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COTABATO City — More than a hundred civil society leaders and peace advocates gathered this week in Cotabato City for the first day of the Kaakbay, Kapayaan: Civil Society Peace and Solidarity Assembly to facilitate public dialogue, consolidate their gains, and discuss what they call are “immense challenges and opportunities in both the Bangsamoro and GRP-NDFP peace processes.”

Organizers of the event said, “We see the critical importance of civil society’s role and participation in ensuring sustainable and enduring peace. We vow to pursue an enabling environment for meaningful people’s participation in agenda building and active citizenship during the political transition, especially in normalization and transitional justice aspects of the overall peace process in and beyond the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.”

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Reiterating its previous demand to also embed transitional justice lens in the Bangsamoro, they stressed, “We have yet to see the Transitional Justice component to catch up alongside the decommissioning element and the cascading of socio-economic packages for the former combatants in compliance with the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (CAB) and its annexes.”

In his keynote speech, Barmm Interim Chief Minister Hon. Ahod Balawag Ebrahim stressed the need for Advancing Moral Governance in Barmm and the role of civil society. Delivered by Assistant Regional Cabinet Secretary Atty. Ayla Herazade Salendab, he said, “The Barmm and its promise of lasting peace and development in the region arose from the labor not only of our brother-in-struggle-and-arms but also of the stakeholders of peace, principally the civil society, which helped build and environment conducive to the peace process.”

“As the struggle has moved from the battlefield to the government offices, we are confronted with another difficult challenge – the challenge of moral governance,” Ebrahim  said. (pr)

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