“Ustadz Habier Malik said the tripartite meeting would serve as a venue for threshing out what could be wrong with the GRP and what could be wrong with the MNLF in the implementation of the 1996 Peace Agreement,” Tulawie said.
Flashback
The MNLF traces its origins to a massacre of between 28 and 64 Moro fighters recruited by the government in 1968 for a scheme to occupy Sabah, an island near Mindanao to which the Philippines has a historic claim.
Sabah ended up in the hands of the Malaysian government during the presidency of Diosdado Macapagal (1961-1965). His successor Ferdinand Marcos conceived a scheme involving the recruitment of Moro fighters to occupy the island.
The recruits were summarily executed by their military superiors in 1968, in what is now known as the infamous Jabidah Massacre.
The Jabidah Massacre triggered widespread outrage among the Moros and led to the formation of the MNLF that same year. The MNLF waged an armed revolutionary struggle against the GRP for an independent Muslim state in Mindanao.
The Marcos government, weighed down by the costs of the Mindanao war, negotiated for peace and signed an agreement with the MNLF in Tripoli, Libya in the mid-1970s. The pact involved the grant of autonomy to the Mindanao Muslims.
Negotiations between the GRP and the MNLF went on and off until 1996, when the two parties signed a Final Peace Agreement which created the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) as a concession to the group.
Sulu is one of four provinces under the ARMM: the others are Basilan, Maguindanao, and Tawi-Tawi.
Renewed hostilities
In October 2001, hostilities broke out anew between the GRP and the MNLF. The military was in hot pursuit of Abu Sayyaf bandits who had abducted tourists in Sipadan, Malaysia. At one point, the military had announced the defeat of an “Abu Sayyaf” contingent in Talipao, Sulu.
The MNLF, however, said that it was its guerrillas, not Abu Sayyaf bandits, who were killed by the military.
The massacre in Talipao led the MNLF, just five years after signing a peace agreement with the government, to once more take up arms. MNLF founding chairman Nur Misuari, a former political science professor at the University of the Philippines (UP) who was then ARMM governor, said the Talipao Massacre was a “violation” of the 1996 Peace Agreement.
Misuari, who was then in Malaysia, ended up being arrested and subsequently detained in a military camp in Sta. Rosa, Laguna (38 kms south of Manila). He is currently facing rebellion charges.
Military officials have repeatedly accused the MNLF of coddling “terrorist” groups in its turf but this has been denied by MNLF leaders. (Bulatlat.com)
* The 12th ASEAN Summit was supposed to be held in Cebu last December. It was, however, postponed to January – purportedly due to a storm that hit the country in mid-December. It finally pushed through in Cebu last month.
