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Chapter 7 Muslim Separatism and the Bangsamoro Rebellion
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The Commission on National Integration and the Generation of Muslim Separatism

In 1954 the Philippine Congress, prompted by an intensification of Muslim "banditry" in Mindanao and Sulu, appointed a Special Committee to investigate what were by then the conspicuous economic disparities between Philippine Muslims and Christians generated by Christian migration to the Muslim South.[1] The committee, headed by Domocao Alonto, a prominent Muslim congressman from Lanao, selected a familiar object of study—"the Moro Problem"—and adopted the colonial discourse of Muslim backwardness and guided integration in its report. The Moro Problem was redefined to accord with the ideology of the postcolonial Philippine nation, referring now to "nothing less than the problem of integrating into the Philippine body politic the Muslim population of the country, and the problem of inculcating into their minds that they are Filipinos and that this Government is their own and that they are part of it" (Congress of the Philippines, House of Representatives, 1955, quoted in Gowing 1979, 208). The Congressional Report acknowledged the poverty plaguing Philippine Muslims but ignored the evidence linking the relative impoverishment of Muslims to Christian in-migration and blamed only Muslim culture for Muslim poverty: "In their ignorance and in their trend toward religious fanaticism, the Muslims are sadly wanting in the advantages of normal health and social factors and functions" (Congress of the Philippines, House of Representatives, 1955, quoted in Glang 1969, 35).[2]

The Special Committee recommended the creation of a Commission on National Integration (CNI). A 1957 act of Congress established the commission, authorizing it to "effectuate in a more rapid and complete


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manner the economic, social, moral and political advancement of the Non-Christian Filipinos" (Congress of the Philippines, House of Representatives, 1957, Republic Act 1888, quoted in Gowing 1979, 208). One of the few substantive accomplishments of the Commission on National Integration was to provide scholarships for a significant number of Muslim students to attend universities in Manila. Majul reports that the number of CNI scholars increased from 109 in 1958 to 1,210 in 1967 (1979, 191–92). While political maneuvering ensured that many of the CNI scholarships went to the children of datus, the scholarship program also represented the first opportunity for considerable numbers of non-elite Muslims to attend universities.

The total number of Muslim college graduates for the period between 1958 and 1967 was 1,391, many of whom received professional degrees. Although that number represents only about 16 percent of all CNI scholars, it is nonetheless a notable increase over the handful of Muslim students (probably never more than ten to fifteen per year) graduated from Manila universities during the late colonial and immediate postcolonial period. The CNI graduates, most of them from nonelite backgrounds, gradually constituted themselves as a new professional elite in their home communities. The shared experiences of the more than 8,000 Muslim CNI scholars studying in Manila between 1958 and 1967 also profoundly affected Muslim politics after 1968. Much of their political education was gained outside university lecture halls from observing and participating in campus political activism. They also experienced firsthand the magnitude of popular anti-Muslim bias in the national capital and, after the election of Ferdinand Marcos as president of the Philippines in 1965, witnessed an increasing antagonism toward Muslims by the same Christian-dominated state that had provided them scholarships.

In 1968 an event came to light that politically aroused the Muslim student community in Manila. In March of that year the newly elected Senator Benigno Aquino told the Senate of a report that Christian army officers had shot dead a number of Muslim recruits on the island of Corregidor in Manila Bay. According to a survivor who had told his story to Aquino, 180 Muslim trainees had been recruited in 1967 as part of a covert force connected with the Philippine Army and administered by the Civil Affairs Office. The trainees had reportedly protested the conditions of their training and demanded to be allowed to return to their homes. In reaction, at least 14 of them (and perhaps as many as 28) were executed without investigation or trial (George


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1980; Majul 1985). Despite four separate congressional and military inquiries, and a great deal of press interest, the true purpose of the clandestine "Jabidah Project" and the reason for the execution of the Muslim recruits have never been made clear. The most widely repeated interpretation was that the project was part of a Marcos administration plan to invade the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo by a force from Sulu that could not be directly linked with the Philippine Army.[3]

The so-called Jabidah Massacre had a galvanizing effect on the Muslim student community in Manila. Throughout the year, Muslim students demonstrated against the Jabidah killings. The Jabidah protests transformed one campus activist in particular into a Muslim separatist. Nur Misuari was a Tausug from Sulu and the son of a very poor family. Supported by a CNI scholarship, he had graduated from the University of the Philippines and by 1968 was teaching there in the Department of Political Science. Misuari had been active in progressive student politics for some time but, shortly before 1968, had begun to focus his efforts on issues specific to Philippine Muslims.[4] In 1967 he helped to found the Muslim Nationalist League and became editor of its official publication, the Philippine Muslim News (George 1980). Misuari has stated that it was the Jabidah protests that inspired his political career and motivated his rise to the leadership of the Muslim separatist movement (Majul 1985, 45). In a 1968 editorial in the official organ of the Muslim Nationalist League, he wrote: "Separatism is a costly and painful process and few ordinary mortals are prepared to pay the price. But this world has been a witness time and again to the division of certain countries into smaller ones. For, political division is a matter which is not fully within the control of men, nor yet a sole product of their whims and caprices. It is in fact mainly the creation of the actual conditions in which men find themselves. It is the creation of the system" (quoted in George 1980, 200). The rhetoric employed by Misuari here in one of his very first published statements on Muslim separatism borrows the language of revolutionary Marxism and reflects the political influences of the university-based activism of that period. Significantly, Misuari has redirected the revolutionary rhetoric of the Manila student movement (and of student movements elsewhere in that period) toward the goal of Muslim nationalism rather than adopting a specifically Islamic discourse.

That the assimilationist efforts of the Commission on National Integration should yield in ten years' time a Western-educated revolutionary


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poised to lead a Muslim nationalist rebellion against the Philippine state is as illuminating as it is ironic. It presents a characteristic instance of the genesis of ethnonationalism—a sweeping political phenomenon for which Brackette Williams has recently offered an innovative reading. According to Williams, any adequate analysis of ethnonationalism must treat ethnic differentiation as "an aspect of a total system of stratification"(1989, 421). In such a system, the most powerful members of any particular nation-state "determine who, among persons of different 'tribal pasts,' is trustworthy and loyal to the political unit" (1989, 419).

Following Williams's schema, in the new Philippine republic only Christian Filipinos were deemed entirely trustworthy and thereby considered "non-ethnic" despite the quite considerable ethnolinguistic diversity found among them. Non-Christian Filipinos (comprising Muslim-Filipinos and "Tribal-Filipinos"), deemed culturally suspect, were labeled "ethnic" (by assigning them hyphenated designators) and regarded as socially and morally substandard. Muslim-Filipinos, comprising the largest single category of non-Christians, were judged to be dangerously disloyal because of their long history of armed enmity toward Philippine Christians.

The distrust and devaluation of Muslims by the Christians who controlled the Philippine state is evidenced in the 1954 report of the Special Committee, which depicts Muslims as socially problematic by nature—mired in poverty as a result of their own ignorance and religious fanaticism. Official expenditures aimed at integrating them into the "body politic" were thought necessary precisely because Muslims were viewed as "holding the nation back" (B. Williams 1989, 435). It is worth noting that while the legislation establishing the Commission on National Integration authorized the commission to institute a broad spectrum of development programs and services ranging from irrigation projects to legal aid to road building, the only component to receive more than token funding was the scholarship program for higher education. In this respect, the postcolonial Philippine government continued the practice established during the American period of "developing" Philippine Muslims not by providing them the material resources of the West but by endeavoring to remove (by the selective provision of university educations) the cultural disabilities perceived to be impeding their advancement and, indirectly, that of the Philippine nation.

An unintended consequence of the CNI scholarships was the creation of a group of young Muslim intellectuals schooled in political ac-


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tivism and able to articulate the frustrations of a much larger group of Muslim students disaffected by their encounters with Christian cultural hegemony in Manila. Nur Misuari and other Western-educated leaders of the separatist movement that began to take form in 1968 had inherited an ethnicized Muslim-Filipino identity from their colonial-era predecessors and experienced its contradictions in their frustrated attempts at integration in the national capital. The Jabidah Massacre provided both provocation and metaphor. Philippine Muslims who had volunteered to serve the republic had been deceived, exploited, and treacherously murdered by Christian agents of the state. Efforts by Muslims to contribute to the Philippine nation as Muslims were repaid with abuse and betrayal. Misuari and other young Muslim activists saw only one proportionate response: Philippine Muslims had to "separate themselves from those against whom they [were] judged unfavorably and . . . in relation to whom they [were] materially disadvantaged"—they must proclaim themselves a "new people" (B. Williams 1989, 429). The separatist intellectuals rejected their ascribed hyphenated identities as Muslim-Filipinos (Muslim citizens of the Philippine nation) and proclaimed themselves "Moros." In a bold piece of semantic alchemy they appropriated and transfigured a colonial and Christian pejorative to denominate the citizens of their newly imagined nation. Henceforth, "Moro" would denote the descendants of those unsubjugated peoples whom the Spaniards and their colonized subjects feared and distrusted.


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Chapter 7 Muslim Separatism and the Bangsamoro Rebellion
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