Philippines' Bangsamoro region votes in first parliamentary elections

Voters in an autonomous region of the southern Philippines went to the polls on Monday to elect their first parliament, a milestone in a long peace process aimed at ending decades of insurgency and violence.

The Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, or BARMM, spans five provinces, three cities and 63 villages grouped into eight special geographic areas. Nearly 2.4 million people are registered to vote, and election officials are targeting an 80% turnout after the polls were postponed for several years.

Eighty seats are up for grabs: 40 for political party representatives, 32 for district representatives and eight for sectoral representatives. Voters select one regional party, one district representative and six sectoral representatives. The 40 party seats are allocated to nominees in proportion to each party's share of the vote.

Unlike the national presidential system, the region's chief minister is not chosen directly by the public. Parliament members will elect the chief minister from among themselves by majority vote at their first session.

The BARMM was carved out of Mindanao, the southern third of the Philippine archipelago, where centuries of colonial rule by Spain and the United States, along with the settlement of Filipino Christians, reduced Muslims to a minority in a resource-rich area. Since the 1970s, about 150,000 combatants and civilians have died in the southern Philippines, and development has lagged in what remains the country's poorest region. Private armies and long-running clan feuds have compounded the violence.

Under a 2014 peace agreement brokered by Malaysia, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the largest Muslim rebel group, abandoned its goal of a separate Muslim state in the largely Catholic country in return for broader autonomy. Its 40,000 fighters were to be demobilized and given livelihoods and other support to return to civilian life.

The Bangsamoro region replaced a poverty-stricken five-province autonomous area with a larger, better-funded and more powerful entity, governed by former guerrilla leaders during a transition that ends with these first regular elections.

Last year the Moro Islamic Liberation Front suspended the disarmament of its remaining 14,000 fighters, saying the government had not fully met socio-economic commitments under the 2014 deal. Its central committee decided to postpone the decommissioning of those combatants and 2,450 weapons, according to David Diciano, then a presidential assistant helping oversee the region's transition.

The Institute for Autonomy and Governance, a policy and research center based in the region, has flagged the incomplete decommissioning and the front's split into two rival political parties as potential sources of violence that could deter voters.

More than 20,000 military and police personnel have been deployed to secure the vote. "We have just one goal: for them to be able to vote," said Commission on Elections Chairman Erwin Garcia. "All our preparations and efforts would be in vain if our fellow citizens couldn't vote."

Michael Henry Yusingco, a senior research fellow at the Ateneo Policy Center, wrote in the online portal Access Bangsamoro that parliaments without a party ethos rooted in collective responsibility, mutual respect and the common good risk becoming arenas of personal rivalries, factional disputes or transactional politics. He said regional parties should now demonstrate such an ethos to sustain parliamentary democracy, noting that the BARMM's history of clan politics, electoral violence and patronage-based loyalties poses formidable challenges.