MNLF against transfer of Sulu BARMM parliamentary districts

COTABATO CITY, Philippines — Leaders of the Moro National Liberation in the 80-seat Bangsamoro parliament and in regional agencies are optimistic that the Senate and the House of Representatives can help them workout the reintegration of Sulu into the autonomous region.

The Supreme Court removed Sulu last year from the core territory of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao as petitioned by its provincial governor, Hadji Abdusakur Tan, Jr.

Regional lawmakers are presently initiating public consultations on the transfer of the seven parliamentary districts in Sulu to the remaining provinces in the autonomous region, Maguindanao del Norte, Maguindanao del Sur, Lanao del Sur, Basilan and Tawi-Tawi, in preparation for the first ever regional elections on October 13 this year.

“We in the MNLF are against the reapportioning of the seven parliamentary districts in Sulu to other BARMM provinces because we are still trying our best to have the province reintegrated, returned to the region’s core territory with the help of national lawmakers and various peace-advocacy entities,” BARMM's labor and employment minister, Muslimin Sema, chairman of the MNLF, said on Saturday, July 5.

Sema said Sulu was the birthplace of the Moro National Liberation Front, from where top leaders now of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front had come from.

"Sulu is where the struggle of the Moro people for self-rule started five decades ago. It hurts to see Sulu get detached from the Bangsamoro region, whose creation is a dividend of that bloody uprising,” BARMM’s labor and employment Minister, Muslimin Sema, chairman of the MNLF, told reporters on Saturday, July 5.

The MNLF and Malacañang are bound by a final compact, forged by negotiators from both sides on September 2, 1996, to cooperate in peace, security and humanitarian initiatives that would benefit the Muslim, Christian and indigenous Moro communities in southern provinces. The agreement was brokered by the influential Organization of Islamic Cooperation, most known as the OIC, a bloc of more than 60 Muslim countries, including petroleum-exporting states in the Middle East and North Africa.

The MNLF and the MILF, which has a separate truce with Malacañang, the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on Bangsamoro, are together managing some of the agencies in the BARMM government. Both fronts have representatives in the BARMM parliament too.

The creation of BARMM in 2019 is a product of 22 years of peace talks between Malacañang and the MILF, a tedious process that OIC member-states, one of which is Malaysia, helped facilitate.