MILF wants new chairman for gov't peace implementing panel

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March 17, 2026 | 7:16pm

COTABATO CITY, Philippines — The Moro Islamic Liberation Front has temporarily suspended, since March 12, the supposedly sustained connectivity of its peace implementing panel with its counterpart in the government, whose chairperson resigned last January.

The chairman of the MILF’s central committee, Ahod Ebrahim, said on Tuesday that they are saddened by the government’s peace implementing panel being bereft now of a chairperson since the resignation from the post of the retired Army Gen. Cesar Yano in January.

Ebrahim had served as an appointed chief minister of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao from 2019 to March last year. He was replaced as BARMM government’s figurehead in March 2025 by the chief of their Bangsamoro Islamic Armed Forces, Abdulrauf A. Macacua, via an appointment by President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.

The two peace implementing panels that Ebrahim was referring to are jointly overseeing the implementation of all the provisions in the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on Bangsamoro, or CAB, between the national government and the MILF, a product of 22 years of peace talks.

The truce paved the way for the replacement in 2019 of the then 27-year Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao with a more empowered Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao that has an 80-seat parliament that has members from both the MILF and the Moro National Liberation Front, which has a separate truce with the national government.

“The absence of an empowered and functioning government peace implementing panel due to the resignation of its chairman has left a gaping hole in the implementation of the (government-MILF) peace agreement,” Ebrahim said. 

He said that while the Office of the Presidential Adviser on Peace, Reconciliation and Unity and the Office of the Special Assistant to the President are actively involved in programs complementing the government and MILF’s longtime peace overture, it should be the mechanisms both sides had established that should jointly implement the CAB that negotiators from both sides had crafted together.

Member-states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, composed of more than 50 Muslim countries, including petroleum-exporting nations in the Middle East and North Africa, helped the government and the MILF craft the CAB in 2014. 

"The MILF is hoping for the prompt designation (by President Marcos) of a chairman for the government peace implementing panel so that the shared work of complementing the implementation of the Comprehensive Agreement on Bangsamoro may proceed with clarity, certainty and renewed momentum,” Ebrahim said.

Members of BARMM's regional lawmaking body, among them the lawyer Naguib Sinarimbo, the physician-ophthalmologist Kadil Sinolinding Jr., who is also health minister of the regional government and their chief minister, Macacua, and Bangsamoro Labor and Employment Minister Muslimin Sema, who is chairman of the MNLF's central committee, said they are optimistic that President Marcos will soon appoint a new chairman for the government's peace implementing panel to deal with its MILF counterpart.

"We are very optimistic about that. We want a new chairperson for the government's peace implementing panel," Macacua told reporters on Tuesday.