6th ID, PRO-BAR cite MNLF's peace commitment 

COTABATO CITY --- Regional security officials were elated with the commitment of support from the largest bloc in the Moro National Liberation Front to the anti-terror campaign of President Rodrigo Duterte.

Major Gen. Juvymax Uy, commander of the Army’s 6^th Infantry Division, said Thursday MNLF’s pledge to help the Western Mindanao Command and the Police Regional Office-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region maintain law and order in areas where it has members is a boost to efforts of addressing local security woes.

Muslimin Sema, chairman of the largest and most politically active among two groups in the MNLF, told the commander of WestMinCom, Lt. Gen. Corleto Vinluan, Jr., during a meeting last week that they will actively participate in multi-sector counter-terrorism programs of the Armed Forces and the Philippine National Police.

There is presence of violent religious extremists in some areas where there MNLF forces.

A number of MNLF members and supporters perished in recent attacks by terror groups.

The MNLF was originally founded by the political science professor Nur Misuari, who hails from Sulu, and the ethnic Maguindanaon Ustadz Salamat Hashim, who had studied Islamic theology at the Al-Azzar University in Cairo, Egypt.

The MNLF and the national government are bound to help each other address peace and security issues besetting southern Mindanao by a final peace accord crafted by both sides on September 2, 1996 after about three decades of talks.

Salamat bolted from the MNLF and established in the early 1980s the Moro Islamic Liberation Front whose current chairman, Hadji Ahod Ebrahim, is now appointed chief minister of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

Uy and Police Brig. Samuel Rodriguez, director of PRO-BAR, are cooperating in enlisting multi-sector support to the anti-terror thrusts of the Duterte administration.

“The 6^th ID appreciates this move by the MNLF,” Uy said Wednesday.

More than a hundred members of the outlawed Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters, or BIFF, have surrendered in batches to the 6^th ID since 2017 through the intercession of units under the division and local executives in central Mindanao region.

Three confessed BIFF bombers yielded to PRO-BAR last month and renounced their membership with the group before pledging allegiance to the government in the presence of Rodriguez and other regional police officials.

The BIFF, operating in the fashion of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, has been trying to sabotage Duterte’s separate peace overtures with the MNLF and the MILF.

The group is tagged in all deadly bomb attacks in recent years in provinces covered by 6^th ID and PRO-BAR.

Rodriguez, who has jurisdiction over the provincial police offices in Maguindanao, Lanao del Sur, Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi, said he will direct police officials in the five provinces to embark on peace-building programs involving the MNLF.

“Maintaining law and order in the local communities can be done easier with the cooperation of all stakeholder sectors. The police and military cannot succeed in keeping peace in the barangays without support from the local sectors,” Rodriguez said.

Sema, during his meeting with Vinluan at WestMinCom’s headquarters in Zamboanga City, also assured of the MNLF’s commitment to work, along with the MILF, in pushing forward the peace and development initiatives of the BARMM government.

The creation of BARMM via the Republic Act 11054, also known as the Bangsamoro Organic Law, is a product of 22 years of peace negotiation between the MILF and Malacanang.

There are representatives from the MNLF in BARMM’s 80-member interim parliament.