ARMM town inaugurates new municipal hall

COTABATO CITY, Philippines - A small community of mixed Maguindanaon and Teduray settlers at the western coast of Maguindanao, created municipality in 2006, is now rising from the devastation wrought by a deadly tsunami in August 1976, the bloody Moro rebellion, and the cholera and malaria plagues that hit the area in recent years.

Local officials and residents of the seaside Datu Blah Sinsuat municipality, also known as DBS, in the first district of Maguindanao, inaugurated Sunday their new municipal hall, for them an important icon resembling the presence of government in their municipality.

Residents of DBS town, a major bivouac area of the Moro National Liberation Front at the height of the MNLF uprising, rely mainly on fishing and are into raising short-term crops, such as yams, corn and rice for local consumption.

The DBS, which is comprised of 11 barangays that originally belong to Maguindanao’s North Upi town, was created Dec. 9, 2006 in honor of a blue-blooded Muslim chieftain, Datu Blah Sinsuat, who, as a guerilla leader, fought the Japanese in World War II and became a congressman in the 1960s.

The late Datu Blah also served as member of the Philippine parliament during the time of President Ferdinand Marcos.

Efforts to spur progress in DBS is fraught with extreme difficulties, its municipal mayor, Marcial Sinsuat said.

The town has not been receiving internal revenue allotment from the national government since its inception in 2006 by the Regional Assembly of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

Sinsuat said DBS would not rise if not for the support of Maguindanao First District Rep. Sandra Sema, Gov. Esmael Mangudadatu and ARMM Gov. Mujiv Hataman, who have been providing projects and extending basic services to the town’s impoverished villages.

Hundreds of local folks witnessed Sunday’s launching of the town’s newly built municipal hall on a hill overlooking the sea at Barangay Pura and whose construction was funded with more than P1 million worth of grant from the office of Sema.

"We are grateful to the House of Representatives," Sinsuat said.

Sinsuat said Mangudadatu provided for the glass panes and partitions of the building, as well as other essential fixtures.

Sema, who addressed villagers that witnessed the inaugural rite, said it is important for DBS residents to support President Benigno Aquino III’s Mindanao peace process for development to spread around the entire municipality with momentum.

“Without peace, development will not happen. Let us unite and build peace through consensus-building as participatory effort,” said Sema, whose spouse, incumbent Cotabato City Vice-Mayor Muslimin Sema, is chairman of the largest and most politically active of the three factions in the MNLF.

Sema said she will allocate P1.5 million from her 2014 Priority Development Assistance Fund for the procurement of a “sea ambulance” the DBS local government unit can use to ferry sick constituents to Cotabato City for medication.

More than a dozen residents of DBS succumbed to cerebral malaria in the past 12 months, the dreaded disease being “endemic” to the area. Many others tested positive to malaria in a series of tests initiated recently by government epidemiologists.

Thousands of residents availed of free medical and dental services by teams from the ARMM’s Department of Health during an outreach mission from Dec. 9-10, as one of the highlights of the 6th founding anniversary of DBS.

The outreach mission was assisted by the 1st Marine Brigade and its component unit guarding DBS, the Marine Battalion Landing Team 1, and a medical contingent from the Army’s 6th Infantry Division.

The ARMM’s regional health secretary, eye surgeon Kadil Sinolinding, Jr., who led the mission, also treated 40 cataract patients and villagers afflicted with various eye ailments.

The medical-dental outreach mission was done in a covered basketball court constructed more than a year ago by the office of Mangudadatu.

Sinolinding said he is thankful to the regional governor of ARMM, the Philippine Marine Corps, the 6th ID, the provincial government of Maguindanao and the office of Rep. Sema for supporting their DBS medical-dental missions.

Sinolinding and his subordinates also lectured villagers on how to prevent the spread of malaria and Dengue fever, and water-borne diseases such as dysentery and cholera.

Some 70 villagers, while the 11 barangays of DBS were still under North Upi town, were afflicted with cholera when severe droughts struck in 1997 and in 1998 that forced people to drink unsafe drinking water from murky streams. Three villagers died from the outbreak.

The government has earmarked the construction of one day care center for each of the 11 barangays of DBS from the Transition Investment Support Plan, which is intended to hasten Malacañang’s development initiatives in the autonomous region, in support of its on-going peace talks with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

The 11 barangays of DBS were all badly devastated by a Tsunami on August 16, 1976, which killed 2,973 villagers and leveled seaside fishing villages that took local folks many years to rebuild.