Lamitan cancels festival as sympathy to Marawi victims

COTABATO CITY, Philippines — The ruling Christian clans in Lamitan City cancelled this year’s decades-old “Lami-Lamihan Festival” in sympathy with more than 200,000 conflict-stricken Muslim residents in Marawi City.

Lamitan City Vice Mayor Roderick Furigay said on Tuesday that they instead held last Monday an ecumenical prayer service just enough to rekindle how the city stood through political evolutions and conflicts that repeatedly put to test the unity of local Muslim and Christian residents.

Public officials, moderate Muslim clerics and Christian religious leaders prayed for the troubled Marawi City on Monday after reaching a consensus to defer the annual June 27 to 28 Lami-lamihan Festival, patronized loyally by all 45 barangays in Lamitan City.

Half of the 45 barangays in Lamitan City, capital of Basilan, are exclusive homes to mixed Muslim Yakan and Tausug settlers.

“The Lami-lamihan Festival was deferred in solidarity with the conflict-affected Marawi City folk,” Furigay said.

The traditional two-day annual commemoration of Lamitan's founding anniversary highlights the beginnings of an ancient Muslim community that opened up to Christian settlers whom locals have since been thriving with in peace.

Lamitan was originally founded in the late 1800s by a Christian from Cavite, Pedro Javier Cuevas, whom the Spaniards imprisoned in Zamboanga City for militancy against Spain, but escaped and fled to Basilan Island where he was to become the adopted “Datu Kalun” of ethnic Yakans in the seaside Lamitan Muslim settlement.

“We understand how painful it is to be plagued by armed conflicts that are morbid and destroys communities. We had many of that in the past. We sympathize with the thousands of residents in Marawi City who were driven away from their homes by hostilities,” Furigay said.

Residents of Lamitan City, the new capital of Basilan, are no strangers to conflicts having witnessed deadly confrontations between state security forces and the Moro National Liberation Front in the 1970s and, subsequently, the troubles instigated by the Abu Sayyaf group.

The Abu Sayyaf, now claiming allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, first emerged in Basilan in 1992 as a small but well armed jihadist bloc led by cleric Abduradjak Janjalani, born and raised in Barangay Tabuk in Isabela City, the old capital of the island province.

Janjalani, who studied Islamic theology in Libya and in Syria, was killed in an encounter with policemen in a coastal fishing enclave at the boundary of Lamitan and Isabela in 1997. 

Monday’s interfaith program, where participants recited universal prayers for peace in Marawi City, was held at the Datu Kalun Shrine in the Lamitan City plaza.

Furigay, now in his second term as vice mayor, is a fourth generation descendant of Datu Kalun, from whose lineage sprung tightly-knit Muslim and Christian families now scattered in Lamitan city and in other parts of Mindanao.

“Our clans are models of Muslim-Christian unity showing how we, from one bloodline, co-exists despite being spiritually heterogeneous. There are more Christians in us and we dominate local politics but there is no animosity between us and our Muslim relatives,”  Furigay said.