DAVAO CITY (MindaNews / 15 August) – Rodrigo Roa Duterte is the first Mindanawon to become President but the President who put Mindanao on the Philippine map of priorities was Fidel Valdez Ramos, a…
DAVAO CITY – Rodrigo Roa Duterte is the first Mindanawon to become President but the President who put Mindanao on the Philippine map of priorities was Fidel Valdez Ramos, a retired general who negotiated peace with Moro and communist rebels and championed Mindanao as he pushed for its transformation from the country’s “backdoor” to the “main door … to our ASEAN neighbors.”
The peace agreement with the MILF – the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro — would be signed in 2014 under the Aquino administration and the enabling law establishing the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao to replace the ARMM was passed and ratified under the Duterte administration. Newly-elected President Ramos wasted no time in focusing on Mindanao.
Mindanao leaders pushed for an equitable share of the budget for the country’s second largest island grouping, to allow it to catch up with Luzon and Visayas. In the late 1980s, then Senator Aquilino Pimentel Jr. in a privilege speech, lamented that Mindanao was “the country’s cash cow that gets only dog food.”
The EO provided that the PA for Mindanao will also chair the Mindanao Economic Development Council created through Executive Order 512 of President Aquino on March 19, 1992 – less than two months before the May Presidential elections – and implemented under the Ramos Presidency. Medco preceded what is now the Mindanao Development Authority.
Ramos’ successor, Joseph Estrada, abolished the OPAMIN set-up and the CORD through EO 7 issued on September 30, 1998. In its stead, he appointed PARECOs or Presidential Assistant for Regional Concerns, initially two for Mindanao and later three, but their presence was hardly felt in Mindanao until his ouster in January 2001.
That 1993 statement, Dominguez said in August 1996, “continues to reverberate today because it is a major policy statement and we have seen so many follow-through policy changes by the national government in terms of implementing that policy.”The Mindanao Development Authority noted that from 1994 to 1997, there was a surge of investments in Mindanao. Air routes within BIMP-EAGA opened: Davao-Manado, Davao-Kota Kinabalu, Zamboanga-Sandakan.
The NUC’s recommendations provided the framework for a comprehensive peace process through EO 125 issued on September 15, 1993, which also paved the way for the creation of the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process that same year. The Six Paths to Peace which are “pursued in a simultaneous and integrated fashion” are: “pursuit of social, economic and political reforms; consensus-building and empowerment for peace; peaceful, negotiated settlement with the different rebel groups; programs for reconciliation, reintegration into mainstream society and rehabilitation; addressing concerns arising from continuing armed hostilities; and building and nurturing a climate conducive to peace.
Dominguez, in his tribute to Ramos on August 8 at the Heritage Park, recalled how in the aftermath of the sacking of Ipil in April 1995, Ramos asked him to organize peace and development summits in key cities in Mindanao, and the President attended these not just to deliver his opening remarks but he “stayed the entire conference, sat in on a number of the workshops, received the outputs of every single conference in six months and in so doing, not only wiped out the impact of the Ipil raid but...
“That we have made Mindanao the focus of our concerns fittingly demonstrates its vital role in the overall enterprise of nation building. We must forge the peace first in Mindanao because it has suffered the most and harbors many of the most depressed communities in the land,” said Ramos, who in 1995, became the object of wrath of those opposing a peace settlement with the MNLF. At one point, during a Mindanao visit, protesters threw tomatoes at him but missed their target.
In April 2002, Dominguez told a civil society forum in Davao City that “the present value of the economic cost of a never-ending conflict would be at least $2 billion over the next 10 years,” estimated to be 30 million pesos a day at the exchange rate then, based on ‘very preliminary’ findings of a World Bank study which cited the ‘hidden costs’ of the conflict, including profits made from investments in south-western Mindanao that were reinvested or spent in other areas; defense budgets used...
Under Ramos’ term, several power-generating projects were launched to address the power shortage, among them the Mt. Apo Geothermal power plant which was unveiled and inaugurated on December 14, 1996 and was fully synchronized to the Mindanao grid on December 23, 1996.In the education sector, Mindanao finally had its own University of the Philippines in Mintal, Davao City in 1995, nearly 50 years after UP Visayas in Miag-ao, Iloilo was established in 1947.
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