Role of PRO-BAR in peace process acknowledged

COTABATO CITY --- The Bangsamoro government is grateful to the police for supporting the normalization agenda of the Mindanao peace process, meant to return thousands of Moro rebels into mainstream communities.

Bangsamoro Local Government Minister Naguib Sinarimbo said Tuesday he told officials of the Police Regional Office-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region about the need to keep supporting the normalization tract of the peace process during an engagement Monday.

Sinarimbo, chairman of the multi-sector Regional Advisory Council of PRO-BAR, was guest of honor in Monday’s commemoration in Camp Salipada Pendatun in Parang,  Maguindanao of the 30^th founding anniversary of the Philippine National Police.

He said he also acknowledged the efforts of the Armed Forces of the Philippines in sustaining the dividends of the Mindanao peace process, meant to put a closure to the nagging southern secessionist strife.

Sinarimbo said the joint initiative of Malacañang and the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao to deactivate thousands of Moro Islamic Liberation Front members, in keeping with the MILF’s peace compacts with the national government, is a challengingly tedious thrust. 

In the forefront of the decommissioning of thousands of MILF fighters is the International Decommissioning Body, or IDB, a bloc of transnational entities that are experts in peace processes.

The IDB is led by the Turkish government, a member of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of more than 50 Muslim countries, including petroleum-exporting states in the Middle East and North Africa, supporting the national government’s peace overture with southern Moro communities since the 1970s.

Sinarimbo, BARMM's regional spokesperson, is also overseeing the operation of the Bangsamoro government’s Rapid Emergency Action on Disaster Incidence that has teams of well-trained disaster and calamity responders whose humanitarian missions are supported by the AFP and the PNP.

The creation of the now 25-month BARMM that replaced the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao in February 2019, after existing for almost three decades, was premised on two compacts between the MILF and Malacañang --- the 2012 Framework Agreement on Bangsamoro and, subsequently, the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on Bangsamoro.

Both agreements are products of 22 years of peace talks, facilitated by Malaysia, between the national government and the MILF, whose figurehead, Hadji Ahod Ebrahim, is now appointed chief minister of BARMM.