War in the Philippines has raged for decades due to neglect and bad management

MANILA, Philippines — The works of journalist Patricio P. Diaz would make a comprehensive history of the conflict in the Southern Philippines. He was only in his 20s when he started off as a reporter and columnist for a Mindanao publication.

But covering the conflict continues for Diaz, now 88 years old.

“Conflict was still very manageable” back in 1969, he once wrote in retrospect.

“A problem that could have been nipped in the bud had been allowed to grow into its present crisis through indifference, neglect, miscalculation and misunderstanding,” he noted.

Peace in the region has long remained elusive, although there have been promising recent developments. In March the Philippines government signed a “final” peace agreement with rebel group Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). And on Sept. 10, after several months of delay, President Benigno S. Aquino III submitted to congressional leaders the draft bill that would create a more autonomous region in Mindanao.

This new political region is to be called Bangsamoro. It is set to replace the existing Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). Unlike the rest of the Philippines, it will have a parliamentary form of government. The draft bill lists 58 powers exclusive to the Bangsamoro government, including authority over economic zones and industrial centers.

Writing in his column for MindaNews, Diaz sees many challenges ahead. The biggest hurdle is limited time, as the Bangsamoro region is expected to be set up by 2016.

The House of Representatives hopes to pass the Bangsamoro bill by December this year, and the Philippines Senate by early 2015. Yet even with the lawmakers’ best efforts, the law designating this new region should face stiff challenges before the Philippines Supreme Court.

“Too many possible complications within so short a time seem too real for comfort,” writes Diaz, who still lives in Mindanao and still writes with the same incisive and biting prose as before. (About the peace deal and the future of the Bangsamoro, he recently wrote: “There is no better deal than the best.”)

These are words of caution from the same journalist who has been proven right by history many times in his career.

“Muslim problems should not be taken lightly,” Diaz wrote in a 1969 piece about land disputes in the Southern Philippines. He warned the national government in the same article to do more than just placate Muslim leaders in times of tension.

The warning went unheeded. By the 1970s, rebellion exploded in Mindanao.

In 1989, amid government efforts to legislate an autonomy act for Muslim Mindanao, Diaz wrote that autonomy is good only if it reconciles Christians and Muslims in the region and brings back to the socio-political mainstream the rebel groups MILF and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF).

Autonomy, no matter how constitutional, should be “reconsidered, rethought and revised” if it fails to achieve these goals, he said.

He took issue with the use of the name “Muslim Mindanao” for being divisive. He warned that it is dangerous “to enact an autonomy based on legal and political principles” without addressing squarely the roots of the problem in Mindanao.

That same year, the Philippines Congress enacted a law creating the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

More than 20 years later, President Aquino himself admitted that ARMM has been “a failed experiment. Many of the people continue to feel alienated by the system, and those who feel that there is no way out will continue to articulate their grievances through the barrel of a gun.”

The similarities between this assessment and the scenario Diaz saw coming two decades ago are striking.

With discussions on the Bangsamoro bill ongoing, Diaz notes that the law creating ARMM was never questioned on the grounds of constitutionality. The same is not the case for the Bangsamoro bill.

“We have to prepare for the worst, not just the best,” he writes.