A generation of conflict in Mindanao has already cost 120,000 casualties and displaced two million people. Since 1997, the government and the MILF have engaged in intermittent peace negotiations. While talks were inconclusive, they did succeed in reducing the incidence and intensity of violence on the ground. The prospects for peace, at one time, appeared encouraging.

Gross and culpable miscalculations of government, resulting in the aborted MoA on Ancestral Domain, have now launched a new spiral of violence. Media reports count at least 62 civilians, 17 soldiers and 7 MILF combatants killed and caused another half-a-million people to flee their homes, the direct and running costs of the government attempt to manipulate the peace agenda to push charter change. As more new blood is shed on both sides, prospects for peace diminish.

The administration claims it still wants to pursue the peace process. But its new framework for negotiations, Demobilization, Disarmament, and Rehabilitation, is unlikely to tempt the MILF back to the peace table. First, the new framework was unilaterally imposed by the government. Second, discussions on demobilization and disarmament usually take place towards the final stages of negotiations, not as the initial agenda of talks.

Organized in 1976, the MILF has maintained an armed presence in Mindanao for over thirty years. By the government’s own estimate, the MILF continues to deploy some 12,000 armed combatants. Why should the MILF defang the force that enables it to exert influence on the ground and pressure on the government? No revolutionary movement would willingly surrender, for the privilege of participating in talks, what its enemy has not achieved on the battlefield.

The other obstacles to a conclusive peace agreement relate to the credibility of the government. The peace panel has clearly lost the confidence of the senators, who will have to approve any peace agreement, and the public, who will endorse the terms of the agreement in a referendum. The President has already dismantled the panel.

From opinion surveys, the panel’s principal, the President, lost her credibility with the general public a long time ago. With her hasty reversal of policy on the MoA, she lost her credibility with the MILF. Both Mohagher Iqbal, MILF chief negotiator, and MILF leader Haji Murad, have alleged bad faith on the part of government. They have wondered whether their cause was not better served by waiting to deal with the next administration.

In declaring that she will not sign a MoA at gunpoint, Arroyo has tried to blame the collapse of the peace process on the MILF. But she misrepresents the sequence of events. Before the guns moved to point at government, her negotiators, presumably with her approval, had initialed the MoA. Political opposition and the intervention of the Supreme Court caused the cancellation of the signing ceremony and, subsequently, the attacks from MILF commanders, not the other way around.

Unprovoked attacks on soldiers and civilian communities by the troops of Commanders Kato and Bravo violated laws, human rights and the rules of war. Perhaps worse from the MILF perspective, these attacks were politically inexpedient and counter-productive. They surrendered the moral high ground to those opposed to the terms of the MoA and gave the government a crack from which to squeeze out of the mess it had created.

Had it managed to maintain control of its commanders, the MILF could have left the government twisting in the wind. The MoA was favorable to the MILF; it could hardly be faulted for out-negotiating their counterparts. But the government would have had to explain to its stakeholders why it had agreed to the deal; and to the international community, why it could so casually abandon the agreement.

Arroyo will not have peace in her time. Sadly, she has also made that day more distant for all of us.