The 2008 Bangsamoro Freedom Day
March 18, 2008

MORO NATIONAL LIBERATION FRONT

Central Committee

Office of the Secretary General

PRESS RELEASE  MARCH 18, 2008

JOLO, SULU – “Alhamdulillah (Praise be to Allah), we have reached this far, it’s now Forty years exact from the time of the Jabidah Massacre and the founding day of the MNLF,” said Ustaz Murshi Ibrahim, the secretary general of the Central Committee of the Moro National Liberation Front.

Today, March 18 is commemorated everywhere in the national Homeland of the Bangsamoro people as a “Bangsamoro National Freedom Day.” According to Ustaz Murshi all their forces, followers and soldiers are assembled on this memorable day in their camps and in major cities, islands  and provinces in Mindanao, to include the Bangsamoro communities  abroad. Parades and programs advocating freedom justice and peace reverberate in their soil and in foreign lands.

In the early morning, he said, their red-colored, with  kris-emblem national flag is hoisted.

“This day is memorable to all of us because it is our Freedom Day,” he said, adding that this was the day when the MNLF was born. He reckoned this day to the Jabidah Massacre of hundreds of  Moro youth in Corrigidor Island by the government of Ferdinand E. Marcos then on March 18, 1968.

The lone survivor of this massacre, Jibin Arula, who is a living witness to this carnage told the whole world of what tragically  happened to them. They were recruited, trained and armed by the Armed Forces of the Philippines purposely to invade Sabah, Malaysia. Being Muslims themselves, they refused to execute the order for which reason they were all killed in cold blood.

“The blood of our martyrs in Corrigidor and those Mujahedin in later times who fought against the Manila government continue to inspire us to go on with our self-determination struggle,” said the MNLF secretary general. “Day by day the MNLF is infused with new blood, new vigor and the dream for comprehensive and lasting peace and prosperous development remain, according to Ustaz Murshi.

To the Bangsamoro people the most significant implication triggered by the Jabidah Massacre is the tightening of solid unity among the historic Islamized  nations in the South, such as, the Taosug nation, the Maranaw nation, the Maguindanao nation and others, which all constitute as the impregnable Bangsamoro people. The MNLF is their vanguard, and continues to be so, in their struggle for national political independence and comprehensive peace.

Ustaz Murshi further enunciated that despite the unlawful detention this past Six years of their leader, MNLF Central Committee Chairman Prof. Nur Misuari, the tasks remain and their strategic goals are slowly gaining grounds. “The MNLF as a self-determination movement is mutating,” he revealed. Like a full grown  tree, it has shed off some of its old and cancerous branches,  new ones sprout healthily, and the mutation is phenomenal in our case.

To date, he revealed, many new commands and task-oriented special units and instrumentalities are added as strategic support systems to current structures. Like all peace-loving peoples of the world, he said, and after Four decades of struggle, and after three international peace treaties signed by the MNLF and the Manila government, they are still hopeful that complete peace, development, justice and co-existence between the Bangsamoro and the Filipino peoples can still  be achieved.