The MILF and the New Opposition Alliance

A new Muslim separatist organization, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) first announced its independent existence (as distinct from the MNLF) in 1984. The establishment of a rival Moro "liberation front" resulted from a political schism between Hashim Salamat and Nur Misuari, the chairman and vice-chairman respectively of the MNLF. The rift, which had been developing for some time, first became public in December 1977, after the collapse of the second round of talks in Tripoli, Libya, aimed at implementing the peace accord and cease-fire agreement. By 1980, the "New Leadership" (Salamat quoted in Mastura 1985, 16) faction of the MNLF had moved its headquarters to Lahore, Pakistan, and Salamat was having success promoting his leadership to international Islamic organizations and "moderate Arab states" (Mastura 1985, 15. Salamat's faction also engaged in talks with the Philippine government on reopening negotiations to implement the Tripoli Agreement. While the Misuari faction had become intransigent after the failure of the 1977 Tripoli negotiations, reverting to a separatist stance after having previously agreed to a negotiated autonomy within the framework of the Philippine republic, the Salamat faction maintained a conciliatory posture, endorsing "a peaceful resolution of differences on the issue of autonomy" (Salamat quoted in Mastura 1985, 15).

In early 1980, Salamat's group suffered a stunning political blow. Amelil Malaguiok (alias "Commander Ronnie"), the chairman of the Kutawatu Revolutionary Committee (KRC), defected to the government with a number of his field commanders and received as his prize the premier position in the newly formed regional autonomous government of Region 12, encompassing Central Mindanao. The Kutawatu Revolutionary Committee had been the largest regional unit in the MNLF, and the only one effectively controlled by the Salamat faction. Although it never recovered its momentum on the diplomatic front, the Salamat group did rebuild its command structure and regain its popular support in Cotabato. This success was due in part to the personal popularity of Hadji Murad, the man who assumed the chairmanship of the KRC (the name of which was changed at about this time to the Kutawatu Regional Committee). As we shall see, the revitalization of the KRC was also aided by the development of an aboveground political support structure. In mid-1984, six years after his "takeover" (Mastura 1985, 15) of the MNLF, Salamat officially changed the title of his organization to the "Moro Islamic Liberation Front" to "underscore Islam as the rallying point of the Bangsamoro struggle" (1985, 17). In a letter to the secretary general of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Salamat elaborated: "All Mujahideen under the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) adopt Islam as their way of life. Their ultimate objective in their Jihad is to make supreme the WORD of ALLAH and establish Islam in the Bangsamoro homeland" (emphases in the original; 1985, 18). Salamat's principal aim of establishing Islam in Muslim Mindanao varied markedly from that of his rival, Misuari, who sought first the creation of a separate state in the Moro homeland. It is doubtful, however, whether the stated objective of the newly formed MILF was really different from the goals formulated by Salamat and the al-Azhar group twenty years earlier. The name change of the Salamat faction represented less an alteration of goals and more a recognition that, after six years of challenges to his leadership of the MNLF, Nur Misuari retained a tenacious grip as chairman. Salamat's only option was to relinquish his claim to sole leadership of the original front and develop another organization. Here it was politic to choose a name that best emphasized the differences between his new front and the original Moro National Liberation Front.

When I began my field research in 1985, the members and supporters of the Cotabato MILF faced arrest and detention without trial as

participants in an illegal armed organization. Because of that political reality, I did not question Campo Muslim residents about the activities of the MILF, nor did I seek interviews with its current members. Even so, community residents volunteered a good deal of information about the MILF and I engaged in informal and often unexpected conversations with active rebels. Nevertheless, as a result of my approach, and because the MILF operates as an underground organization, I know less about the MILF than I do about other political associations.

In 1984, the Salamat faction had undergone a reorganization before taking on a new name. In the letter quoted above, Salamat also explained that reorganization, and included the following passage: "The MILF operates as a parallel government vis-à-vis the enemy government within its area of responsibility and exercises influence extensively among the Bangsamoro masses in a degree more effective and binding than that of the enemy administration" (quoted in Mastura 1985, 18). An MILF "shadow" government did exist in Campo Muslim. A clandestine MILF barangay committee paralleled the one headed by Datu Kamsa. While I lack specifics of its day-to-day operation or influence, my impression is that, as with many other Philippine political associations, it functioned in an ad hoc and informal manner. In addition to shadow-governing offices, there were also "invisible" MILF workers, active agents who operated secretly in the city (or elsewhere away from rebel-held areas). Invisible workers kept track of developments in their areas of operation and performed other assignments, which almost certainly included the selective use of intimidation. The Kutawatu Regional Committee published a local underground news sheet, Tantawan^[10] —a mimeographed bulletin written in English with some Tagalog, which appeared monthly or bimonthly. It carried editorials and reports of local incidents—particularly of armed clashes between MILF units and the military.

Although it is difficult to determine with any precision how "effective and binding" was the influence exercised by the MILF in Campo Muslim, the MILF was more influential in most matters than the "enemy administration." No collective political activities (e.g., rallies or demonstrations) were undertaken without at least the implicit approval of the MILF, and few individual decisions that had political implications were made without consideration of the likely reaction of the MILE Those community members summoned to MILF headquarters always endeavored to respond promptly and in person. During my

stay in Campo Muslim, a number of these summonses concerned the politically volatile issue of the conspicuous operation of a Christian charitable organization in Campo Muslim.

Child Sponsorship and Christian Hegemony in Campo Muslim

The efforts of Sister Theresa to aid victims of the 1976 earthquake first brought representatives of the Catholic diocese to Campo Muslim. Their presence continued in a more institutionalized form after her departure in 1981 (it was widely rumored that the new bishop had removed the popular Sister Theresa because he disliked her independent manner). In 1983, Reconciliation House, the community service program established by Sister Theresa, was expanded and redesignated as "the Reconciliation Center." The new bishop secured external funding for the expanded community program from the Christian Children's Fund (CCF).

By 1986, the Reconciliation Center program supported 165 students in Campo Muslim, or one child each from just less than one-fourth of the households in the community. Operating with a monthly budget of fifteen hundred dollars, the program was intended to educate children, develop community leaders, train local health workers, and provide parental education in child care, nutrition, and home economics. As articulated by its director, the program guided recipient households in value formation and social responsibility. The principal form of assistance provided to recipient families was educational support for one child per household. CCF "scholars" received the equivalent of five to ten dollars a month in tuition fees (often for Catholic schools), clothing, and school supplies. Overseas funds were generated by means of individual sponsorship arrangements. Participating children received letters from their American sponsors and were required to respond to them with the assistance of program staff members. School clothing and supplies were purchased with vouchers at the Reconciliation Center store. Parents of supported children could also receive small loans and free instruction on topics such as money management and herbal medicine.

Although this support represented more material assistance than provided by any other agency or association in Campo Muslim, the tangible results of the program as of 1986 were questionable, even perverse.^[11] CCF-sponsored children did tend to be members of some of

the poorest families in the community, but after three years of participation in the program, the average monthly household income of CCF members remained well below the community average.^[12] Child sponsorship arrangements had also generated new tensions and dependencies in the community.

The often ambivalent attitudes of recipients toward the CCF program were revealed most clearly to me in a conversation I had with a couple living in the very poorest interior portion of Campo Muslim. When I arrived at their house seeking census information, Andig, a laborer caring for his four-month-old son while his wife was away, invited me in. While we were talking, his wife, Taya, returned from bathing. She wrapped her wet hair in a piece of cloth, then sat and began to breast-feed her baby. As the baby nursed, Taya took a small packet of tobacco from underneath her malong (skirt), sprinkled some tobacco on a strip of newspaper, and rolled a long thin cigarette. She joined the conversation, supplementing her husband's often hesitant responses with animated comments.

She told me, "I have borne seven children but only three survive. I have my own work as a labandera [washerwoman]. I earn as much in a day as my husband." When I asked her about CCF, Taya complained about the program and brought letters and pictures from her child's sponsor to show me. I translated the letters for her and she had questions: "Is it true, as some of the ustadzes say, that children in the CCF program are sometimes sold to foreigners"? I told her I didn't think that was true. "Is it true that the Sisters change the children's names to Christian names in their letters to their sponsors"? I told her I did not know whether that happened but that many of the sponsors were not aware that the children they sponsored were Muslims, or even that they lived with their families. "What is the real reason that the sponsors' names are torn off the envelopes before their letters are given to the children?" she asked. I said that I thought it was because the CCF wanted to be able to control the correspondence between sponsors and recipient families. "You know," she said, "the sponsor of the daughter of Babu Amina visited them a few months ago. She was an old woman from America. After that woman left, Amina and her husband enlarged their house. I heard she was given one hundred dollars by the sponsor. Tell me, how can I invite the sponsor of my child to visit?" I had no answer.

Program recipients viewed themselves as clients receiving resources from mysterious and powerful outsiders. They reciprocated with the

deference, obedience, and attendance required to maintain the relationship. They complained about their powerless position vis-à-vis the program workers above them and the foreign sponsors beyond their reach, but they also defended the program against those who would remove it from the community. As it was the only source of external funding available to them, recipient families expressed a strong material interest in its continuation.

The physical as well as fiscal presence of the Catholic diocese in Campo Muslim was a political affront to the MILF and the ulama. They were unable, however, to provide comparable resources to community residents. Disapproval of the CCF program by the MILF was a cause of some considerable anxiety among its participants. Two entries from my field notes provide illustration:

Nur [my research assistant] and I went to zone four this morning to interview a man who lived there. He was not at home so we left a message with his daughter. Nur told her vaguely that we wanted to talk to him, and we made an appointment for the next morning. We then went off to another interview and returned one hour later to our house. An older woman, somewhat agitated, arrived soon after and asked for Nur. She was the wife of the first man we had intended to interview. Her daughter told her we had been asking for her husband and had described us. She recognized Nur from the description and knew that he was active in rallies connected to the "inside" (she thought I was "an Arab"). Her daughter is a CCF scholar, and she knew that there were problems concerning the "inside" and the Reconciliation Center. She thought we had come from the MILF and was worried, so came looking for Nur to see what the problem was. We explained to her the purpose of the research. I hadn't anticipated that I would be mistaken for an MILF official.^[13]

[Kasan] told me that he was tired and had broken his [Ramadan] fast early today because he had made a long hard trip to Bumbaran to talk with the vice-chairman of the Kutawatu Political Office of the MILE The vice-chairman had sent him a typed letter in Magindanaon [four days earlier] asking him to come to talk about the CCF program in Campo Muslim. Kasan left very early in the morning. He went first to Parang, then took another long jeep ride east, then rode in a pedicab into the mountains to the "liberated area." At their meeting, the vice-chairman simply asked him for an "update" on the CCF program. Kasan gave him that and added his opinion that it would put great hardship on recipient families to remove the program. The vice-chairman replied that "it is best to be practical now," which Kasan took to mean that he thought that the CCF program should remain for the time being. Kasan also received an endorsement from him in the form of a signed, dated letter stating that they had met.

The most frequent services provided by the MILF involved adjudication. MILF courts heard cases on topics from homicide to land disputes to adultery. One outgrowth of the MILF's adjudication services was its registration of marriage contracts. Philippine Muslims very seldom registered births or marriages with governmental agencies. Muslim children became officially known to state authorities only when registered at public schools. Beginning in 1983 or so, the MILF provided a marriage contract form that asked for the names of the bride and groom and witnesses and the amount of the bridewealth. One copy of the contract was left with the bride and the other sent "inside" to the Kutawatu Regional Committee. Such MILF services, it may be noted, involved the direct participation of the ulama. All MILF adjudication was conducted by "inside" ulama, using Sharia (Islamic) law in a more stringent (although still locally modified) manner than it was traditionally applied. MILF marriage contract forms were provided to local ustadzes, who presided at most marriages.

The Counterelite Consolidated: The MILF-ULAMA-Professional Coalition

Crucial to the MILF recovery in Cotabato in the 1980s was an alliance of ulama and pro-MILF professionals working aboveground to advance its interests. The reason for the cooperation of the new ulama with the MILF is easy to discern. Most al-Azhar-educated ustadzes in Cotabato were, like Ustadz Ali, connected to their underground ulama colleagues by kinship links, cohort ties, and shared convictions. Although the underground ulama—who preached only at mosques in the countryside—spoke much more radically than the aboveground clerics, the latter tended to support the position of the MILF and were generally viewed as public spokesmen for the MILF.

Less obvious is the reason for the coalescence of interests between the MILF, the independent ulama, and a number of Manila-educated Cotabato professionals. While their affinity may be traced ultimately to their shared antagonisms toward the Marcos regime and its (primarily) datu collaborators in Cotabato, those shared interests were forged into a political coalition through the catalyzing efforts of a single individual. As a former political appointee of the martial law regime and the son of a datu, Zacaria Candao seemed an improbable candidate to organize an alliance of the Cotabato counterelite. At the same time, his

professional training, political experience, and kin connections furnished him with a political tool kit possessed by few other public figures in Cotabato, Muslim or Christian. Candao was a native of Cotabato City and member of a prominent city family. His father, Datu Liwa Candao, served for many years as vice-mayor of the city. Candao graduated from a Manila law school in the late 1960s, and in 1976, in the midst of the Bangsamoro Rebellion, was appointed governor of Maguindanao Province by Ferdinand Marcos on the recommendation of Simeon Datumanong, whom he replaced. Less than one year later he resigned the governorship to join the MNLF cease-fire negotiating panel in Tripoli. As he relates it, in 1977 he was asked by Nur Misuari to act as a technical advisor to the MNLF for negotiations concerning the details of the Tripoli Agreement that had been signed in December of 1976. Four months of intensive negotiations produced only stalemate, and the talks were abandoned. December of 1977 brought the split in the MNLF leadership. Candao supported the Salamat "takeover" and remained with Salamat in Cairo for one year. In 1979, Candao led a team from the Salamat faction that held exploratory talks with the Philippine government aimed at reopening formal negotiations. Those talks collapsed with the surrender of the chairman of the Kutawatu Revolutionary Committee, Amelil Malaguiok, to the government. Soon after, Candao returned to Cotabato as legal advisor to the Central Committee of the MNLF.

One of the few concrete results of the Tripoli talks was the establishment of official committees to monitor the cease-fire: one each from the government and MNLF in each region of the South. By 1978 the cease-fire arrangement had disintegrated and the original function of the committees was rendered moot. Nevertheless, Salamat decided to maintain the Cotabato cease-fire committee to document "military atrocities" in the region. Yearly reports were submitted to the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Two of the most prominent aboveground Islamic clerics in Cotabato—Ustadz Yahiya and Ustadz Pasigan, the founder of the Mahad al-Ulum al-Islamia—led the Cotabato cease-fire committee. Zacaria Candao worked closely with these men after his return and together they became the first entirely public and aboveground spokesmen for the MNLF (soon to be the MILF) in Cotabato. They also formed the core of a coalition being developed quietly but energetically by Candao.

Candao forged wider links with the Cotabato ulama by organizing and sponsoring large da'wah (call to faith) conferences. At the confer-

ence I attended in 1985, religious and regional political issues were intermingled, and copies of the official organ of the MILF Central Committee were included in every attendee's information packet. One important offshoot of the conferences was the establishment of a popular nightly da'wah radio program that provided religious and political information to listeners.

Candao also had close kinship and friendship ties with the new Muslim commercial and professional elites of Cotabato City and its environs—those who had provided so much support in the past to the Muslim rebels. He encouraged the formation of Islamic-oriented family organizations among these friends and relatives. With the help of the local ulama, he also began to build a base of support among the Muslim urban poor, particularly in Campo Muslim. A major accomplishment of the new opposition alliance organized by Zacaria Candao was the introduction of a new potent political vocabulary into Muslim politics in Cotabato. "Islamic Unity" became a catchphrase for the local opposition, and, for the first time, Islamic phraseology began to be used in everyday political discourse in Muslim Cotabato. The aboveground coalition combined an Islamic message with well-developed kinship and economic ties among two rising elite groups—the ulama and the professionals and entrepreneurs, who were, in many cases, the sons of successful smugglers. Joined with the underground MILF, the alliance presented a new and formidable challenge to the collaborative traditionalism of the datus who monopolized formal political posts in Muslim Cotabato in the early 1980s.

An extraordinary event that occurred in conjunction with the 1985 "Da'wah Conference" illustrates the Muslim opposition's unprecedented use of Islamic renewal as a cultural frame for public political protest against the martial law regime and the datu establishment. The organizers of the conference staged a large parade through the city to celebrate its opening. As many as ten thousand madrasah students from throughout the province marched from the Mahad in Campo Muslim, through the city plaza to the parade ground of the Central Elementary School, where they were reviewed by a number of dignitaries including the Muslim military commander of the region and the Muslim governor of the province.

As the very first event of its kind in Cotabato, the parade was remarkable in itself, displaying the exceptional growth in Islamic education in the province in the previous five years. However, it also included a political demonstration by Muslim college students that had

been planned weeks earlier at the Mahad in Campo Muslim. At that meeting, representatives from various Muslim student organizations at local colleges were addressed by Ustadz Ali, who spoke about the courage required to demonstrate publicly and told stories of his days as a student in Cairo demonstrating against Nasser. The students gathered again at the Mahad on the day before the parade to prepare placards and banners. Some of those carried messages (in English), such as "Allah Hates Oppressors" and "We support the Mujahideen in Afghanistan," and a few had quotations in Arabic from the Qur'an. Others held slogans that pointedly though obliquely protested the martial law regime ("Muslims and Christians Have a Common Enemy"), while still others voiced explicit criticism ("Military Out of Mindanao"). The most directly confrontational slogan stated: "MMA = Ministry of Munafiq Affairs." This message denounced the Ministry of Muslim Affairs, a new government agency created as part of the Marcos regime's unilateral implementation of the Tripoli Agreement, as a hypocritical, anti-Islamic (munafiq) institution. Zacaria Candao arrived at the Mahad later in the day and reviewed the banners. He asked that the four most controversial not be carried in the parade but approved their display at the school ground afterward. While it is not clear that Zacaria Candao or Ustadz Ali actually initiated the student demonstration, they clearly approved and facilitated it. With the addition of the student demonstrators, the parade represented not only the largest Islamic event ever held in the province but also the very first mass political action engaged in by Cotabato Muslims.^[14]