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Marcos and Mindanao: The non-Moro zones

It was not just the Moros who suffered from the brutality of the Marcos dictatorship; all of Mindanao suffered. One would expect the country’s first Mindanawon president to at least acknowledge that.

The contradictions are beginning to show, and it is unfortunate that – for me at least – they go back to Mindanao, President Duterte’s home island.

When the President deemed Marcos a hero and a soldier who fought with honor in World War II, it was bizarre how he overlooked what the dictator did to Muslim Mindanao while remembering General Leonard Wood and Bud Dajo.

The war, argues a couple of the President’s supporters, was a rebellion by a community that wanted to leave the Republic in the first place, and the MNLF was getting military assistance from Libya (a terrorist state) and Malaysia (which refused to return Sabah to us, its rightful owner). Thousands of Moros were killed, wounded and forced to leave their homes – but these were the consequences of war. Besides, Marcos’s war never affected the Christian/settler side of the island.

Alas, not true.

The dictatorship weakened the MNLF by convincing Libya to compel the MNLF to accept arbitration, but it did not anticipate the growth of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). The CPP had overcome its initial setbacks, and through sheer determination and creativity, it expanded in areas where communists had not gone before.

The details of this incredible expansion are still incomplete, but we know its general contours. The Party created a Mindanao Commission to oversee the development of the NPA and the urban underground in the Christian provinces. There were attempts to organize among the Maranaos and Magindanaos, but these fizzled out, with one cadre abandoning the Party and joining the MNLF.

The dictator responded by just expanding the AFP’s killing zone to the entire eastern Mindanao seaboard, the two Misamis provinces, Zamboanga del Norte and Bukidnon. Other parts of the country were not spared: where the revolution spread, the military followed. Soon much of the archipelago had become a militarized zone.