COTABATO CITY - Voters in the Bangsamoro should pick a presidential candidate who is a "friend" of the autonomous region, an official said Thursday.

Mohagher Iqbal, the region's Minister for Basic, Higher and Technical Education, said that in his 50 years in the armed struggle, he had only cast his vote twice.

“We should choose a president who is a friend of the Bangsamoro people, and has the academic preparation, deep experience in public service, demonstrated untiring service to the people, decisiveness, and someone who satisfies the moral uprightness to lead the country,” Iqbal said.

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“Despite of what we have achieved so far, I came to realize that we are still in the face of struggle. That struggle is more complex, more vicious, and definitely the hardest of them all. That struggle now is the field of political arena and all its surrounding dirty games... And now I finally realize that there is a need to exercise our right of suffrage, and collectively, we should once again be one body for a single cause of choosing a worthy candidate for the position of President in the Republic of the Philippines” he added.

Iqral stressed that the Bangsamoro people should choose a candidate who will preserve and defend the region's cause, "who will assure that our women and children will not suffer the atrocities of the past and instead wake up to a bright and colorful future brought about by living in peaceful, harmonious and developed community."

“We cannot support a candidate who will bring back the horrors of the past or not honor the sacrifices our brothers and sisters,” said the official who was actively involved in the peace negotiations between the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the government.

Iqbal said a leader who is a pure politician and does not understand the cause of the Bangsamoro will definitely be a problem to them.

He is apprehensive that the continuity of the aspect of policing will be at stake after the change of administration. It is stated in Article 2, Section 2 of Republic Act 11054 or the Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL) that entry into the Philippine National Police of the members of the MILF and of the Moro National Liberation Front shall be availed of within a period of five years from ratification of the organic law.

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“However, up to now, we have yet to commence this process. And the MILF and MNLF are the losing end. Why? Because of the reckoning period. If the elected president on May 9, 2022 will be strict in the implementation of this law, we only have two years left to facilitate the entry of our members to the Philippine National Police,” Iqbal said.

He also noted that the Bangsamoro Government has yet to set up the Bangsamoro Justice System, and the Transitional Justice and Reconciliation Commission under the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (CAB) and BOL.

“I don’t want to think what will happen to us if the elected head of the State is one who has no genuine concern for the Bangsamoro and instead will work to reverse the gains we have achieved,” Iqbal lamented.

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THE MORO STRUGGLE

The Moro rebellion began in the late 1960s when massacres by paramilitary groups, seemingly backed by the government at that time, left many Filipino Muslims in Lanao and Sultan Kudarat areas dead.

Al-Hajj Murad Ebrahim, leader of the MILF who now sits as Bangsamoro chief minister, was already in the underground movement at the onset of that revolution.

“The struggle of the Bangsamoro, basically, is a political struggle for our rights for self-determination. Even before the colonial period ay nakipaglaban na kami sa colonizers. We wanted to sustain our independence as a nation. But unfortunately, we didn’t succeed,” Murad told ABS-CBN News in an interview at the MILF stronghold, Camp Darapanan, a day after the January 21, 2019 plebiscite.

That struggle, Murad explained, began ages ago with the inclusion of their land under the Philippine Republic without the consent of the Bangsamoro people. Although the Moros embrace their Filipino identity today, the dream of governing their own land according to their own set of customs, systems, and beliefs, had remained unfulfilled, Murad added.

While people in the different Philippine islands and the Bangsamoro south have their own struggles, all of them faced a common adversity when former President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. declared a nationwide martial law.

“In 1972, when President Marcos declared martial law, the situation worsened for the Moros. The atrocities were all out there, and we saw the military behind it. At first, there will be these groups, but it appears the government was supporting this because we saw the Philippine Constabulary with them,” Murad said.

Murad was initially a member of the MNLF led by Nur Misuari, but he later joined Hashim Salamat in the 1980s to form the MILF when the two factions failed to agree on how to implement the 1976 Tripoli Agreement, a historic deal that gained the support of all Moros and member-states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation at that time.

The rebellion persisted for decades until the MILF, then led by Murad, struck a landmark peace deal with the government, headed by President Benigno Aquino III in 2014. After several setbacks, the new Bangsamoro Organic Law was passed by Congress and signed by President Rodrigo Duterte in 2018.

The Bangsamoro region has nearly 2.59 million registered voters in the May elections, according to the Comelec data processed and analyzed by the ABS-CBN Investigative and Research Group.

-- Report from Lerio Bompat; with report from Patrick Quintos, ABS-CBN News

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