CAMP DARAPANAN—Paved roads where rugged terrain used to be. A steady supply of electricity and potable water. The silence of guns as fighters turned into farmers.
Conveniences that are normally taken for granted are crucial peace and development milestones in Camp Darapanan, the main base of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in Sultan Kudarat, Maguindanao del Norte.
“In 2000, there were almost no houses here. You can count with just your fingers how many houses there were. No road was paved,” said Camp Darapanan base commander Kudzaa Bayao.
“Now, things have changed. We no longer have to transfer from one place to another because of the conflict. We even have a covered gym now,” he added.
Bayao, who became an MILF fighter in 1972, said his son is now a beneficiary of a government scholarship program, taking up computer science.
“All this became possible because of the signing of the peace agreement,” he said, referring to the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro signed by the government and the MILF on March 27, 2014.
Presidential Peace Adviser Secretary Carlito Galvez said education is a very important factor for the peace process to succeed.
“Our scholarship package is an investment in the future. We want the families of former combatants to benefit from this – one professional worker per family is our goal,” Galvez told Manila Standard in an interview.
Under the program, a decommissioned combatant or his next of kin who is enrolled in tertiary education is given P25,000 per semester, or P50,000 per year, for four years, or until they finish a four-year bachelor’s degree.
The financial support can be used for all expenses related to schooling such as tuition, books, daily allowance, and lodging, among others, and is not tied up to the students’ grades.
“We are expanding the program. Since it started in 2023 with 466 beneficiaries, we now have 2,500 beneficiaries this school year. For next year, we have included in our proposed budget the educational support for 7,000 to 10,000 students,” Galvez added.
He said the government is currently implementing a plan to develop six other previously-acknowledged MILF camps – Abubakar, Badre, Bilal, Bushra, Omar, Rajamuda.
“We aim to transform these camps into productive and peaceful communities,” Galvez said, noting that in terms of infrastructure, the government has already completed at least 20 kilometers of farm-to-market roads, six rural health units, 13 warehouse facilities, 18 solar dryer projects and 10 women centers across the various MILF camps.
Following decades of sluggish economic growth, the region began to expand rapidly after the signing of the peace agreement – with an average growth of 7.9 percent between 2017 and 2019, data from World Bank showed. In 2023, it logged a growth rate of 4.3 percent.
The Bangsamoro region also posted a 4.5 percentage point decline in its poverty incidence at 23.5 percent in 2023, down from the 28 percent posted in 2021. However, it remains to be among the poorest in the country, second only to Zamboanga Peninsula that logged a 24.2 percent poverty incidence in 2023.
According to MILF chief negotiator and Bangsamoro Education Minister Mohagher Iqbal, there is a need to hasten the implementation of the commitments under the peace agreement, including the development of the six other camps, for economic growth to be truly inclusive.
“The peace process is moving forward. In the implementation, some aspects of the peace agreement are moving very fast. Some are trailing behind and others are practically not moving. The devil is in the details,” Iqbal said.
He acknowledged that the process would not be easy, but the Bangsamoro people, who have already sacrificed too much over the many decades of conflict, remain committed to upholding peace efforts.
“What we are reaping now, although it’s not so much, we paid this in blood, sweat and tears. It was not given to us in a silver platter,” Iqbal said.
“And right now, we are in a transition. From a conflict situation to a transition, and during the transition, we have the normalization process. And if the normalization process succeeds, then we can go to the regular government already. So that’s very important,” he added.
Galvez, for his part, underscored the importance of the decommissioning of MILF combatants and the recovery of firearms in the Bangsamoro region amid the transformation efforts.
At least 26,145 former MILF combatants have been decommissioned over a decade after the CAB was signed, but the last phase of the process has not yet resumed.
Iqbal reaffirmed the MILF’s commitment to the normalization process, but urged the government to hasten the dismantling of private armed groups in the region.
“We are decommissioning our weapons, and yet there are so many private armed groups in Mindanao. So we are no longer armed, and yet the private armed groups are still there, including those belonging to some politicians,” Iqbal said.
But regardless of the delays or bumps along the way at the level of decision-makers, life goes on in communities in the Bangsamoro, including the families living inside Camp Darapanan.
“The war has claimed so many victims that it has become hard to dream. But now we see that what would have been spent before on bullets can now be used to improve our lives,” said Camp Darapanan operations commander Garex Shariff.
Shariff’s son, who is now in his fourth year in college taking up civil engineering, is also a beneficiary of the scholarship program extended to decommissioned MILF combatants and their families.
“Never in my life did I imagine that this would happen, that my own son would be a government scholar,” he said.
