Peace in the Philippines

Peace as a vision is shared by all, not least by contestants in beauty pageants. For sure, beauty and peace go together.

When popular international singing groups come to the Philippines, they skip Mindanao and Davao City. The conclusion is that terrorism and tourism do not go together.
I could not even convince my fellow development workers in Manila to hold a meeting in beautiful Marawi City because they fear for their lives.

Travel advisories are declared by embassies around the world against our islands, even if terrorism is not a monopoly in our part of the world. As a case in point, was there a travel advisory against UK as an aftermath of the London looting nor of the past bombings in their streets? But, this is another story.

Peace is a development issue and so we will all benefit from a peace agreement that will come out of the ongoing peace talks by the government with both the MILF and NDF. Last week, seventeen peace groups and five funding agencies met to discuss past peace programs and the future of work in this field. It was organized by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and graced by other various funders such as AusAID, The Asia Foundation, UNDP, & JICA.

The themes and tools towards the promotion of peace were all shared by the peace groups: human rights, good governance, community based or indigenous conflict and local dispute resolution, community education, access to justice, law and policy reform. Yet, peace remains as elusive as ever. So, I am convinced that conflict is part of life and so what matters is how we address conflict and that there is so much to learn from the methodology and from the journey to peace per se.

My own project was about access to justice and access to courts. We wanted women to have access to justice but the more basic questions were: (a) what kind of laws do we want our women to have access to or (b) what kind of judges’ orientation do we want our women to have access to? As this turns out, our theme is so relevant given the issues in the impeachment trial of Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona.

Since, we could not get a legislative reform of the Code of Muslim Personal Laws (CMPL) from the past 11th Congress, we went to the UN Cedaw Committee through the Philippine Commission on Women ( formerly the NCRFW) The CMPL is a Marcos presidential decree which is one of the results of the 1976 Tripoli agreement between the Philippines & the MNLF.

We shared the Concluding Remarks of the UN Cedaw Committee to the Sharia Court judges who were convinced that, yes since the Philippines is a signatory to UN Cedaw, we are obliged and bound by the provisions of these international standards of human rights.
We published this peace program and it has been translated to a French and Arabic publication and has been a leverage to promote our advocacy worldwide.

If one is into promotion of human rights and your work can be “googled” in the internet as words as generic as “UN Cedaw and Sharia Courts” or “UN Cedaw & Muslim Personal Laws” and it comes out on page one of search results of popular search engines, that is sheer joy, a psychic reward for a difficult work.

Religion is a complete code of life for our Muslim community and it is part of the current ongoing talks between the Philippines and the MILF and so we adopt the following recommendation for the panels: “laws that are human made, shall as much as possible, be consistent with the UN CEDAW, the Philippine Constitution, and national laws.”

We count as one of the results of our peace work, the adoption as a provision in the ARMM GAD (Gender & Development) Code, the UN CEDAW definition of discrimination. The few words written into law in the ARMM will mean a lot of programs and funds in the promotion of the rights and well being of Muslim women and men. This is what we consider as one of the examples of success in peace work in the Philippines.