who route their own peace process engagement toward OPAPRU because it is more convenient are inadvertently validating the very displacement the MILF is contesting. The formal panels matter because accountability lives there. Convenience is not a sufficient reason to bypass them.
The 1996 MNLF agreement ultimately failed in significant part because implementation was managed through structures that didn’t carry the commitments of the original agreement. The MILF knows that history. It is invoking it, quietly, in every statement that defends the CAB’s bilateral architecture.
The window for restoring the formal mechanism is open. The appointment is within the President’s power to make this week. But an acting appointment, a placeholder, or one more channel through OPAPRU will not restore trust. It will confirm what the MILF already suspects — that the government regards the formal panels as optional rather than essential.
And once that suspicion is confirmed, the costs will extend far beyond the current pause.
(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.)
