CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY, March 2, 2011—The third member of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front(MILF) peace negotiating panel yesterday said that while other victims of human rights abuses of the Marcos Dictatorship are now getting their compensation after decades of waiting, not a single apology has been issued towards the Bangsamoro people.
“Philippine regimes came and went since Marcos was ousted but never was there an attempt by any of these regimes to offer as much as a verbal apology to the Bangsamoro people for what was done to them,” said Robert Maulana “Bobby” Marohombsar Alonto in an electronic mail to TIGBALITA in answer to a query in regard to a report posted on the MILF website.
The www.luwaran.com report quoted MILF Committee on Information deputy chairman Khaled Musa as having asked Judge Manuel Real of the US District Court of Hawaii if the “tens of thousands of Moros who were victims of massacres also entitled to compensation?”
Real had approved the distribution of US$7.5 million to settle a lawsuit filed by thousands of victims and families of victims of human rights abuses such as torture, execution, abduction and harassment during the Marcos regime. The distribution of the payment of US$1,000 to each of the victims included in the lawsuit started on March 1.
But according to Alonto, Musa’s question was a rhetorical one meant only “to underscore the immensity of the injustice committed against the Bangsamoro people, which until now remains unrectified.”
“Monetary compensation is not what we need; it is our right of self-determination and freedom that we want back. I hope this is clear enough,” he said.
Alonto said that the MILF, through “Brother Khaled Musa” has the right to ask the question “given the fact that during the reign of the Marcos dictatorship, the Bangsamoro people suffered the most. No Muslim Moro
family, except perhaps those who collaborated with the Marcos dictatorship, has survived unscathed in one way or the other the brutality of the dictatorship.”
During the Marcos iron regime, government forces and state-sponsored paramilitary forces such as the Ilonggo Land Grabbers Association (ILAGA) perpetrated several bloody massacres against innocent Moro civilians in the 1970s. Some of these massacres were the Manili Massacre, Kauswagan Massacre, Tictapul Massacre, Malisbong Massacre in which 1,000 Moros were killed en masse, Patikul Massacre which killed 700 Moros, and Pata Island Massacre which killed an estimated 3,000 Moros.
“They have not filed their petitions; they are dead, and therefore they cannot expect anything forthcoming,” Musa was quoted in the MILF website report as answering his own question to Real.
Alonto also said that after EDSA I that overthrew the Marcos dictatorship in 1986, various regimes continue one after the other to use the Bangsamoro people as laboratory guinea pigs in the experiment of autonomy.
But none of these regimes even issued an apology, not even a simple “sorry” to the Muslims, he lamented.
“The Vatican apologized to the Muslims for the Crusades in the Middle Ages, the Australian government apologized to the aborigines in Australia for their cultural marginalization and the discrimination against them, and the US and Canadian governments lifted the indigenous peoples ('Indians') of North America to the status of 'First Nation'. But the Bangsamoro people have remained as laboratory guinea pigs in the 'experiment at autonomy', to use President Noynoy Aquino's words, which all failed because there was no sincere attempt on
the part of government to concede even a modicum of genuine political autonomy to the Moros let alone address the root cause of the Bangsamoro Question,” he said. (Bong D. Fabe)
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