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ANGELINA Jolie, Ambassador of Goodwill for the United Nations High
Commission for Refugees, is being requested by the Moro Islamic
Liberation Front (MILF) to now go on an observation tour of all the
refugee shelters set up in Mindanao, specifically in Lanao del
Norte, Maguindanao and North Cotabato. The MILF publicity stunt
calling upon the high profile Hollywood actress to assume cognizance
over the upsurge of hostilities in affected Central Mindanao
provinces follows the collapse of peace negotiations and the
escalating ruinous effects of the war between government forces and
the Moro rebels. It is, however, the MILF that drew first blood.
When the MOA signing failed to proceed because
of the hostile reactions of surprised stakeholders and local
government officials who were never apprised of the vast extent of
the delineations of the Bangsamoro ancestral domain claims, three
MILF military forces, particularly those headed by Commander Umbra
Kato, Commander Bravo, also known as Abdulrahman Macapaar and
Commander Aleem Pangalian, started their genocidal rampage in
civilian communities throughout Central Mindanao in utter disregard
of human life. Any international recognition of the rebel
organization’s legitimacy within appropriate bounds of
self-determination must have terminated with this genocidal rampage.
Dirtying their hands with the blood of innocent civilians throughout
those communities cannot comprise a viable basis for the MILF to now
call upon the most famous ambassadress of the United Nations and
investigate government military for causing Mindanao’s internal
refugee crisis, when its own rebel commanders under its command and
authorization have primarily caused such bloody, violent rampages.
It has shown that MILF leadership does not have full control over
its ground commanders, or that having full control, it has allowed
such ground commanders to wreak havoc.
Certainly, there is a vast distinction
between a legitimate nationalist or religious endeavor, or an
internationally recognized legitimate albeit armed struggle for
autonomous rule, from terrorism. In whatever language, the
expressions of violence that have consequentially caused the
humanitarian disaster of internal refugees in Central Mindanao
cannot be less than terrorism. The indiscriminate killings, hostage
takings, armed assaults on civilians, rampant kidnappings, the
pillaging and plundering of whole villages with their residential
communities, agricultural products and farm livestock are typical
expressions of terrorist violence, even genocidal terrorism, which
are considered crimes against humanity under national and
international laws.
However, the government is cautioned to
distinguish between legitimate political dissent from terror crimes.
Since acts of terrorism usually, but not exclusively, take place in
the context of political conflict, the government must be able to
determine the legitimacy of such conflict. Conflict itself is not
necessarily illegitimate but can be deemed part of the human
existence and can even be a positive mechanism of social and
political change. It can be a major productive force in the
evolution of the relations within and between societies so long as
it is not accompanied by violence.
Violence, disruptive and destructive, however,
is precisely what visited Mindanao with the rebel forces causing
mass intimidation and hysteria. In challenging the monopoly of
violence of the state, the MILF assures its followers and the public
audience that it can equal the violence of the state’s military
with its own fierce firepower. In so doing, it has proven the
state’s incompetence and inability to protect its citizens,
highlighted by the threatening remarks of former Army General
Hermogenes Esperon in refusing military assistance and protection to
the civilian communities in North Cotabato. In this political
conflict, the terrorists are “pulling” the government forces
into using similar tactics, thus the actual threat of military
rampages on innocent Muslim civilian communities during the fasting
season of Ramadan in the Muslim world. And they have been partially
successful in proving that government forces, which continue to
bombard Mindanao’s Muslim communities with heavy artillery, are
engaging in religious persecution by refusing free religious worship
to the Muslims in the time of Ramadan. This quickly erodes, in the
minds of the Bangsamoro and Lumad peoples, whatever moral upper hand
that government initially held during the MILF genocidal rampages.
If government acted with restraint during the
season of Ramadan, refusing to pursue the genocidal terrorists, it
would have continued holding the moral high ground and attracting
international support for the eventual labeling of the MILF as
nothing more than a terrorist organization. It, however,
accomplished the opposite in failing to restrain its military
excesses, bringing harm to the defenseless and innocent and
allowing itself to be provoked into committing the same atrocities.
The moral difference between the conduct of government soldiers and
Muslim terrorists has grown smaller, highlighting the cause that the
Bangsamoro people are indeed a separate race, and maybe just
convincing Angelina Jolie to visit the displaced peoples of the
Bangsamoro Juridical Entity.
ericfmallonga@yahoo.com
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