For brevity, MILF is the largest and now most influential Islamic movement in the southern islands
of Philippines. It has embarked on peace negotiation with the Government of the Republic of the Philippines with the facilitation of the Government of Malaysia since 2001.
MILF leaders initiated diplomatic visits in 2009 to EU and OIC member-countries besides Japan that signify to join the formation of the International Contact Group (ICG) accompanying the GRP-MILFceasefire mechanisms, the Malaysian-led International Monitoring Team (IMT) was formed with Brunei, Libya, and Japan as mutually agreed by both Sides in 2004.
MILF is a religious and political organization made up of Islamists engaged in liberation struggle based in their traditional homeland embracing Mindanao, its adjacent islands, and the Sulu archipelago. Sunni Islamic seamless identity of self and nation is a part of the Moro narrative which is a historical process itself in modernity. During the past 500 years every generation asserted in arms Moro rights to independence. Political struggles occurred within the MIM, Mindanao Independence Movement, espousing a nationalist Muslim Manifesto to emerge popular in 1968. Current Islamic resistance to oppression as a common cause for all Muslim social, political and armed organization is, above all, the struggle against injustice, the freedom to resist imposition, and the right to determine their future political status.
As Contemporary Islamic Movement
MILF combines Bangsamoro nationalism with Islamic contemporary fundamentals but not extremism. Its fundamental ideology commits the movement “to make the words of Allah supreme” in the life of the Bangsamoro people. MILF sponsors extensive social service network and da’wah acitivity. The MILF core leadership is pragmatic in its influence over politics. Its logic of utility of armed resistance embraces jihad, and its peace negotiation takes on incremental, strategic steps of irreversibility. MILF has adopted hudna (truce) as a flexible Islamic warfare practice.
MILF and the Bangsamoro People’s Struggle for Justice and Islamic resistance
Formed in the early 1980s, the MILF was led by its founder Ustadh Salamat Hashim until his death in 2003. A graduate of Al-azhar, his worldview of on Islamic polity draws heavily ideas of Hasan al-Banna and echoes those of Sayyid Qutub on social justice. Writing extensively on jihad issues as they relate to the struggle for justice and recognition of the legitimate rights of the Muslim communities in southern Philippines, Salamat drew on the Moro historical experience.He expounded on this with progressive radicalization based on interactions between MILF leaders and masses of people themselves for their revolutionary practical necessities.
Sharing this longing for justice, a true mujahid by means of Islamic resistance converts himself to be a vanguard of the MILF revolutionary struggle.For the MILF Amir, jihad “remains to be the only criterion in examining the validity of, and degree of a Muslim’s faith” in the light of present realities obtaining in the Bangsamoro homeland.
Ideology and the MILF Sunni Islamic doctrine Scholars note MILF’s ideological position which makes it clear that the Moro Question is deeply rooted in ‘the illegal, immoral incorporation of the Moro ancestral domain’ into the Philippine unitary state system. Muslim public intellectuals and interlocutors alike call this ideology: “the justness of the original position,” argues MILF lawyer Michael O. Mastura.Salamat expressed this public sentiment in his 2003 Letter Appeal to America for its annexation of the Moro homeland without their ‘plebiscitary consent’. Thus, it renders possible a universal appeal to the basic principle of American ‘fairness and sense of justice’ to use U.S. good offices to rectify “the error that continuous to negate and derogate the Bangsamoro people’s right to seek decolonization.” It is often cited as justification for the late leader’s guidance to the Bangsamoro mujahid on themes in modernity, viz., ‘liberty and freedom’; ‘popular sovereignty’’; ‘economic grievances’ as facets of Muslims both as an individual and as member of the community. “To see faces of individuals behind those issues,” MILF ideologues like Mohagher Iqbal and Maulana Alonto admit, explaining that Salamat’s successor-amir as chairman “Alhaj Murad Ebrahim does not focus the military and political line alone but above it, the Sunni doctrine.”
Balancing Sovereignty and Self-Determination
Memorandum Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD) was a compromise; so it proffered a new modality to end the age-old armed conflict in the Muslim South. What the MOA-AD litigation amounted to was when courts succeed to unravel imperfections of the Constitution as constant.
1976-1996 Government-MNLF Agreements
Contemporary armed confrontations saw its most acute phase from 1968-1976. The freedom fighters became mujahids; and the dead earned, martyrdom. But it deeply changed many lives especially those who lived through martial rule from 1972 onwards. It indeed recast modern Filipino responses to the mass-base formation of MNLF, the shorthand for Moro National Liberation Front that organized resistance to State violence. A clandestine umbrella organization in the decade of 1970s, the MNLF demonstrated the Moro is accustomed to armed-fighting the Marcos military dictatorship. And they are a people used to defending their homeland and their birthright identity over ‘one nation, one faith’.
The Bangsamoro people gained political space when the OIC granted them an Observer Status in 1974 writing the MNLF as “the sole representative”. For Muslim publics, the Tripoli Agreement of 1976 signed between the Government and MNLF facilitated by Libya under OIC auspices was, at that point, a political project that could deconstruct the Philippine unitary state on all fronts. Again Moro leaders made missteps for extra-constitutional remedy under Aquino’s revolutionary statecraft in 1986 to reach the democratic conditions that could re-adjust political arrangement in the structures of a predominantly Catholic Country once hostile to Muslim interests. Over thirty years, Indonesia brokered the GRP-MNLF Final Peace Agreement which the Ramos presidency and Nur Misuari signed in 1996. Yet its failure to reify roots in Islamic ‘treaty devise’ and constitutionally to evolve an autonomous polity on that foundation as ‘constant’, the political solution lies ahead in a comprehensive compact.
2001-2010 Government-MILF Peace Talks
During this first decade of the 21st century, MILF engaged the GRP in a problem-solving oriented peace process. In the immediate aftermath of Estrada’s ouster, Arroyo reversed her predecessor’s policy of “all-out-war” in 2000. In statesmanlike way, she invited Mahathir for Malaysia’s facilitation of the Government-MILF peace talks. The mindsets that guided impetus for the new formula envisage in the 2001 GRP-MILF Peace Agreement of Tripoli the ‘totality of relationships’ between the Bangsamoro and the Filipino nation. Extensive poverty in ARMM could be a fertile ground for radical left-wing views; but, evidence of economic stress in rural areas points to other logical conclusions. ‘Consociational approach’ is not a matter of absorbing the Muslim South to the Metropole and into the political economy of the North. The unitary structures of governance, North and South, must be transformed into new state constructs with borders redrawn to entrench an associative juridical entity.