The following information was sent by Manuel Domes, Projcet Manager for Forum Civil Peace Service (forumZFD)
This Monday, July 14, forumZFD officially launched its publication entitled “Moving Beyond: Towards Transitional Justice in the Bangsamoro Peace Process” in Davao City’s Apo View Hotel. The event was opened by Fr. Joel Tabora, SJ, President of the Ateneo de Davao University, emphasizing that “finding agreement on the nuanced concepts fixed in documents on the negotiating table may be important, but affixing signatures to peace agreements or to a new Bangsamoro Basic Law does not insure peace, nor insulate the future from the evils and wrongdoings of the past”.
Through the publication, forumZFD seeks to contribute to a broader understanding and deeper discourse on transitional justice in the Bangsamoro. The publication’s first part reviews conceptual developments in the field of transitional justice, as well as insights from the implementation of transitional justice measures. It then moves on to lessons learned in the regional context, as well as past experiences with pursuing transitional justice in the Philippines and Mindanao. The final part of the publication leads the discussion into perspectives on transitional justice in the Bangsamoro context. Multiple understandings of truth, justice, reparation, and reconciliation will need to inform an eventual transitional justice program for the Bangsamoro. Localizing transitional justice also implies affirming communities’ distinct concepts of memory, trust, forgetting, and forgiving as important building blocks for transitional justice.
Building peace means contemplating a peaceful future, thinking about better ways for the peoples of a community to live together, initiating processes to address the sources of conflict, analysing past grievances and implementing actions for more stability and justice. Can we build the future without youth? This brochure addresses the role of African youth in peace work, the hurdles and sources of potential. Young people very often find themselves in the centre of conflicts, either as desperate perpetrators of violence, as the pawns of power-hungry manipulators, or as members of an armed group as a means to make a living.