Moro National Liberation Front

The Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) is a Muslim separatist group that waged a 24-year guerrilla war against the Philippine government.

The MNLF traces it origins to a 400-year conflict between Muslims and Christians in the Philippines. Sixteenth-century Spanish colonizers converted the majority of the country's native inhabitants to Christianity. However, the southern islands of the archipelago had a large Muslim community (today estimated at 5 percent of the country's total population) that did not convert. The Spaniards called these people “Moros” (as in Moor, or Muslim) and they became a despised and often persecuted minority. Violent clashes between Moros and colonial administrators (first Spanish and later American) were frequent.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Philippine government began to encourage Christians to migrate to the southern island of Mindanao, the second largest island of the Philippines and one of the richest in natural resources. ...