“The MNLF has not yet unleashed its military potential because we don’t want to be at odds with the OIC and its member-states – 57 member-states, all sovereign states, members of the United Nations in good standing – you know, we cannot annoy them, we cannot defy their demands that we maintain the peace,” he also said. “And we continue to uphold the achievement that we made across the negotiating table.”
Adding insult to injury, Misuari said, is the government’s attempt to impose its Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD) with the MILF on the GRP-MNLF peace agreements.
The MOA-AD seeks the establishment of a BJE that would also cover the Mindanao-Sulu-Palawan region – with the ARMM as the core of the new region. As regards governance, the agreement provides among other things that:
“The relationship between the Central Government and the BJE shall be associative characterized by shared authority and responsibility with a structure of governance based on executive, legislative, judicial and administrative institutions with defined powers and functions in the Comprehensive Compact. A period of transition shall be established in a Comprehensive Compact specifying the relationship between the Central Government and the BJE.”
The MNLF leader said that trying to impose the MOA-AD on their peace agreements with the GRP is an insult to his group.
“It is not good (for the Philippine government) to treat us the way they do,” Misuari said. “We have signed a formal peace agreement and now they are trying to sign a MOA which they want to impose or superimpose on our binding international agreement. This is tantamount to slapping the face…of the MNLF.”
He said that before signing the MOA-AD, the GRP would have done well to send a written communication to the MNLF and the OIC stating that it no longer feels bound by the 1996 Final Peace Agreement. “We would not have been hurt by that,” Misuari said.
The MOA-AD was to be signed by the GRP and the MILF last Aug. 5, but the Supreme Court on Aug. 4 issued a temporary restraining order on its signing following a petition by North Cotabato Vice Gov. Emmanuel Piñol, supported by another petition filed by Zamboanga City Mayor Celso Lobregat and two congressmen. The Supreme Court has since been hearing oral arguments on the MOA-AD.
Origins of the conflict
Moro historian Salah Jubair traces the roots of the present conflict in southern Philippines to the US annexation of Mindanao and Sulu into the Philippine territory in 1946. Jubair argues that the Bangsamoro is a people with a socio-political, economic, and cultural system distinct from that of the Filipino people.
The inclusion of Mindanao and Sulu in the scope of the 1946 “independence” granted to the Philippines paved the way for large-scale non-Muslim migration to the two islands. This large-scale migration, which began in the 1950s, brought with it the problem of land grabbing.
At some point the government even instituted a Mindanao Homestead Program, which involved giving land parcels seized from Moros to landless peasants from the Visayas islands and Luzon and also to former communist guerrillas who availed of amnesty. This was intended to defuse the peasant unrest and the revolutionary war that was staged in the late 1940s and early 1950s by the communist-led Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (HMB or People’s Liberation Army), which was basically a peasant army.
The Jabidah Massacre of 1967 triggered widespread outrage among the Moros and led to the formation of the MNLF that same year. A breakdown in the GRP-MNLF peace talks in 1978 led a group led by Salamat Hashim to break away and form the MILF.
As the armed conflict between the GRP and the MILF rages in Mindanao because of an aborted agreement, another bigger conflict threatens to unfold, this time with the MNLF, because the government failed to implement a previous agreement. (POSTED BY Bulatlat.com)
