Another bloody Basilan clan war settled amicably

COTABATO CITY - Army officials and local executives in Basilan on Tuesday settled amicably another deadly clan war in the province, ending hostility between protagonists whose clashes had affected thousands of innocent villagers.

Basilan Gov. Jim Salliman and the director of the Bangsamoro regional police, Brig. Gen. Prexy Tanggawohn, separately announced on Wednesday the reconciliation of the feuding Lajid and Jakilan clans in Al-Barka town through the intercession of Brig. Gen. Alvin Luzon, commander of the Army’s 101^st Infantry Brigade and local executives.

Luzon and officials of the 45^th Infantry Battalion had brokered a peace covenant that leaders of both clans, among them Al-Barka Mayor Jaydeefar Lajid and Mujib Jakilan, signed during a symbolic rite on Tuesday at the headquarters of the 101^st Infantry Brigade in Barangay Tabiawan in Isabela City in Basilan.

The event, witnessed by Major Gen. Ignatius Patrimonio, commander of the military-led anti-terror Task Force Orion covering Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi, Bangsamoro Parliament Member Muslimin Jakilan and the Islamic theologian Abdulmuhmin Alyakanie Mujahid, ended the intense political rivalry between the Lajids and Jakilans. 

The two clans, whose encounters had exacted fatalities on both sides, also turned in nine assault rifles and a .45 caliber pistol to Army officials, representatives from Salliman’s office and from the Basilan Provincial Police Office as a goodwill gesture that sealed their peace compact.

“We in the Basilan provincial government are grateful to the Army officials who had settled this clan war with the help of the police and local officials in Al-Barka and in municipalities around,” Salliman said.

The Basilan PPO, in a report on Wednesday to the Police Regional Office-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region here, stated that the “rido” between the Lajid and Jakilan families was the eighth that the 101^st Infantry Brigade had settled since January this year with the help of the Salliman administration and officials of different municipal police stations in the island province.

Rido means family feud in most southern Mindanao vernaculars, usually triggered by affronts to clan pride and honor, deep-seated political differences, land conflicts and squabbles for control of vote-rich communities.  

Officials of the Bangsamoro Business Council and the chairman of the Bangsamoro Board of Investments, Mohammad Omar Pasigan, were elated with the settlement by the 101^st Infantry Brigade and the Basilan provincial government of more than a dozen rido involving heavily armed clans in Basilan since 2023.

“These feats help boost our efforts to project Basilan as the new investment hub in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao,” the lawyer-entrepreneur Ronald Hallid Dimacisil Torres, chairman of the BBC that has members in all of BARMM’s six provinces, said.