Peace in the south

LONG has been the search for peace in the south. Thus, the recent news that the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) has decided “to form a political party that will participate in future elections” is like a ray of sunshine breaking through the clouds.

There is real hope in the almost instantaneous response of the Aquino administration to the MILF decision, welcoming the group with open arms. It means that our way of governance, with its assertion of personal freedom and individual, could also be enjoyed by the MILF as it becomes part of the mainstream Filipinos in Mindanao. An MILF political party is a triumph of our democracy no doubt.

The MILF, led by its chairman Al Hadj Murad Ebrahim, is intending to participate in the 2016 presidential elections, becoming part of the national Filipino political community. The MILF decision has been long in coming, but that it has decided to take its place as part of the Filipino constituents makes our country look whole and complete.

Certainly, in the words of PNoy’s adviser on the peace process in the south, the MILF plan is “consistent with the...approved Framework Agreement on the Bangsamoro (FAB), which ends with the election of officials for the newly established Bangsamoro in 2016. It is consistent with the goals of (the) negotiated political settlement to transform the engaged armed party into an unarmed political and socio-economic force for continuing change.”

As a boy in knee-pants in my home in a west coast town of Cebu, I grew up regaled with tales by the old folks about the raiding “pangko” of the Moros who come to shore at night and kidnap women and children to take back to Mindanao, and make them Moro slaves. Of course, in those days, the Moros were considered by the Visayans as “wild people who rode their pangko or boat with sole intent of kidnapping women and children that they sold to the rich Moros families in Mindanao.

But during my years in college at the University of the Philippines in Diliman in the 1950s, the government began to move for integration of the Mindanao natives, and the term Moros was changed to Muslim. Some of my classmates became Muslim Filipinos.

But that was some years ago. The integration of the Muslims into the Philippine society took quite some time. Now, they are called by the media as Muslim Filipinos, just like Cebuano Visayans.

Indeed, the effort of the Aquino administration to fulfill the agreement to create the Bangsamoro by 2016 is like the final nail driven to the frame of a Philippine portrait that makes us at last a truly whole and complete nation.