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Filipino Muslims Celebrate Autonomy
4-09-2014
SULTAN KUDARAT — Ending a four-decade conflict, joyous Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) celebrated the signature of a deal that would create a new, autonomous Muslim homeland in the southern Philippines.
"The comprehensive agreement on the Bangsamoro is the crowning glory of our struggle," Muslim rebel leader Al Haj Ebrahim Murad was quoted by Reuters, in a reference to the new region, which takes for itself the name used for Muslim and non-Christian natives of southern Mindanao island.
Murad speech came as Philippines and MILF signed a final peace pact on Thursday, ending about 45 years of conflict that has killed more than 120,000 people in the country's south.
Various armed Muslim groups have been fighting since the 1970s for an independent Islamic state or autonomous rule in the south, which they regard as their ancestral home, and the conflict has claimed tens of thousands of lives.
Hundreds of rebels, wearing camouflage uniforms and pointing assault rifles to the sky, shouted "Allahu akbar", or "God is greater", as they watched the historic moment on a television screen in a grassy field.
"I hope my boy will be able to finish college and not be an MILF fighter, like me," Senior MILF commander Usop Pasigan, 65, said he took up arms at the age of 17, told AFP as he stood alongside many other elderly soldiers in their military fatigues.
Losing three brothers in the fighting, Pasigan hops to be a farmer and for his son to be able to live a normal life.
MILF, the country’s biggest Muslim group, has been struggling for an independent state in the mineral-rich southern region of Mindanao for some four decades now.
More than 120,000 people have been killed since the conflict erupted in the late 1960s.
Celebrations
Celebrating peace, thousands of MILF fighters and supporters gathered at the Muslim rebel camp in Maguindanao to celebrate the conclusion of the deal.
Elsewhere in Mindanao, thousands of Muslims held prayer rallies and celebrations.
"The mood is very festive," MILF official Nasrullah Abdullah told Reuters.
"We are so overwhelmed that members and supporters flocked here to the camp."
For Jamira Mapagkasunggot, 56, a member of the MILF women's auxiliary battalion, peace would mean being able to live without the constant fear of death.
"Most of the women have lost a father, a son or a nephew," she told AFP at Camp Darapanan, where rebels and their families live inside a sprawling compound of coconut groves and corn fields.
While Mapagkasunggot was optimistic about the process, she also acknowledged the many potential pitfalls that lay ahead.
"We fear some groups might not be supportive of these peace talks," she said, referring to a wide range of smaller armed groups that roam the impoverished and often lawless southern Philippines that are opposed to the peace process.
Among them is the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF), which split from the MILF in 2008 because it wanted to continue pursuing independence.
Mindanao, the birthplace of Islam in the Philippines, is home to more than 5 million Muslims.
Muslims make up nearly 8 percent of the total populace in the Philippines, which Islam reached in the 13th century about 200 years before Christianity.
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