Duterte to grace Inaul Festival in Maguindanao provincial capital

MAGUINDANAO-- All is set for the visit of President Rodrigo Duterte to Buluan town Monday, February 11, to grace the Maguindanao provincial Inaul Festival and distribute lands to agrarian reform beneficiaries.Duterte will lead the distribution of certificates of land ownership awards, or CLOAs, to farmers in the presence of provincial and municipal officials facilitating the cultural activities highlighting the Inaul Festival.The week-long festival, the third in three years, will culminate on February 14.The Inaul Festival showcases the iconic Inaul fabric Maguindanaons have been producing using wooden looms for centuries now.The office of Maguindanao Gov. Esmael Mangudadatu is promoting the traditional craft by providing weavers with technical support and by brokering linkages with markets outside of Mindanao and abroad.This year’s Inaul Festival, partly a thanksgiving celebration for the ratification via a plebiscite on January 21 of the Bangsamoro Organic Law, or BOL, was launched on Thursday.For contemporary historians, the Inaul cloth symbolizes the resilience of closely-knit ethnic Maguindanaon communities in the raya, or upper delta, and the ilod, or the downstream zone of Maguindanao.Maguindanao’s indigenous non-Muslim Teduray people have also been wearing clothes made of Inaul fabric even before Shariff Mohammad Kabunsuan, an Arab-Malay cleric from Johore, now part of Malaysia, set foot in what is now Cotabato City in the 14thcentury to spread Islam. We are thankful to President Duterte for his scheduled engagement with agrarian reform beneficiaries in Maguindanao province while we are having this Inaul Festival, Mangudadatu said.Mangudadatu said Sunday he will reaffirm to Duterte and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front the commitment of the provincial government to the bilateral peace efforts of Malacañang and the MILF. This year’s Inaul Festival is partly a thanksgiving celebration for the ratification of the BOL that we believe is a lasting solution to the Mindanao Moro issue hounding the nation since the late 1960s, Mangudadatu said.The BOL is the enabling measure for the replacement of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao with a Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, or BARMM, as agreed by the national government and the MILF.The Regional Police Office-Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao and the Army’s 6thInfantry Division started deploying uniformed personnel Sunday around Buluan, the capital town of Maguindanao, as part of the security preparations for Duterte’s visit on Monday.