Walking the tightrope: New ARMM governor to face gamut of problems

CAMP SIONGCO, Maguindanao — Whoever is elected governor of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) on Aug. 8 will surely walk the tightrope.

The ARMM, first established through a plebiscite in 1990, originally covered only Maguindanao, Lanao del Sur, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi, but was expanded to include Basilan and Marawi City in a referendum in 2001.

About 80 percent of the ARMM’s 105 municipalities are impoverished, known hotbeds of Islamic militancy and are locked in bloody conflicts involving influential Muslim clans.

In the past five years, reports have circulated persistently about the presence of foreign terrorists, particularly the regional terror group Jemaah Islamiyah, in some parts of the ARMM, thus further setting back the region’s economy.

One major issue that would confront the incoming ARMM governor, who would assume office on Sept. 30, barring any legal hitches, is how to account for some P1 billion in missing contributions to the Government Service Insurance System deducted from the salaries of the region’s thousands of teachers in the past four years.

Since 1990, more than 20 key personnel of the ARMM government, some of them directorate staffers of devolved agencies, have been victims of still unsolved vendetta killings. The latest victim was Murshid Tutuh, regional port manager, who was gunned down in front of his office in Cotabato City more that six months ago.

Although separated by ethnic divides, political leaders of the ARMM were at first optimistic about the region’s socio-economic strides through self-governance and a yearly infrastructure subsidy of P615 million from 1990 to 1995.

The mechanisms for self-governance were first laid down by the region’s pioneering governor, Zacaria Candao, a Maguindanaon lawyer who worked out the devolution to the regional government of the functions and powers of about a dozen line agencies, earning for the ARMM governor’s office the moniker "little Malacañang."

Candao’s successor, former Ambassador Lininding Pangandaman, an ethnic Maranaw, became popular throughout the region for his construction of the 145-kilometer Secretary Narciso Ramos Highway connecting the cities of Cotabato and Marawi during his stint as governor from 1993 to 1996.

Pangandaman, however, did not run for re-election in 1996 to pave the way for the candidacy for regional governor of Nur Misuari, founder of the Moro National Liberation Front, which signed a peace pact with the government on Sept. 6 that year, exactly nine days before the third ARMM elections.

For most peace advocates in the region, it was when Misuari was at the helm of the ARMM government that the region’s socio-economic and political atmosphere deteriorated.

"Hundreds and hundreds of Misuari’s followers looked up to the ARMM as a source of employment then as if it was an employment agency. He had no way but to accommodate and employ them, causing the regional bureaucracy to bloat tremendously," said a former member of the Misuari Cabinet.

Highly placed political leaders in the ARMM said it was former President Fidel Ramos and Speaker Jose de Venecia who jointly engineered the installation of the revolutionary Misuari to the regional leadership to hasten the MNLF’s assimilation into the political mainstream after waging a 30-year bloody secessionist war in Mindanao.

Misuari, however, apparently realized that governance, the path to peace that he had chosen, was not an easy route to lasting peace in the region, still hounded by the vestiges of the so-called Mindanao conflict in the 1970s.

A ‘Paper Tiger’

In less than a year after his assumption into office, Misuari was already ranting about his lack of administrative power and fiscal capability to transform the war-devastated MNLF communities. He branded the ARMM a "paper tiger."

Observers, however, said Misuari and his trusted lieutenants merely lacked the knowledge of public administration. It was, in fact, during Misuari’s governorship when dozens of foreign donors and non-government organizations poured in huge socio-economic grants to areas covered by the Sept. 2, 1996 peace accord.

From 1996 to 2001, not a single foreign investor came to the region to venture into viable business projects. The area’s investment climate worsened with former President Joseph Estrada’s military adventurism in many parts of the ARMM, which subsequently resulted in the fall of all 41 "minor" and "major" camps of the secessionist Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

Misuari is now languishing in a police detention facility in Sta. Rosa, Laguna as he is being tried for leading a bloody mutiny in Jolo, Sulu two weeks before the November 2001 regional elections, which he then feared would boot him out of power.

Parouk Hussin, chairman of the MNLF’s foreign affairs committee, took over as ARMM governor on Jan. 5, 2002 and since then, has tried to revitalize the ARMM economy by building linkages with foreign governments and international funding agencies.

Hussin is seeking a second term as an independent candidate. The Lakas-CMD (Christian, Muslim Democrats), under whose banner he was elected in 2001, has anointed Mayor Datu Zaldy Ampatuan of Shariff Aguak, Maguindanao as the administration candidate.

Voters in the region predict a three-cornered gubernatorial race among Ampatuan, ARMM Vice Gov. Mahid Mutilan and Maguindanaon businessman Ibrahim "Toto" Paglas.

Ampatuan, whose candidacy is supported by four of the five provincial governors in the ARMM, has promised to address the non-remittance of the regional teachers’ GSIS contributions, and initiate reforms to restore the confidence of the regional folk in the autonomous set-up as a vehicle for Moro empowerment.

Ampatuan’s father, Maguindanao Gov. Datu Andal Ampatuan, provincial chairman of the Lakas-CMD, is known for his reconciliation efforts and his continuing advocacy for political unity.

The Ampatuan clan engineered the unopposed candidacies in last year’s elections of 14 of the 28 Maguindanao mayors by brokering traditional "power-sharing deals" among warring political leaders.

Paglas has been using as a campaign pitch his conversion of his hometown of Datu Paglas in the second district of Maguindanao into an investment hub, where foreign and local investors have poured in some $50 million in capital for agricultural ventures.

In his campaign sorties, Paglas gave assurances that he would focus on generating investments to provide decent jobs to ARMM residents, including secessionist rebels.

Mutilan, a preacher trained at the Al-Azzar University in Cairo, Egypt in the 1970s, is banking on his vision of religious and political solidarity as catalyst for peace and sustainable development in the autonomous region.

All of the candidates for ARMM governor are aware that the region’s socio-economic woes are the main causes of the continuing proliferation of loose firearms across the region.

These same problems could have also caused the wings of the now dreaded Pentagon kidnap-for-ransom gang to spread wide in Lanao del Sur and Maguindanao in recent years.

The same economic constraints are also blamed for the expansion of the fundamentalist Abu Sayyaf in Maguindanao where the MILF, engaged in ongoing peace talks with the government, maintains more than a dozen enclaves.

Addressing all of these problems, with limited fiscal resources and political capabilities, would surely be like walking the tightrope.