COTABATO CITY, Philippines – The Moro Islamic Liberation Front has yet to officially expel its renegade commander Ameril Ombra Kato and the government and MILF panels still have to agree on how to go about him.
Ghadzali Jaafar, MILF vice chairman for military affairs, said their central committee still has to draft a resolution declaring Kato officially dropped as member and as a consequence, is no longer protected by the security provisions of the ceasefire.
Jaafar said the MILF also has to transmit to the government peace panel “in black and white” its action on Kato and both sides has to come out with a bilateral decision on how to treat him as a virtual third force.
Jaafar said the communication process has to be channeled through the Malaysian facilitator of the government-MILF talks.
“The problem is that there is a deadlock in the government-MILF peace talks. The most pressing concern for us, as far as our peace panel is concerned, is how the government and the MILF can reconcile each other’s position on how to resolve the quest for self-rule of Mindanao’s Moro communities. Kato is just a very small issue compared to that,” Jaafar said.
Kato, former chief of the MILF’s 105th Base Command, now leads his self-styled Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Movement (BIFM), which boasts of about 200 fighters, including jihadists known for their radical interpretation of Islamic principles on governance and Sharia justice.
Meantime, Jaafar said it is up to their council of Islamic theologians to decide on how the MILF would address Kato now that he has closed the door on reunification with the group.
Kato, a preacher trained in Saudi Arabia during the late 1970s, bolted the MILF last year due to “irreconcilable differences” with its superiors and subsequently formed the BIFM.
Jaafar said the Ulama Council, composed of clerics from across Central Mindanao, many of them graduates of Islamic universities in Pakistan, Egypt, Libya, and other countries in the Middle East, has to decide on what the MILF would do with Kato.
“The MILF leadership has tried its best to reach out to him, tried many times to have a dialogue with him, but he declined and so we now accept the fact that there would be no more reconciliation,” Jaafar said.
BIFM spokesman Abu Misra Mama said Kato would not return to an organization that is supposedly no longer guided by Islamic principles as founded by the late Salamat Hashim.