Civil War Interventions and Their Benefits by Castellano Isaac M.;

Author:Castellano, Isaac M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books

Chapter 4

The Moro National Liberation Front and the Philippine Government

THE CONFLICT

This chapter examines the conflict between the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Filipino government between the years 1975–1988.1 The Moro people, a disputed2 term, are a Muslim minority on the Island of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago consisting of four main groups, the Tausugs, Maranaos, Magindanaos, and Yakans. The Moro have long been marginalized by the Christian majority. Prior to independence in 1945, the Philippines, a country consisting of more than 7,000 islands, was dominated by Spanish colonial masters for three centuries. This was followed by U.S. rule for nearly 50 years. At the end of the World War II the United States ended the colonial era and returned the country to the Filipino people. While the Philippines is a predominantly Catholic nation, throughout Spanish and U.S. colonization the Moro people retained their cultural and sometimes political independence, including Islamic religious practices, despite efforts to convert the population to Catholicism. The Moro people remained a firmly minority population, and there are currently 3.2 million Moro people in a country of 96 million. The slow migration of Christians to the southern Moro lands created the conditions for the conflict documented here. The island of Mindanao was 75% Moro in 1900, and by 1960 had dropped to 25%.3

A substantial resettlement program institutionalized a resettlement policy in the mid-1950s, as then President Ramon Magsaysay encouraged ex-soldiers, ex-convicts, and ex-communists from the north to resettle on Moro lands. The daily arrivals of poor Christian peasants from the north, encouraged by the central government to migrate south,4 created the predictable conflicts. Christian majorities populated traditional Muslim majority towns and provinces, and were the beneficiaries of major government projects to aid in the economic development of the newly transferred population. This was a form of support the Moros had rarely seen from the central government. The Senate created the Commission of National Integration to help resolve some of the disparities between the two groups. However, lack of funding prevented any major reform or systemic resolution to the Moro’s complaints.5

This conflict led to the Moro people seeking independence. 1961 saw the first official legislation for the independence of Sulu, a traditionally Moro dominated region, by a Moro Senator, which was not taken seriously by the political establishment in Manila. Concurrently, many young men traveled to Egypt on scholarship to attend the famous the Al-Azhar University, and returned with a deeper sense of their Islamic faith and connection to government structures, with many gained exposure to military and professional fields.6 A rise in mosques and madras enrollment created the conditions of a more sophisticated political population. By the mid-1960s a more cohesive national identity around a minority status was established.7

These structural developments were followed by what became known as the “Jabidah Massacre” in March 1968, where some 30 young Moro soldiers were executed on the island of Corregidor by Christian officers following an alleged mutiny. The initial denial of the government gave way to inconsistencies in the testimonies as well as a halted investigation and censorship of media coverage.

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