Door 6, LD Apartment, Santan St., Butuan City Tel: (085) 342-3281, E-mail: ppvrcaraga@gmail.

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Our Commitment to Peace Building in our Communities We, the members of the People Power Volunteers for Reform, Caraga Regional Chapter (PPVR Caraga) hereby state our untiring commitment in the pursuit of peace. We have long witnessed hostilities between our government and rebel groups, particularly the CPP-NPA-NDF (CNN) that has been waging a national protracted peoples war since the late 60s and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) that has been fighting a separatist struggle following disagreement of its leaders to the autonomy framework adopted by their original organization, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF). The MNLF, which arrived into agreement with the Philippine government, thereby facilitating the creation of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) in 1989, has itself recently waged a violent confrontation with the state armed forces in a siege in Zamboanga city that killed close to a hundred people and caused untold sufferings and severe damage to properties. Various efforts for facilitating peace processes aimed at finally ending the wars and attaining sustainable peace have been work on by different administrations in the post martial law years. Over time, it has been shown that attaining peace is a more difficult job than waging war, so much so that peace processes have not come to their final conclusion. We welcome developments in the negotiations between the GPH and the MILF with the recent signing of the Framework Agreement on the Bangsamoro and three annexes: (1) the Annex on Transitional Arrangements and Modalities, (2) the Annex on Revenue Generation and Wealth Sharing and (3) the Annex on

Power Sharing. We are aware that whatever gains and losses in the peace negotiations will affect our region. On the other hand, we lament the collapse of the talks, both formal and informal, with the CNN. Today, more than ever, we see the imperatives of peace. When before, the rationale of the peoples struggles that gave them the impetus to wage war is founded basically on poverty and injustices, now we confront a much stronger enemy that has started in the recent years to inflict horrible damage on our people; more disastrous than any of the local wars we have witnessed in our generation. We are confronting climate change that seeks justice for what humankind has inflected on the environment. War against each other will only aggravate our incapacity to confront the continuing wrath of nature. Now, more than ever, the need for achieving peace is at its strongest imperative. The warring factions should be able to arrive into the resolution of conflicts and build unity to wage war against environmental hazards and disasters. We thank God for sparing our region from natural disasters at this time. But we know that unless we take care of our environment, it may just be a matter of time when our turn comes to face our own Sendong, Pablo or Yolanda. We in PPVR Caraga see the need for a sustained campaign for peace that will help keep the public constantly reminded that there are solutions to the wars, and that we need to redirect our efforts towards building resiliency in the face of disasters and instability. To achieve these goals, we need to build a peace constituency to broaden the peoples participation in the peace process and address issues that cause conflict, instability and wars. We hereby reaffirm our commitment to work for peace and support the peace process led by the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process (OPAPP) while we will likewise work for the increased participation of our people in finding peace in our homes, our communities and our nation. December 14, 2013 Butuan City and Caraga Region