| by Ken Fuller
( 16 October 2012, Manila, Sri Lanka
Guardian ) According
to the draft “Framework Agreement on the Bangsamoro” recently concluded by the
government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the Manila government
will retain responsibility for defense and national security, foreign policy,
common market and global trade, coinage and monetary policy, citizenship and
naturalization, and the postal service, although additional powers may be
agreed.
The reserved powers over the
common market and global trade are subject to the proviso “that the power to enter
into economic agreements already allowed under Republic Act No. 9054 shall be
transferred to the Bangsamoro.” This might set alarm bells ringing. Article IX,
Section 11 of RA 9054, (“An Act to Strengthen and Expand the Organic Act for
the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao” which lapsed into law on March 31,
2001 without the signature of Mrs. Arroyo) reads as follows:
Subject to the provisions of the
Constitution, the regional government shall evolve a system of economic
agreements and trade compacts to generate block grants for regional investments
and improvements of regional economic structures which shall be authorized by
law enacted by the regional assembly. Pursuant to specific recommendations of
the Regional Economic and Development Planning Board, the regional government
may assist local government units in their requirements for counterpart funds
for foreign-assisted projects.
If there is a danger in this
section, it lies in its vagueness. A reasonable person might conclude that it
merely authorizes the regional government to enter into agreements with bodies
such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Ill-advised as
agreements with those organizations might be, a wider interpretation might
insist that the section authorizes the regional authority to conclude pacts
with every get-rich-quick foreign company — or country — that turns up with phony promises of
“development.”
This is of no little importance,
because the healthiest skeptics last time around were those who understood that
MILF chairman Hashim Salamat’s plea for help to (of all people!) George W. Bush
in 2003 led to the appointment of the congressionally-funded US Institute for
Peace to “assist” in negotiating what became the memorandum of agreement on
ancestral domain (MoA-AD). They therefore feared that a Bangsamoro Juridical
Entity (BJE) might allow the USA greater access to Mindanao for geopolitical
purposes and to plunder its mineral resources.
It is not clear how many foreign
organizations were involved in the latest negotiations, but the Geneva-based
Center for Humanitarian Dialog has been mentioned in the media. While itself
apparently innocuous, this is funded by a number of governments and
foundations, and in 2011 these included the UK, the Bureau for Population, Refugees
and Migration (an arm of the US State Department), Open Society (founded by
George Soros) and the MacArthur Foundation (the board of which contains at
least two former senior US government employees and a former managing director
of Lehman brothers).
Are natural resources at risk?
Current legislation (RA 9054) is
quite cautious, giving the regional government control of “mines and minerals
and other natural resources… except for the strategic minerals such as uranium,
petroleum and all other fossil fuels, mineral oils, all sources of potential
energy…” Revenues, taxes and fees derived from “strategic minerals” are shared
on a 50-50 basis.
The MoA-AD went much further,
stating that “all potential sources of energy, petroleum in situ, hydrocarbon,
natural gas and other minerals, including deposits or fields found within the
territorial waters” would be shared between the BJE and the central government,
favoring the former on a 75-25 basis. Moreover, the BJE was “free to enter into
any economic cooperation and trade relations with foreign countries...”
Under the current framework
agreement, the Bangsamoro is accorded a “just and equitable share” in revenues
generated by the exploitation and development of natural resources “in
accordance with the formula agreed upon by the parties.” This strikes one as a
compromise that leaves the specific split, to appear in an “Annex on Wealth
Sharing,” for future negotiation. “Equitable” would imply half, but that is
what the ARMM has already. While one might assume that the government wishes to
avoid conceding the 75 percent agreed by the Arroyo negotiators, the MILF’s
Ghadzali Jaafar has been reported as saying that this is a “done deal.”
Quite apart from the framework
document itself there are, surely, dangers enough. Speaker Belmonte has
suggested that the occasion when the constitutional changes required by the
document (not required at all, the government says) are agreed could also be
used to ditch the nationalist economic provisions of the Constitution.
Such an occasion would,
therefore, hardly be one of nation-building but one of surrendering all
pretence to that noble quest. And what if, as has been suggested in the past,
this proved to be the start of a shift to a federal system in which the
components would become little more than glorified Export Processing Zones
competing against each other in a race to the bottom?
In negotiating a peace formula in
Mindanao (or, indeed, elsewhere), context is of the utmost importance. A
Philippines that is simply following the dysfunctional economic model imposed
by the World Bank-IMF decades ago, and now possibly compounds that folly by
discarding its constitutionally-stated intention to develop into a nation of
some economic consequence, has little to offer those on the other side of the
table except a piece of the hardly vibrant action.
If peace fails to come to
Mindanao it will not be simply because the framework agreement has failed. The
problems of the Muslim areas are caused not just by a lack of real autonomy,
but by the absence of real development. The same may be said of many of the
problems in the rest of the archipelago.
It is surely because successive
governments have devoted so little attention to development that a solution to
these problems proves so elusive — in Mindanao and elsewhere.
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