What to know as a Philippine region with a history of conflict holds its first parliamentary polls

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MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Voters in an autonomous southern Philippine region will cast their ballots Monday in the region's first parliamentary elections, seen as a crucial step in the quest for self-determination and lasting peace after decades of insurgency and violence.

The Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, or BARMM, covers five provinces, three cities and 63 villages across eight special geographic area clusters. It has nearly 2.4 million voters, with election officials aiming for an 80% turnout after polling was postponed for several years.

Here’s what to know about the Sept. 14 vote.

There are 80 seats at stake in the elections that will determine members of parliament, the region’s legislative body. These include 40 political party representatives, 32 district representatives and eight sectoral representatives.

Unlike the direct voting under the presidential system of the national government, the region’s chief minister, who heads the executive branch, is not elected by voters. Members of parliament will choose the chief minister from among themselves by a majority vote during their first parliamentary session.

Voters will choose one regional party, one district representative and six sectoral representatives. The 40 regional party-representative seats will be distributed to nominees based on a party’s vote share.

Centuries of colonialism by Spain, the U.S. and Filipino Christian settlers turned Muslims into a minority group in resource-rich Mindanao, the southern third of the Philippine archipelago from which the BARMM was carved out. The region has seen decades of intermittent but bloody conflicts over land, resources and political power.

Since the 1970s, about 150,000 combatants and civilians have died in the southern Philippines, while development was stunted in the country’s poorest region. Western and Asian governments feared the tenacious insurgencies could help foster Islamic extremism in Southeast Asia.

The presence of private armies and long-running clan wars has added to the violent mix.

Under a 2014 peace deal brokered by Malaysia, the largest Muslim rebel group — the Moro Islamic Liberation Front — gave up its goal of a separate Muslim state in the south of the largely Catholic country in exchange for broader autonomy. The group’s 40,000 fighters would be “demobilized” and given livelihoods and other help to bring them back to normal life.

The Bangsamoro region was established under the peace deal to replace a poverty-wracked five-province autonomous region with a larger, better-funded and more powerful area, which has been governed by former guerrilla leaders under a transition period that ends with the first regular elections on Sept. 14.

The Moro Islamic Liberation Front last year suspended the disarming of its remaining 14,000 fighters after claiming that the government has not fully complied with socio-economic commitments it made under the 2014 peace deal. Then-presidential assistant David Diciano, who had been helping oversee the transformation of the Bangsamoro region, said in a statement at the time that the Muslim rebel front’s central committee had decided “to postpone the decommissioning of 14,000 of its combatants and 2,450 of their weapons.”

The Institute for Autonomy and Governance, a nonprofit policy and research center based in the region, has noted that the incomplete decommissioning of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front’s combatants as well as the organization’s split into two rival political parties vying in the elections pose a potential danger of violence that may affect voters’ confidence to go out and vote.

More than 20,000 military and police personnel are being deployed to secure the elections, officials said.

“We have just one goal: for them to be able to vote. All our preparations and efforts would be in vain if our fellow citizens couldn’t vote,” Commission on Elections Chairman Erwin Garcia said.

Michael Henry Yusingco, a senior research fellow of the Ateneo Policy Center, in an article published by the online portal Access Bangsamoro, said: “Without a party ethos that is rooted in collective responsibility, mutual respect, and orientation toward the common good, parliaments risk devolving into arenas of personal rivalries, factional disputes, or transactional politics."

He said it is the right time for regional parties to show they can embody such party ethos to sustain parliamentary democracy.

“Clearly, the BARMM’s history of clan politics, electoral violence, and patronage-based loyalties presents formidable challenges.”