MNLF group blocks meeting of indigenous people’s army

SOUTH UPI, Maguindanao — As if taunting the obscure Indigenous People’s Federal Army (IPFA), members of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) blocked what could have been the first clandestine meeting here last Sunday of the former group’s leaders, including its strategist, Roger Adamat, with selected members of the media.

The IPFA was tagged as behind hoax bombs found in Metro Manila and parts of the Visayas and Mindanao last January to dramatize its bid for the involvement of indigenous people in governance.

The group, claiming to be "fighting for land, race and culture," is composed of Tirurays. It is divided into different groups led by professionals, some of them public school teachers.

A group of 30 or so MNLF members, among them community officials, in Barangay Lamud here, which is adjacent to the designated venue of the meeting between IPFA leaders and the journalists, feared their territory could be subjected to possible military operations against the native guerrilla force.

Barangay Lamud, recognized by the police and military as the MNLF’s Camp Kabelan Sema, is traversed by the only farm-to-market road linking a national highway and a strategic hill where the IPFA was supposed to show its "force" to the media.

The incident sparked tension between the local MNLF forces and an estimated 700 heavily armed fighters of the IPFA.

The situation was only defused after this writer, Mary Anne Uy of ABS-CBN’s TV station in Cotabato City, Florante Formento of Radio Mindanao Network and Joefrey Maitem of the Philippine News Agency, voluntarily agreed to pull out from the area to prevent possible outbreak of hostilities between the two groups.

Village officials took turns in apologizing for the incident, explaining that they were only concerned about the safety of the journalists and the possible dislocation of their constituents if state forces would be deployed to run after Adamat’s group.

They also asserted that the Sept. 2, 1996 peace accord between the government and the MNLF has a clear mandate for them not to allow intrusions by outlawed groups into any duly acknowledged MNLF territory.

Cotabato City Mayor Muslimin Sema, the MNLF’s secretary-general, said their forces and central leadership oppose the holding of any press conference by the IPFA inside any of their territories covered by the peace pact.