New Malaysian ceasefire monitors visit Sulu

COTABATO CITY, Philippines - The Malaysian-led International Monitoring Team (IMT) assured to support the good governance initiatives of the provincial government Sulu, which covers 18 towns that are hotbeds of secessionist activities.

The IMT, comprised of soldiers from Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and Libya, and non-uniformed conflict resolution experts and economists from Japan, Norway and the European Union, has been helping enforce since late 2003 the July 1997 Agreement on General Cessation of Hostilities between the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

Officials of the IMT, led by Malaysian Major Gen. Mouhsin Hassan, and Sulu Vice Gov. Hadji Sakur Tan met over the weekend in Jolo, capital town of the island province, and discussed the prospects of the Mindanao peace process.

Sulu is a known bastion of a faction in the Moro National Liberation Front, led by former political science professor, Nur Misuari, who is opposed to the ongoing government-MILF peace agreement.

The largest and most politically active group in the MNLF, led by former Cotabato City Mayor Muslimin Sema, whose followers are spread in 20 "revolutionary states" in Central Mindanao, the Zamboanga peninsula and Palawan, has overtly been supporting the enforcement of all the interim security agreements between the government and the MILF. 

Hassan, of the Malaysian Royal Armed Forces, is the IMT’s new head of mission, who took over the leadership two weeks ago.

Hassan gave Tan a symbolic token, in the presence of provincial officials, as an expression of the IMT’s support to the peace and development efforts of the provincial government.

The Sulu vice governor toured the visiting IMT officials to a government museum in the province, which has vast collections of historic mementos and artifacts giving credence to the long history of the socioeconomic and political relationships between Malaysia and the Muslim communities in Sulu.

The ties between the people in the island provinces of Sulu and Tawi-Tawi, both component areas of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, began hundreds of years before merchant-sailor Ferdinand Magellan arrived in what is now Visayas on March 16, 1521.

The day Magellan - a Portuguese who worked for the Spanish monarch then - arrived in Visayas had been chronicled in history books as the start of the spread of Christianity in what was to become a sovereign Philippine nation.