COTABATO CITY, Philippines, 12 September — Leaders of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) yesterday urged the Philippine government not to pursue its territorial claim on Malaysia’s eastern state of Sabah.
“The Sabahans are already progressive, contented and secured in the Federation of Malaysia,” said a statement issued by the MILF’s Central Committee.
“We do not want our brothers in Sabah to suffer like (Filipino Muslims) who are dispossessed of their lands, disenfranchised, pushed to the wall and once the object of a genocide campaign,” it added.
The statement, signed by MILF chief information officer Mohagher Iqbal, came three days after allies of jailed Muslim leader Nur Misuari came up with a statement pushing for a revival of the Philippine claim on Sabah.
The claim is actually of the Sultanate of Sulu, but which it passed on to the Philippine government to pursue.
Since the 80s, Manila has let the issue sleep to mend ties with Kuala Lumpur.
But Malaysia’s crackdown and deportation of thousands of illegal Filipino migrants in Sabah has rekindled calls for a revival of the claim.
The mass deportations, which started last month, have soured relations between the two Southeast Asian neighbors. The Philippines protested twice to Malaysia because of allegations many of the deportees were maltreated and punished harshly by Malaysian authorities.
In its statement, the MILF said it recognizes “the historical reality that the Sultanate of Sulu had acquired both proprietary and sovereignty rights over Sabah (formerly North Borneo), to include Sulu, Zamboanga, Palawan and Mindoro.”
But it said the people of Sabah should be allowed to choose their own fate.
“Any conflict involving people of any given territory particularly that concerning their political rights shall; be resolved by invoking the principle of right to self-determination as embodied in the United Nations charter through the conduct of a referendum,” the MILF statement said.
In the same declaration, however, the MILF expressed regrets over the reported inhuman treatment and abuses by the Malaysian authorities in Sabah against the deportees.
Still, it said, it said the suffering of the deportees was rooted in their displacement from the Philippine south because of violence and crushing poverty.
“The Philippine government’s policy of war and its failure to solve the massive poverty in Mindanao led to these massive migrations. That’s the reality,” MILF spokesman Eid Kabalu also said.
Unless the problems are solved, the exodus of Filipinos from the southern Philippine region of Mindanao into nearby countries will continue, he said.
Filipinos, many of them Muslim, started fleeing the southern Philippines in great numbers in the 1970s when then-President Ferdinand Marcos launched large-scale offensives against Muslim guerrillas demanding self-rule and development in Muslim areas.
The MILF urged the Philippine and Malaysian governments to extend all necessary aid especially humanitarian to the deportees or migrants.
It also requested the United Nations and its pertinent instrumentalities especially the United Nations High Commission of Refugees (UNHCR) and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) to intervene and extend all possible help.
On the reported new independence movement in Sulu, the home province of Misuari, calling itself “Bangsamoro Independence Movement,” the MILF said it has nothing to do with it nor will it ever be part of this new group.
