MANILA — President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines has signed a landmark law aimed at giving expanded autonomy to Muslims in the south of the country, his spokesman said on Thursday, with the legislation expected to bring some measure of peace to a region choked by four decades of separatist violence.
The long-delayed law came four years after the government signed a peace deal with the separatist group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which dropped its bid for full independence in return for the right to self-rule.
The front had fought a fierce uprising since 1978 that left about 120,000 people dead and pushed pockets of the deep south of the Philippines into a cycle of extreme poverty and violence.
The new legislation, called the Bangsamoro Organic Law, was supposed to have been passed early this week, but infighting among allies of Mr. Duterte in Congress delayed its passage. The president’s spokesman, Harry Roque, said on Thursday that the presidential palace had now received a copy of the law.
“After much confusion, the president has signed into law the Bangsamoro Organic Law,” Mr. Roque said in an interview.
The legislation mandates the expansion of an autonomous region that would be led initially by a “transitional authority” composed mostly of former fighters before eventually being governed by its own parliament.
The region is intended to supersede an earlier autonomous zone, composed of five provinces, that was considered to have benefited only a small number of Muslim families and that had been wracked by violence. The new area is expected to be larger and better funded.
Under the new plan, the government would retain police and military forces in the area, combatants would lay down their weapons in phases, and six of the guerrilla group’s camps would be converted to “productive civilian communities,” according to the leader of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, Al Haj Murad Ebrahim.
Mr. Murad said that the rebel group had 30,000 to 40,000 fighters and that those combatants would willingly give up their weapons, a first step toward reducing the proliferation of unlicensed firearms in the region.
The exact number of insurgents and the quantity of weapons they possess have been relayed to the army, Mr. Murad said. The military had long estimated that the front had around 10,000 fighters.
Mr. Murad said that the new law was expected to decrease extremism in the south because young Muslims would finally feel they were being given a voice and a fairer chance to succeed.
He said that the move would also make it harder for Islamic State-linked operatives to recruit disaffected youth in the region.
Last year, fighters from Southeast Asia and the Middle East helped a local faction of the Islamic State to take over the city of Marawi, leading to a five-month battle ending in October that left hundreds dead. The faction was composed mainly of fighters formerly allied with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front who had become frustrated with the peace process.
The Philippine military eventually took back Marawi with help from the United States and Australia, which provided surveillance and intelligence data.
Mr. Murad said, “We are quite confident that if there is a political settlement acceptable by majority of Bangsamoro Muslim people, splinter groups will gradually be carried into the mainstream.”
“It is very difficult for them to exist minus the support of some people in the area,” he said, adding: “If the people support the result of the peace process, there is no choice for these small groups except to join.”
Rommel Banlaoi, a security analyst at the Philippine Institute for Peace, Violence and Terrorism Research, agreed that the new law could bring calm to the south by requiring the Moro Islamic Liberation Front “to stop fighting the Philippines through military struggle.”
“But it will not automatically bring peace,” Mr. Banlaoi said, stressing that the key to reducing the violence was making sure that the front followed through with its promise to disarm and decommission its thousands of combatants.
Referring to the law, he said, “The B.O.L. is not a magic pill that can give a solution to multifaceted problems of armed conflicts” in the region.
Source : Nytimes
