MNLF leaders suffer defeat in ARMM elections

COTABATO CITY – The stature of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) before the international community could be affected by the defeat of two of its ranking leaders in last Monday’s elections in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).

Indanan, Sulu Mayor Alvarez Isnaji, who ran for governor of ARMM, and reelectionist Basilan Assemblyman Hatimil Hassan lost even in towns where they have relatives.

An ethnic Yakan, Hassan is a cousin of former Basilan congressman Gerry Salappudin, former speaker of the ARMM Regional Assembly.

Some 30 percent of the 1.5 million voters in the ARMM are either members or supporters of the MNLF, which signed a peace pact with the government in September 1996.

The MNLF endorsed Isnaji as its anointed bet for the ARMM gubernatorial post during a gathering of its leaders last April 2 in Pagadian City.

A leader of an MNLF faction called the Islamic Command Council (ICC), Habib Mujahab Hashim, has blamed “disunity” as the real cause of the dismal performance of their comrades in the Aug. 11 regional elections.

“We are also divided organizationally,” Hashim said.

Hassan and Isnaji both belong to a bloc of MNLF leaders who unseated, in April 2000, founding chairman Nur Misuari and installed a 15-member core group, the “Council of 15.”

Sources close to Misuari, among them Maranaw and Tausug Islamic preachers, said the MNLF founder supported the reelection bid of ARMM Gov. Datu Zaldy Ampatuan.

Sulu Rep. Yusoph Jikiri, a key leader of an MNLF group to which Isnaji belongs, also supported Ampatuan’s candidacy.

“It’s Allah’s will that they will lose in the elections because they have gone out of the fold of the MNLF, the true MNLF that is led by Chairman Misuari,” said a foreign-trained Tausug ustadz, who is close to Misuari.

The reelected 40-year-old Ampatuan, a scion of an influential political clan in central Mindanao, garnered in last Monday’s regional polls 1,017,179 votes, while Isnaji got only 17,937 votes.

Ampatuan was proclaimed last Wednesday by the regional board of canvassers at the central office of the Commission on Elections in Intramuros, Manila.

Ampatuan was mayor of Shariff Aguak, capital town of Maguindanao, when he first ran for ARMM governor on Aug. 8, 2005.

The MNLF was at the helm of the ARMM government for nine years, first under Nur Misuari, from 1996 to 2001, and subsequently under physician Parouk Hussin, from 2002 to 2005.

Another MNLF member in Sulu, Al-Habsi Hassan, who aspired for a seat in the ARMM’s 24-seat Regional Legislative Assembly in Monday’s elections, was also defeated by “political neophytes” who come from ruling political elites in the province.

Hussin, who, as ARMM governor, built trade and diplomatic linkages between the regional government and diplomatic communities in Europe, the Middle East and South America, said it is never too late yet for all MNLF leaders to reunite.

The Tripoli-based Gaddafi International Charity Foundation, led by Saiful Al-Islam Gaddafi, son of Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi, has been trying since April to broker the reunification of the feuding leaders of the MNLF.

It is known all over the ARMM that it was Ampatuan who bankrolled Isnaji’s candidacy for mayor of Indanan during the May 2007 local polls.

Ampatuan, in his first official post-proclamation statement, said he would never be an enemy of the MNLF even if Isnaji contested his reelection bid.

“There is no room for political vendetta in my heart,” Ampatuan said. “I’m for peace and peace must start in me, in my home.”