First published in BusinessWorld. Mario Antonio T. Lopez teaches at the Asian Institute of Management and consults for business, government and civil society.

People are getting very edgy as the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) leaders expressed their “disappointment” not only at the slowness of the passing of the Bangsamoro Basic Law but more so with the amendments being made on it without apparent consultations with them.

I am not a lawyer and cannot so will not debate the opinions of legal minds like Senator Miriam Santiago that the Framework Agreement on which the Basic Law is based is unconstitutional. She points out that the Executive branch of government acted as if it alone was the government, mindless of the roles of both the legislative and the judiciary. This is most unfortunate.

That said, I am not unfamiliar with many aspects of the Muslim Mindanao problem. I have had the chance to work with our brothers and sisters in what has been referred to as the ARMM (Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao) for over 10 years.

We have been at war with our Muslim brethren since the early 1970s. That is over 40 years of dislocated community, family and individual lives, physical harm to peoples, and lost lives. That is over 40 years of stunted growth and development not only in the affected areas in Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago but the whole nation.

This conflict got me started reading more on the history of the area and, indeed, our nation. I was mortified at what little I actually knew even with a University of the Philippines education. Many in my generation of UP grads tended to arrogate to ourselves what we wrongly thought was a superior education in our history.

There are far too many aspects of the problem that our constitutions, including the 1987 Constitution, had never fully accounted for, if at all.

I have had the opportunity to speak with members of the MILF Central Council, with some intensity since 1992 on several occasions related to a capacity-building project for Muslims. We in the Asian Institute of Management had been contracted to provide project management training. Fortunately, the training programs called too for the involvement of non-Muslim ARMM residents.

Other than the desire for complete independence expressed only by a small but aggressive group, a constant message we kept hearing was that our Muslim brothers and sisters are tired and wish to settle to a peaceful life, but not at the expense of their dignity and of justice. The women, especially the women, who bear the most onerous brunt of all kinds of dislocations, deprivations and the physical and emotional trauma to their men, their children and themselves, have risked speaking out openly, loudly and unequivocally against the continuation of the conflict if a negotiated and just peace is possible, and at the soonest possible time.

And now after much hard and sincere work, and the great hope after the signing of the Comprehensive Framework Agreement, we are getting all the flak, creating in the minds of many the distinct possibility of a major disappointing result which can only lead to a resumption of hostilities.

What can we do?

Leadership guru Ronald Heifetz of Harvard (who is here this week) draws analogies from his original discipline, medicine. He says that doctors and patients together typically face three types of medical situations.

He calls the first Situation I. These involve problems that are clear and for which there exist tried and tested response protocols. These require “technical” solutions, often already dictated by codified practice, implemented by technicians, with hardly any need to get patient cooperation. Such are many problems involving law and public administration.

Then there is Situation II, where the problem is clear but the response protocols aren’t and require learning from both the doctor and the patient. Doctor and patient must collaborate to learn more about what responses can and will work.

Last and most challenging is Situation III, where the problem is unclear and no response protocols exist. Here the collaboration of the patient is crucial. Both physician and patient must learn together not only about the situation, but how to cope with and adapt to the situation as it evolves until such time that the problem becomes clear. Hopefully, that time comes. Otherwise, the doctor’s only task is to make the patient’s passing on as painless as possible,

The situation we face in Mindanao places us in either Situation II or III. Why do I say that? Well, because it is no secret that many non-Muslim Filipinos, and indeed, even some of our Muslim brothers and sisters, do not know the full extent and depth of the problem. We have no shared perceptions and sentiments of the situation.

In either case, a resort to laws promulgated as far back as the late 1980s will not prove very productive. This may even prove to be dysfunctional. We need to accept that we will need to create new rules to allow us to operate within a new and emerging situation if we are to avoid conflict and the dismemberment of the republic.

Insisting that we can only resort and must resort to a 27-year-old constitution in a fast-changing and much changed world is one way of ensuring nothing except continued fighting will result. At best, the Constitution can serve those parts of the country where the situation has remained much the same. But in the war-torn parts, we must boldly strike out into areas we have never ventured into before and chart out a new course, bearing in mind that if mutual respect is finally given and mutual trust earned, we can have the peace we want within the context of a still united country.

Heifetz himself warns, “Unfortunately, neither doctors nor patients are inclined to differentiate between technical and adaptive work. Indeed, the harsher the reality, the harder we look to authority for a remedy that saves us from adjustment. By and large, we want answers, not questions. Even the toughest individual tends to avoid anything that require adaptive work, searching instead for an authority, a physician to provide the way out. And doctors, wanting deeply to fulfill the yearning for remedy, too often respond willingly to the pressures we place on them to focus narrowly on technical answers.”

I believe we have a chance to recreate our country into a true democracy of diverse but united peoples moving toward a mutually chosen direction using mutually determined rules. Whether we are up to the challenge remains to be seen. I think we have no choice but to face that challenge. 

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