MILF to Government: Honor your agreements

July 11, 2008

 

“Agreements are made to be honored in good faith” is the message of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front to the Government of the Philippines.  Just as when the international community and multi-donor countries expected the Government-MILF negotiation to resolve one of the root causes of the armed conflict in Mindanao, yet another stumbling bloc has come the way of the GRP-MILF peace process. “The GRP will engage in unending “studies in due diligence” that resonate in negotiations from now on,” the source quoted one keen observer.

 

In Manila, the Philippine Supreme Court issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) to stop the Government peace panel, its agency or representative, from signing the MOA-AD.  The TRO is similar to the Malaysian High Court ad interim order to stop any party, government official or agency from performing an act and to stay the action. 

 

The parties and facilitator were scheduled to ink the agreed text at the Malaysian federal capital on August 5 at the posh Putrajaya Marriot Hotel. “I cannot understand why the Government still is playing games,” one diplomat mumbled.  Remarked an observer who enplaned from Mindanao: “Is this some ploy?”  Many diplomats, public officials, civil society, including observers and the media at the aborted ceremonial signing of the Memorandum of Agreement on the Ancestral Domain last Monday took it unbelievable and an unprecedented conduct in diplomacy. 

 

Asked about their opinion, the lawyer members of the MILF negotiating panel seriously recommend that the Government should file an “explanatory memoranda” because it is premature to talk of the incorporation of the MOA-AD into its constitutional practice or municipal law.  “The only sanction here is political,” they said, adding: “Hence, our chief negotiator Mohagher Iqbal is duty bound to accept the completed negotiation of the AD strands as a done deal.” 

 

When asked what he thinks of the provisional remedy resorted to at the Court by local politicians, for Iqbal, it is akin to compelling the MILF to negotiate with the three branches of government. “Are we expected to negotiate with the justices, too, en banc? In that country, TRO is a much abused remedy, which the highest Court itself investigated”, the revolutionary leader said without elaborating.

 

Later, the MILF negotiators told the reporters that GRP-MILF peace deal is about a new formula on political settlement of the Bangsmoro problem, not some legal battles about treaty-making or judicial litigation.  “The Filipino political class must be running out of lame excuses to deny the right of Moros to determine their political status,” says Maulana Alonto, an MILF panel member.

 

A chance interview at the hotel lobby with Datu Michael Mastura, a former legislator and a senior lawyer member of the MILF negotiators is instructive. “That TRO turns upside down the TOR of the agreed text on ancestral domain, which are meant to allay fears and apprehensions,” he lamented.  Obviously, Datu Mastura is pointing to the Terms of Reference (TOR) in the initialed text of the agreement as the proper contextual referents.

 

Attorney Mastura and Musib Buat (also a lawyer who once headed the MILF technical working group) now a full-pledged panel member, elaborated. They cited modern treaty law practice in which “an agreement can be constituted by mere exchange of third-person diplomatic notes (which are initialed but not signed).”

 

They informed us that the practice of designating a treaty device that elaborate principles as ‘framework agreement’ for later, and more detailed, comprehensive compact has started and only by studying the MOA-AD as a new formula can one determine its status.     

 

“According to the Vienna Convention on the Law on Treaties, initialing the text of an agreement constitutes signature when the negotiating parties have so agreed,” the lawyers explained. And so, they concluded, initialing is commonly used as a means by which an agreed