Leaders of civil society organizations (CSOs) also asked President Ferdinand R. Marcos, Jr. to ensure holding of BARMM’s first parliamentary polls as scheduled on October 13, 2025.
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MANILA, June 17, 2025 (SDN) — Is the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) undergoing “political turmoil and power struggles” as claimed by Mindanao-based civil society organizations (CSOs)?
At least this is how CSO leaders portrayed what is happening in the six-year-old Bangsamoro region. And they communicated their assessment to President Ferdinand R. Marcos, Jr. through an appeal posted on social media via Mindanao Lens, a media outfit reporting out of Davao City, Davao Region.
They spoke of what they described “political turmoil and power struggles” and they brought it to the President’s attention.
“We, the undersigned civil society organizations, express our grave concern over the deepening political turmoil and power struggles within the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao and the Bangsamoro Transition Authority,” the CSO leaders, unnamed in the post, claims. None of the so-called CSOs was named in the post either.
They pointed these as “internal conflicts” which they said are posing a “serious threat” to the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro’s (CAB) “successful implementation and completion”.
The CSO leaders said the CAB, signed by the Government of the Philippines (GPH) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), is “a hard-won peace settlement that has brought hope to generations of Bangsamoro people.”
Owing to the GPH-MILF peace pact, the CSO leaders noted how the Bangsamoro people are presently enjoying the “dividends of peace.”
“We are exercising a respectable political autonomy which empowers the Parliament to pass our own laws, approve the budget and determine economic and fiscal policies,” they noted, citing a World Bank report that says the Bangsamoro region’s level of poverty had scaled down to 37.2 percent from a high of 60 percent, “which means approximately 892,000 people escaped poverty between 2018 and 2021.”
The BARMM’s decreased incidence of conflicts enabled farmers and entrepreneurs to put more of their resources in business ventures that added to their income and more opportunities for workers.
Established in 2018 by the Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL) to implement the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (CAB), the Bangsamoro region is made up of the provinces of Basilan, Lanao del Sur, Maguindanao del Sur, Maguindanao del Norte, and Tawi-Tawi, the cities of Cotabato, Lamitan, and Marawi, as well as the Special Geographic Area’s (SGA) 63 barangays or villages — now eight new municipalities — that voted “Yes” in a plebiscite in February 2019 to be under the BARMM jurisdiction.
According to the Philippine Atlas BARMM has 4,404,288 people. It has 116 municipalities: Basilan, 11 municipalities; Lanao del Sur, 39; undivided Maguindanao, 36; Sulu, 19; and Tawi-Tawi, 11. Its component cities are Cotabato (the regional center and capital) in Maguindanao; Lamitan in Basilan; and Marawi in Lanao del Sur. — Jigger Gomez (✓)