COTABATO CITY: Local executives in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) are calling on the Organisation of Islamic Conference to stop recognising Nur Misuari as “sole representative of the Moro people” to the international bloc helping in the Mindanao peace process.
Talk that Misuari had duped his followers into proceeding to Zamboanga City to attend a peaceful gathering and instead laid a siege, has been circulating among influential mayors in the ARMM, which covers Maguindanao and Lanao del Sur, both in Central Mindanao and the island provinces of Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi.
“The OIC should look into this seriously. What they did was a big embarrassment to the group, an international group that has been trying to help solve the Mindanao Moro problem diplomatically,” said a Maranaw local executive who is related to senior leaders of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) in Lanao del Sur.
ARMM Governor Mujiv Hataman, chairman of the provincial peace and order council, said MNLF insiders have told him that the gunmen now fighting government forces in Zamboanga City were merely invited to participate in an important gathering, not to lay siege on the villages.
“This is the information being relayed to us by the more sensible MNLF people and respectable Moro elders and religious leaders in the island provinces of Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi,” Hataman said.
There are contemporary references and history books that tell of the OIC’s recognition of Misuari as “sole representative of the Bangsamoro people” during the 1970s, something local officials in the autonomous region want to be assessed by the bloc, which is comprised of more than 50 Muslim states, including wealthy oil exporting nations in the Middle East and North Africa.
“The OIC should look deeper and evaluate if Misuari still has the political and moral ascendancy to enjoy such recognition. The MNLF has long fragmented into at least three factions and that is a clear sign he has lost grip of his very own group, so how can he be a representative of the Bangsamoro people,” commented a vice mayor, who is of Yakan descent.
Even Moro clerics, some of them trained in Al Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt and in the World Islamic Call University in Libya, said Misuari could no longer claim being the Moro people’s representative to the OIC owing to the presence now the more religious Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which has an on-going peace talks with government.
Misuari declared Mindanao independent three weeks ago in an isolated town in Sulu, an action precipitated by his having been left out of the government-Milf talks.
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