Moro Islamic Liberation Front

Background and History of Philippine Muslim Insurgency

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. Mindanao's Muslim inhabitants, however, are among the country's poorest. By the late 1960s, on many islands and on parts of Mindanao itself, Christians had become the majority population. Many Muslims felt that the government—in encouraging the Christian migration—was deliberately attempting to push them out of their homes.

The MNLF was founded by Nur Misuari as a Muslim advocacy group in the late 1960s. In 1972, Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law and attempted to disarm the Muslim population. Misuari and the MNLF went to war against the government, hoping to establish an independent Muslim state.

During the early 1970s, the MNLF army was 50,000 strong, while the Philippine army numbered about 60,000. By 1972, Marcos had vastly expanded the armed forces in response to the secessionist threat, committing about 80 percent of the country's troops to Mindanao and the surrounding islands. During those bloody years, tens of thousands of people were killed and the MNLF made substantial territorial gains. In 1976 the rebels and the government signed a Libyan-brokered truce under which the MNLF would integrate its forces with the Philippine army and the Muslim provinces would become economically and politically autonomous but remain part of the Philippines.

Once the agreement was signed, Marcos did nothing to implement it. In 1978, dissatisfaction with the accord caused a split within the MNLF; Misuari's second-in-command, Hashim Salamat, formed the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). Salamat's group of 10,000 to 15,000 men was more Islamist in outlook. The MILF rejected limited [Page 395]autonomy, holding out for complete independence. Operating separately, the two groups continued attacking government forces throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, but neither the government nor the rebels was able to gain the upper hand.

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