Peace process veteran urges Parliament to elect Murad as chief minister

COTABATO CITY — A former government peace process official has argued that the incoming Bangsamoro Parliament should elect Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) Chairman Ahod "Al Haj Murad" Ebrahim as chief minister, saying the unfinished decommissioning of MILF forces makes him the only figure able to bind both the armed movement and the regional government.

In a public Facebook post, Atty. Camilo Miguel "Bong" Montesa said the case for Murad rests not on entitlement but on the structure of the peace agreements themselves.

"Not because the MILF is entitled to a prize," Montesa wrote. "But because governance is only one peg of the peace process. Security and normalization is the other."

Montesa headed the Peacemaking and Peacekeeping Group at the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process from 2008 to 2010, supervising government negotiations with the MILF, and later chaired the Philippine government panel in the tripartite review of the 1996 Final Peace Agreement with the Moro National Liberation Front. He teaches election and administrative law at the Ateneo Law School.

Citing figures on the normalization track, Montesa said about 26,000 MILF combatants have been decommissioned, while some 14,000 fighters and 2,450 weapons remain outside the process. He described Phase 4 as suspended, with camps, transition packages, and transitional justice measures still undelivered.

"Until that work is done, the MILF is still a party across a table, not only a party in a parliament," he wrote, describing the front as half revolutionary movement and half political movement.

Montesa argued that separating the two roles would leave the process without an interlocutor able to close it.

"Murad is the person who can commit the remaining MILF BIAF forces. The chief minister is the person who can bind and steer the Bangsamoro government to finish the rest," he wrote. "If those are two different men, Manila gets a government it can fund and control but not a chairman who still controls residual arms."

He described that arrangement as appearing stable while functioning as "a blocked exit," adding that the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro and the Bangsamoro Organic Law cannot be closed with "one interlocutor who cannot bind the guns and another who cannot bind the government."

Addressing the objection that installing the MILF chairman as chief minister would mix armed and civilian authority, Montesa said the mixing already exists given the combatants still in the field.

He also said Interim Chief Minister Abdulraof Macacua could not commit the Bangsamoro Islamic Armed Forces, noting that Macacua no longer serves as its chief of staff.

"This is not a personality contest. It is commit authority," Montesa wrote.

The September 14 elections produced no outright majority. The Bangsamoro Federalist Party took 31 seats and the United Bangsamoro Justice Party 30 in the 80-member Parliament, with 41 needed for a majority. Montesa's post, written before the final canvass, put both parties at 30 and the BARMM Grand Coalition at about 15.

Murad, who led the MILF through the negotiations that produced the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro and served as the region's first interim chief minister from 2019, was replaced in the post in 2025 and subsequently resigned his seat in the interim Bangsamoro Transition Authority Parliament. He is UBJP president and the party's first nominee, and returns to the legislature when the elected parliament convenes.

The Parliament will convene October 30 and elect the chief minister.