MNLF in BARMM want peaceful end to hostilities in Palestine

COTABATO CITY, Philippines — Top leaders of the Moro National Liberation Front, currently serving in agencies within the Bangsamoro region, urged international humanitarian organizations to take action and prevent further violence in Palestinian territories.

Bangsamoro Labor and Employment Minister Muslimin Sema, who leads the MNLF, stressed the importance of being careful when expressing their views on social media. He and his central committee colleagues have called for responsible online behavior from their followers across the country.

He said emotional and irrational posts on Facebook can only intensify the escalating disgust of Moro communities in Israel.

“We in Mindanao had seen the ugliest images of armed conflicts when we fought for three decades for self-self-governance, obviously not as bloody and destructive as that of the conflict in Palestine, but enough for us to learn that wars are savage and absolutely primitive,” Sema said.

The Ministry of Labor and Employment-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao that Sema manages as a minister has programs promoting religious and cultural solidarity among Muslims, Christians and the non-Moro indigenous people, comprising the labor sector in all of BARMM’s six provinces and three cities.

Sema said the headquarters of the United Nations and its relief agencies and various peacebuilding blocs in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, or OIC, must cooperate in defusing tension among the Israelis and the Palestinians.

The OIC, composed of 57 Muslim states, including petroleum-exporting countries in the Middle East and North Africa, brokered the Sept. 2, 1996 peace compact between Malacañang and the MNLF.

The government-MNLF truce is a product of drawn out negotiations that started with the crafting by both sides of the 1976 Tripoli Agreement in Libya that was to become the main reference in forging the now 27-year accord and in drafting all agreements reached by the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, whose revolutionary figurehead, Ahod Ebrahim, is now BARMM’s chief minister.

“For the MNLF, it is the United Nations that can solve the escalating conflict now in Palestinian territories. We want that resolved on the negotiating table,” Sema said.

He said the conflict, though happening in an area too far from the Philippines, is both saddening and annoying for the Moro people in Mindanao.