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Chapter 9 Unarmed Struggle
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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


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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-


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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


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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]


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Chapter 9 Unarmed Struggle
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