Large acts have large consequences, some of them unintended. When Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines in 1972 and confiscated all private guns, Muslim-Moros went into rebellion.

In Manila, private guns meant private armies and crime everywhere. But for Moros, ‘private’ guns were the only defense against historical waves of ‘Christians’ moving in from the north, applying European law to historically communal Moro lands, titling them, settling and considering that what they had taken was ‘theirs,’ the rest negotiable.

The government in Manila backed them, ‘Christian’ public opinion ignored the consequences.

Unlike the other Southeast Asian states with frontier insurgencies, the Philippines has never given a damn about its biggest problem, assimilating and playing fair with their fellow nationals, the Moro in Mindanao. They are ‘the other.’ One needn’t bother about ‘the other.’

The long-ruling elite in Manila judges everything accordingly. For example, corruption under the current president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, has almost reached marcosian levels, but she’s "one of us, she went to Assumption, an elite school, so corruption is ok, even when her husband demands an almost 200 percent cut on a contract with China".

I asked an elite audience once, of ‘young presidents’ of corporations, how many Muslims they employed. Out of 35, one had… one.

The only exception was in the mid-1990s, when the Philippines’s only elder statesman, Fidel V Ramos, was president, and with diligence and the help of Indonesia’s Suharto and Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad (who could otherwise provide rebels their only possible rear bases), negotiated and kept alive a settlement with the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF).

Subsequently, his successor, the actor Joseph Estrada, wanting to put his own stamp on a solution, bashed MNLF bases and declared an unnecessary war.

Under Arroyo, it’s been back and forth. Last year, her team reached a serious possible settlement, guaranteeing the right to all-out secession in 20 years if the agreement didn’t work. Manila was betting that with the benefits, it could deliver in that time frame and the rebellion would be tamed. The Moro would have become true Filipinos.

This year, negotiating in Kuala Lumpur, her team came up with terms good enough for the now dominant group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).

The amount of territory to be administered autonomously was increased, but independence was not part of the MOU. That Manila should have been so lucky.

But all hell broke loose in the capital when the MOU was made public, with its proposed ‘federal system’ to enable a large autonomous territory to come into being. Shouts of "Betrayal! Sell-out! Giving away national territory!" broke out.

And then critics saw a more lethal problem. No one in Manila doubts that Arroyo would like to find a way to extend her term, expiring in 2010. She grew up in the Palace, after all, during her father’s presidency.

Governing elite must relinquish some power

In parallel, she and others had been pressing for a constitutional convention under which, principally, the Philippines would convert to a parliamentary system. Guess who could be the prime minister — forever — and get to that happy position by using present palace payoffs?

Well, that’s what Marcos did in 1972 and got away with it. So her MOU in fact involved a Trojan horse—using the virtuous argument for a constitutional amendment to settle Mindanaoan issues as an unvirtuous back door for perpetual power.

So there were both bad and good reasons for the attack on the MOU. The bad one was the bad faith Filipinos were showing toward their Moro brothers, after their own team had signed the MOU, this too after years of give and take. The Moros weren’t being given anything they hadn’t for centuries enjoyed.

The good reason is that everyone smelt the rat. No one has advocated longer a federal devolution and a parliamentary system, for example, than Ramos. But he came out for a delay on any such constitutional change until after 2010 — once Arroyo had left the palace once and for all, with or without the billions pilfered.

It’s that simple. No one quite wants to give the real reason, but Manila intrigues have once again shattered hopes for a just settlement in Mindanao. This means the problem lingers. There is no leverage on the wilder Moros, as in the terrorist-bandit Abu Saif brigade.

It means the military and police can’t concentrate on what probably is an even larger threat to the country’s security, the communist New People’s Army, which has returned in force from the peace it conceded under Ramos’s more enlightened leadership.

Let the governing elite in Manila return to its traditional ways, hoarding all the profit from new investment and letting only crumbs fall off the table for the 95 percent of middle class and poor, and of course rebellion will start back up.

It’s too early to say if the Philippines will come to its senses and honor the MOU. It will be difficult. The Supreme Court has ruled against it for the time being.

An enlightened sales job will be needed—along with a presidential pledge on a Bible to vacate the Palace in 2010—with perhaps some token concessions from the MILF, for the parties to get back on course. Don’t be optimistic.

PROF W SCOTT THOMPSON is a national security expert who served four American Presidents and is a professor emeritus at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He is the author or editor of 13 books on world political issues and resides in Washington, Bali and Manila.