Misuari cites Cory's role in peace process

COTABATO CITY, Philippines – If Nur Misuari is “Maas,” or grand old man, among members of the Moro National Liberation Front, former President Corazon Aquino is for them their “Maas Babae,” as she had been instrumental in reviving the government-MNLF talks during her term that led to the crafting of a final peace pact four years after she stepped down from the presidency.

For Misuari and his subordinate-leaders in the MNLF’s central committee, it was Mrs. Aquino who “resuscitated” the government’s peace overture with the front that was for them already dead under the Marcos regime.

Misuari, in an e-mailed statement, said Mrs. Aquino broke protocol, ignored threats to her own lives, and met with him in a Catholic monastery in downtown Jolo, capital of Sulu, in 1986, where they agreed to revive the talks that President Ferdinand Marcos started in 1975.

Misuari said he had just returned then from the Middle East, where he stayed for a long time, already disappointed with what he said was the Marcos administration’s “mishandling” of the Mindanao peace effort.

Retired Marine Gen. Librado Ladia, a colonel in a Marine unit in Sulu when Mrs. Aquino met with Misuari there, said the security preparations for the meeting was extensive, “full of emergency contingency plans.”  

Ladia said security officials even utilized a decoy dressed up like Mrs. Aquino, sitting near the window of a military helicopter that hovered around downtown Jolo, waving at people on the streets, while the President was on her way to the venue of the meeting, to confuse prospective saboteurs from determining her exact whereabouts.

Misuari said Mrs. Aquino and her husband, Sen. Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, will be remembered by Moro communities for their concern for Mindanao’s Muslim tribes, both in their political and private capacities.

Mrs. Aquino “was a strong leader who valued word of honor as a guiding force in dealing with the people in the country, regardless of creed, ethnic origins and cultural identities,” he said.

Not too long after she met Misuari in Jolo, Mrs. Aquino established the multisectoral Regional Consultative Assembly to draft a blueprint for Muslim autonomy that resulted in the enactment in 1989 by the House of Representatives of Republic Act 6734, the first-ever charter of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

Mrs. Aquino endorsed publicly the proposed ARMM charter, also known then as the Organic Act for Muslim Mindanao, which was ratified in a plebiscite in late 1989 in areas that the MNLF wanted to group under an autonomous set-up, as stipulated in the Tripoli Agreement forged on Dec. 23, 1976 in Libya.

Misuari signed a peace pact with the national government, already led by President Fidel Ramos, on Sept. 2, 1996. He was elected ARMM governor seven days later, a post he held until 2001.

The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), a splinter group of the MNLF, earlier had expressed its sadness, too, over Mrs. Aquino’s death.

“The MILF joins the Aquino family and the Filipino nation in mourning the passing away of a woman who started as a mere housewife and ended up as a symbol of resistance,” MILF chieftain Al-Haq Murad said in a statement on the front’s website.