The structural defect that stalled the peace process for over a year is finally cured. With a government panel chair who can commit, the two panels have no more excuse to wait—and no time to lose before September.
To Secretary Mel Senen Sarmiento, now Chairperson of the Government Peace Implementing Panel, and to Chairman Mohagher Iqbal, who has held the MILF panel through the long wait—this is a moment worth naming plainly. For over a year, the peace process carried a structural defect at its center: a government panel without a head who could commit. That defect is now cured. Secretary Sarmiento holds a full and formal chairmanship, concurrent with his role at OPAPRU, and with it the authority the MILF has insisted upon all along. The reason the movement gave for suspending substantive engagement on 12 March—a headless counterpart—no longer exists.
So the first thing I would urge is the simplest: meet, and meet soon. Not for optics, but for decisions. The calendar is unforgiving. On 14 September the Bangsamoro holds its first parliamentary elections, and once coalition math hardens around every unresolved file, each of them becomes harder to move. What is not decided before the vote will be hostage to it after. Two principles should discipline everything that follows. The bargain is reciprocal, not sequential—decommissioning was always meant to move parallel and commensurate with the state’s delivery. Authority is the mechanism that enforces reciprocity; a chair matters only for the decisions he is empowered to make.
Start by restoring the bilateral machinery. The first session should formally lift the abeyance of normalization activities, put on record that Secretary Sarmiento can now bind Manila on normalization, and fix a standing cadence for the panels and the joint mechanisms—a calendar, not a series of events. More importantly, they should agree on a date or pathway to something long overdue: a meeting between President Marcos and the MILF Chairman Al Haj Murad Ebrahim who by their own account have sought one since March 2025 without success. A reckoning this consequential cannot be delegated to a peace office indefinitely. It has to be owned at the top.
Then turn to the security issues, because it is the hardest and the most honest test. Phase 4 of decommissioning—roughly fourteen thousand combatants and some two thousand four hundred fifty weapons—has been frozen since July 2025, pending government compliance. “Compliance” cannot remain a slogan. The two panels should convert it into a written, verifiable, time-stamped list of the specific milestones that would unfreeze it. More than twenty-six thousand fighters, about sixty-five percent of the estimate, have already been decommissioned. That is an enormous deposit of trust. It deserves to be matched by visible reciprocal action, not by a widening gap between what one side has surrendered and what the other has delivered.
The delivery agenda is where communities actually feel the peace. Civil-society monitors have coded five of forty-two normalization stipulations as not even initiated, with the stubborn tail clustered in transitional justice, socioeconomic items, and women-peace-and-security commitments. Each of those should leave the first meeting with a lead agency, a timeline, and a first deliverable. The socioeconomic packages for decommissioned combatants need a disaggregated, time-stamped rollout, not aggregate pledges. The transformation of the six former camps must move from planning toward measurable milestones. The disbandment of private armed groups, the policing transition and AFP redeployment, the amnesty program—whose uptake is being suppressed by a communication gap that Basilan-style localization has shown how to close—and the clarification of the Joint Peace and Security Teams’ role and resourcing all belong on the table now. And women, peace and security commitments must be made operational, not symbolic.
On transitional justice and dealing with the past, I will be direct, because you both know the weight of it. The Bangsamoro Transition Authority—a parliament of the bombed, the displaced, and the dispossessed—has already legislated its own memory. The Congress of the Republic has not passed the national transitional-justice law promised more than a decade ago. That default is not a cultural side-issue; it is one of the levers holding up Phase 4. The panels should agree a joint push for the national mechanism in the incoming Congress, distinct from the regional law already passed, and begin sequencing the implementation of the TJRC’s 2016 recommendations and its 2017 Land Report. Land and dispossession remain an open chapter. An election administers a settlement; it does not close the account beneath it.
Finally, attend to the eyes and the exit. When the International Monitoring Team’s Terms of Reference were not renewed, the Civilian Protection Component collapsed with it, and civilian monitoring on the ground effectively died—precisely when implementation, not the ceasefire, became the real test. The panels should agree an interim arrangement to put community-rooted eyes back on implementation and revisit the wider monitoring gap. Monitoring findings should feed panel decisions, so that watching produces outputs and not just reports. And the two sides should begin defining, together, the closure conditions and irreversible pillars an exit agreement will require—trust and motion, not perfection.
I know how much of this can be tabled and scheduled rather than settled at once. But four decisions, I think, unlock the rest:
- Lift the abeyance and confirm commit authority;
- Set the meeting calendar;
- Commission the Phase 4 trigger list; and
- Agree a pathway to the President.
Do those four, and the rest of the agenda has somewhere to go.
There is a temptation, in an election season, to let the campaign become the story and the peace process wait until after. That temptation should be refused. The political track and the normalization track are two clocks, and they are already out of sync; widening that gap during a campaign is how a legitimate vote ends up coexisting with an unfinished peace. The Bangsamoro did the harder, more humbling things—it laid down its weapons and legislated its own memory. The least the process can do now is give it a working table.
The seat is finally filled. Make it a working chair.
(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.)
