Peace caravan launched today

COTABATO CITY – Hundreds of peace activists from the South will launch today a peace caravan to Corregidor Island in Bataan to drum up support for the Mindanao peace process and commemorate the March 18, 1968 Jabidah massacre that sparked the Moro uprising, now on its 38th year.

The caravan – to be launched simultaneously from the Mindanao cities of Davao, Cotabato, Cagayan de Oro, Marawi and Zamboanga – will end on March 18 in Corregidor, where dozens of young Moro men recruited by then President Ferdinand Marcos to invade Sabah were killed by their military instructors for staging a mutiny in protest of their supposedly secret mission.

Lawyer Mary Ann Arnado, secretary-general of the Mindanao People’s Caucus which is spearheading the peace caravan, said the main objective of the activity is to generate support for the Southern peace process and highlight cross-section cooperation in various peace-building activities in the south.

Arnado said their peace caravan will have brief stopovers in several provinces for peace dialogues with other cause-oriented and peace advocacy groups.

She said relatives of the Moro military recruits for Marcos’ aborted plan to invade Sabah will participate in the caravan.

Sabah used to be part of the Sulu sultanate, but was placed under Malaysia’s territory in the 19th century through a lease agreement with the family of the then reigning Sulu sultan.

Malaysian and Indonesian history books have explicit reference to Sabah as having been ceded “as a gift” by the Muslim monarchy of what is now Malaysia to the sultan of Sulu for helping quell a rebellion by a Malay community somewhere in the now independent, oil-rich Brunei.

A survivor of the Jabidah massacre, ethnic Tausug Jibin Arula, now in his late 50s, will participate in the six-day peace tour from Mindanao to Corregidor.

Arula was one of about 60 Muslim men recruited by the Marcos regime to undergo military training and enlisted in the Jabidah Corps as part of Project Merdeka (freedom) to liberate Sabah from Malaysian control.

According to contemporary Moro historians, Arula and his companions staged a mutiny and threatened to walk out of their training camp in an old military hospital in Corregidor after learning they would be used to invade Sabah.

The mutineers were brought by their Army instructors to an open field where they were shot with automatic rifles.  – John Unson