COTABATO CITY – Even before the historic parliamentary elections in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) on Sept. 14, two winners from non-Moro Indigenous Peoples (IPs) have been chosen to serve as members of the regular Bangsamoro Parliament.
The non-Moro IP election process was held here Tuesday by the Non-Moro Indigenous Peoples Committee for the Selection of Non-Moro Sectoral Representatives to the first regular BARMM parliament.
“They are the first members of (the Bangsamoro) Parliament chosen via a quiet, customary, traditional and very orderly selection process that I witnessed,” Commission on Elections (Comelec) chairperson George Erwin Garcia said in an interview on Wednesday.
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“We already have two IP parliament members even before the Sept. 14 elections,” he added.
Tuesday’s convention was an opportunity for the participating IPs to come together and uphold their customary laws and traditions in choosing who will be their voices in the parliament.
The six NMIP tribes that participated during the convention witnessed by Garcia and several other observers were the Limbubungan Higaonon, Erumanen ne Menuvu, Blaan, Dulangan Manobo, Lambangian, and Teduray.
Their representatives to the Bangsamoro Parliament are not chosen through the ordinary popular election but based on customary laws, indigenous political structures and consensus-building.
Before the regional convention, each recognized NMIP tribe conducted its own tribal assembly to determine, through the tribe’s Indigenous Political Structure (IPS), their delegates to the regional convention.
Each tribe sent two potential members of parliament and 10 nominees to the regional inter-tribal convention where the final decision was made.
Under the Bangsamoro Electoral Code, the selection process requires that 50% of the potential representatives and nominees must be Indigenous women, for equal gender representation.
During the convention, the delegates unanimously agreed that the Teduray and Lambangian tribes would be first in the rotation as NMIP sectoral representatives to the parliament.
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Teduray Jo Genna Jover was selected as the female nominee and Lambangian Timuay Leticio Datuwata as the male nominee.
The convention delegates also agreed that the next two parliament members, during the 2031 BARMM parliamentary elections, would come from the Erumanen ne Menuvu and Dulangan Manobo tribes, and the next two would come from the Blaan and Higaonon tribes to complete the rotation, and start again.
Garcia observed how organized the selection process was with no tarpaulin, no campaign materials, no vote-buying and no quarrel, with everything done through consensus and collective decision-making.
“Sana ganito na ang eleksyon natin, hindi lang sa BARMM kundi sa buong bansa, walang namamatay, walang nasasaktan, walang malaking pondo na ginastos (I hope our elections can be like this—not only in BARMM but throughout the country: no one gets killed, no one gets hurt, and no huge sums of money are spent),” Jen Cornelio, a member of NMIP committee, quoted Garcia as saying after the selection process. INQ /mr
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