The MILF and OPAPRU Cannot Wait for Trust to Return

OPAPRU’s response correctly defends the peace architecture. It does not address what actually broke — or how the process moves forward when trust cannot be rebuilt.

The MILF’s declaration of a temporary pause on some aspects of engagement under the peace implementation mechanism on March 12 was precise. It was not a withdrawal from the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro. It was not a rejection of the peace process. It was a statement that without a duly mandated government panel chairman, formal bilateral engagement cannot proceed — because the CAB requires authorized representatives on both sides, not proxies, not stand-ins, and not officials whose authority doesn’t trace back to the agreement.

OPAPRU’s response dated 18 March was prompt. It reaffirmed the Philippine government’s commitment to the CAB. It acknowledged the MILF’s “positive” feedback on delivery. It clarified the institutional architecture: OPAPRU manages the overall peace policy agenda; the Government Peace Implementing Panel serves as the bilateral bridge; leadership selection is an internal government process that “should not affect the work of the peace mechanisms.”

All of this is accurate. None of it addresses the actual problem.

The MILF did not pause because it was confused about who does what in the peace machinery. It paused because it had lost trust in the OPAPRU. When one party to a bilateral peace agreement can no longer work with the individuals managing the process for the other side, structural clarification will not restore what was broken.

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This moment sits inside a pattern that should worry everyone working on the Bangsamoro transition. In March 2025, the government displaced the MILF’s own chairman as BARMM’s chief minister — what MILF Vice Chairman Mohagher Iqbal called a “regime change” executed outside the formal bilateral panels. In July 2025, the MILF suspended Phase 4 decommissioning, leaving roughly 14,000 combatants in limbo, with PHP 788 million returned to the national Treasury because normalization commitments remained unfulfilled. In March 2026, the GPIP chairman resigned under pressure from the same office, and the formal bilateral mechanism stopped.

Three episodes. Three instances of the MILF halting a critical mechanism to enforce the agreement’s terms. The MILF is not bluffing. It knows what happened to the MNLF agreement when implementation was managed outside the agreed architecture — how the 1996 peace bled out slowly through hollow autonomy and bypassed institutions until there was nothing left to defend. The MILF will not watch that film twice.

The normalization track — the mechanism through which the peace agreement’s promises to conflict-affected communities actually flow — has been effectively frozen for eight months. Combatants who went through decommissioning on the promise that Phase 4 would follow are still waiting. Communities in former MILF camp areas are still waiting. Families who lost members to four decades of war are still waiting for any meaningful form of transitional justice. BARMM’s 2026 budget stands at PHP 114.7 billion, the highest in the region’s history. Development programming continues. But for the people the agreement was designed to serve, the most consequential track has stalled.

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Here is the honest assessment that the government’s response avoids: trust between the MILF and OPAPRU may not be rebuildable on any timeline that the peace process can afford. Trust between parties in a long conflict is not a switch. It is built slowly, across years, through accumulated evidence of good faith. Once broken, it rarely fully returns. Asking for its restoration may be asking for something that cannot be delivered.

But this is not the end of the road. It should not be.

The CAB was never designed for conditions of full trust. It was designed precisely because trust was fragile. The bilateral panels, the joint bodies, the Third Party Monitoring Team, the international witnesses, the Independent Decommissioning Body — this entire architecture exists to make the process functional even when the parties do not fully trust each other. Compliance is built into the structure. Accountability does not require goodwill. It requires working mechanisms.

The more honest and actionable question is not: how do we rebuild trust? It is: how does the process move forward in conditions where that trust is absent?

Three things need to happen. The GPIP must be given genuine operational independence from OPAPRU — a chairman with a direct mandate from the President, reporting directly to the President, whose authority does not pass through OPAPRU. This is not a personnel preference. It is what the CAB’s bilateral architecture requires.

Second, all formal bilateral engagements must be routed through the mandated channels. Where OPAPRU can contribute to policy coordination, it should. Where it displaces the GPIP as the primary bilateral interface, it undermines the agreement. The distinction matters and both parties know where the line is.

Third, performance must replace personality as the basis of the relationship. Third-party verification bodies — the TPMT, the IDB, the ICG — must be activated to measure and report on compliance. When accountability is visible and external, the process can function even between parties who do not trust each other’s intentions.

International partners have a role here as well. Engaging the peace process through OPAPRU directly or other informal channels — because it is more accessible or more convenient — inadvertently validates the displacement the MILF is contesting. The formal panels exist because accountability lives there. Partners who care about outcomes should engage accordingly.

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I’ve watched enough peace processes to know that the ones that survive are rarely the ones running on warmth between officials. They are the ones where the mechanisms are strong enough to hold even when the relationships are cold.

The CAB has those mechanisms. They were built for exactly this kind of moment. The question now is whether the government will use them as designed — or whether it will continue to manage the process through channels that the MILF has repeatedly said it cannot accept.

The MILF and OPAPRU cannot wait for trust to return. They need to make the institutions work.

(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Camilo “Bong” Montesa of Cagayan de Oro is a lawyer and professor based in Pasig City. He has spent three decades in conflict and peacebuilding work in the Philippines.)