Women in MNLF saddened by Sulu’s exclusion from BARMM

September 16, 2024 | 6:28pm

COTABATO CITY — Women in the Moro National Liberation and children of its erstwhile guerillas who waged a bloody secessionist uprising for more than 30 years are lamenting the Supreme Court’s ruling excluding Sulu from the provinces inside the Bangsamoro region.

Officials of the MNLF Women’s Committee and representatives of the front’s Anak MNLF Members Group, separately told reporters on Monday, September 16, that such a decision of the Supreme Court, released last week and premised on a petition by Sulu Gov. Hadji Abdusakur Mahail Tan Sr., to exclude the province from the core territory of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao is hurting and something that needs reconsideration.

“That is our wish, for now,” the chairperson of the MNLF Women’s Committee, the full-blooded Tausug Farserina Julkarnain Mohammad, said.

Mohammad hails from Sulu, daughter of a former MNLF combatant, who belonged to a group that figured in deadly clashes with government forces in the 1970s.

Officials of the MNLF Women’s Committee in Lanao del Sur, Maguindanao del Norte, Maguindanao del Sur, Basilan and Tawi-Tawi were separately quoted in radio reports on Monday as saying that Sulu’s having been taken out from BARMM’s political and administrative coverage is for them an affront to the influential Organization of Islamic Cooperation, most known as the OIC, that helped broker Malacañang’s separate peace agreements with the MNLF and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

The OIC is composed of more than 60 Muslim states, including petroleum-exporting nations in the Middle East and North Africa.

It helped craft Malacañang’s Sept. 2, 1996 peace agreement with the MNLF and, subsequently, brokered two compacts with the MILF, the 2012 Framework Agreement on Bangsamoro and the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on Bangsamoro, which led to the crafting by the House of Representatives of the Republic Act 11054 or the Bangsamoro Organic Law, that enabled BARMM’s creation.

The BOL, in effect, replaced in 2019 the then 27-year and now defunct Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao with a more empowered BARMM, after its ratification through a plebiscite in ARMM provinces, including Sulu, in 2019. BARMM’s appointed chief minister, Ahod Balawag Ebrahim, is the chairman of the MILF’s central committee.

Tan, in his petition to the Supreme Court for Sulu’s exclusion from BARMM’s territory, stated that his constituents voted against the inclusion of the province into the region’s proposed area of coverage during a referendum in early 2019.

The Supreme Court had ruled in favor of Tan’s petition, something that saddened members of the MNLF and peace advocacy blocs, some connected to foreign benefactors, helping push forward the peace and development initiatives of the now five-year BARMM regional government.