Coronel-Ferrer, Miriam

In a world torn and threatened by wars, the work of advancing and sustaining peace is an urgent imperative. It is also extremely difficult. The issues are complex and often intractable. But through time, conscientious peace-makers have forged and collected the vital tools of conflict resolution and peacebuilding.

Women, in their gendered roles of settling disputes, healing, and nurturing, have risen to the task in many conflict-ridden communities. However, they have typically been left out of the decision-making processes that are crucial in ending wars and transforming the polity.

This is changing, albeit slowly. An exemplar in this shift is Miriam Coronel-Ferrer of the Philippines. Her impassioned engagement in political issues started in the late 1970s, when, as a student activist, she joined the resistance against martial rule. After the 1986 People Power Revolution that toppled the Marcos dictatorship, Coronel-Ferrer felt the need to find peaceful resolutions to the many armed conflicts that continued to divide the country.

With other women peacebuilders, Coronel-Ferrer initiated the drafting of the Philippines’ first National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security. The draft was eventually adopted by the government in 2010 as part of its commitment to the UN Security Council Resolution 1325. The landmark document urges all member states to ensure the protection of women’s rights during armed conflicts, mainstream the gender perspective in peace keeping and peace building, and advance the role of women as peacebuilders at all levels.

In the same year, she joined the government panel tasked to negotiate with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), subsequently becoming its chief negotiator in the latter part of 2012. In this role, she was consistently focused and determined, humble but tenacious, and empathetic and open to the position of others. Soon, she earned admiration and respect for her analytical command of the issues and skill as a negotiator.

In 2014, the Philippine government and MILF signed the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (CAB), ushering the transition process that created the new Bangsamoro entity with a more empowered autonomous government. As crucially, the agreement also provided a process for the decommissioning of weapons and combatants and the transformation of conflict-affected areas into peaceful civilian communities.

The CAB has been described by international observers as a model for the integration of gender-responsive provisions and the inclusive participation of women and civil society organizations. Coronel-Ferrer sees this achievement more modestly: “There is no perfect agreement, but we make it more imperfect by leaving women out of the process.”

Coronel-Ferrer’s long-standing peace advocacy has gone beyond the country’s borders. She has since been invited to be part of international teams looking into the conflict situations in East Timor and Cambodia. She had provided support work for the peace programs of the Carter Center in its work on Sudan and Syria. In 2018, she became a member of the United Nations Standby Team of Senior Mediation Advisers, the only one from Southeast Asia so far. In her three years with the UN, she was deployed to support the mediation and preventive diplomacy work of UN missions in places like Afghanistan, Kosovo, Iraq, the Maldives, and the ASEAN region.

In 2020, Coronel-Ferrer co-founded the Southeast Asian Women Peace Mediators, a pioneering group of women engaged in convening safe spaces for dialogues and supporting mediation initiatives in countries like Myanmar and Afghanistan. Today, this is her main work. In addition, she also sits as member of the board of trustees or advisory bodies of several key conflict resolution initiatives such as the International Crisis Group, the Global Network of Women Peacebuilders, the Harvard University-based Negotiations Strategies Institute, and the Peace Treaty Initiative.

“Conflicts,” she wisely observes, “are best resolved not through the annihilation of one party, but by the mutual transformation of all players towards a common vision and shared responsibilities and accountability.”

In electing Miriam Coronel-Ferrer to receive the 2023 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes her deep, unwavering belief in the transformative power of non-violent strategies in peace building, her cool intelligence and courage in surmounting difficulties to convey the truth that it is through inclusion rather than division that peace can be won and sustained, and her unstinting devotion to the agenda of harnessing the power of women in creating a just and peaceful world.

It has been 35 days since the outbreak of the most horrendous war yet of the 21st century running its course before our eyes in Israel and Palestine.

Over 20 months of bombardments have passed since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

The year before that, the coup of Feb 2021 in Myanmar.

And long before these crises, in many parts of the world, occupiers lording it over other people, regimes using violence against their own.

More than 10,500 people have been killed in Gaza, 1,400 in Israel,—almost half, children. Hundreds of thousands have been forcibly displaced… In the West Bank, the killings are alarmingly spiking up.

In Ukraine, the death toll has reached 9,614 civilians with twice that number injured over the course of 19 months.

Since Myanmar plunged in a civil war with many fronts, an average of 130 civilians have reportedly been killed by junta airstrikes, shelling, gunfire, etc.

I thank the Ramon Magsaysay Foundation for giving me this platform to raise my voice of concern. To draw attention to the desperate need for us to wake up, and to push to find lasting solutions to these nightmares.

To affirm that, might is not right.

The Ramon Magsaysay Awards and its Transforming Leadership program, with its motto on the greatness of spirit, however, is not a platform of gloom. On the contrary, it is a platform to spread the message of hope….

Hope. A beautiful four-letter word pregnant with life’s meaning.

Hope that we find in the stories of efforts that have paved ways out of large-scale, longstanding political violence.

Through stories such as our Bangsamoro peace process. Not a perfect process nor agreement. A very slow one – 17 years of talks and by now 9.5 years of unfinished implementation.

Still, an example that bidding for peace through political negotiations can still produce comprehensive peace agreements, a scarcity nowadays.

An example that, through collaborative action and committed partnerships, a peace agreement can be sustained, and the governance infrastructure for meaningful autonomy, a reordering of the relationship between the national state and the substate created, not only to give life to the principles of the right to self-determination but also to engender more democratic, responsive, participatory politics within and among the Bangsamoro.

Of course, we know that this process will take time. It has to prevail over both conservative and extremist mindsets. It must consequently remove the guns from politics and everyday life. Most important, it has to tame the unruly behavior of the political class, and eventually produce transformative leadership in the next batches of leaders to come.

I thank the Ramon Magsaysay Foundation, its Board of Trustees (past and present), partners, and all those awardees who came before the four of us here because they are what this Foundation is all about.

I thank you for this encouragement to promote the stories of courageous women and men who never tired in building peace, every day, everywhere, for every person, one step at a time through peace and human rights education, mediation, humanitarian work, campaigns, and so on, in every imaginable and yet to be imagined ways. A good representation of them are here with us by the way, my fellow peace advocates.

I offer this recognition to them who keep the faith, the faith that it does happen that history, history will be written by the victors, where the victors are those from all sides who did not forsake our humanity but defended it.

Most important, I offer this to the many women in their communities, often ignored, often sidelined, but now empowered to believe in their own strength and capabilities, in no small way by being part of an evergrowing movement, a sisterhood of peacebuilders, mediators, negotiators, conflict preventers, and transformers.

I said it before and will say it again, sisterhood rocks.

It rocks for peace and justice.

Maraming salamat po.