COTABATO CITY, Philippines — Engineers are now constructing the remaining three-kilometer stretch of the Basilan “peace highway” traversing the center of the province where the Abu Sayyaf once had impregnable bastions.
The more than 30-kilometer route, also known as the “transcentral road,” connects Barangay Tumahubong in Sumisip, the largest town in the island province, to Barangay Santa Clara in Lamitan City, the provincial capital.
Basilan Gov. Jim Salliman said Saturday he is optimistic the highway project can be completed by yearend or, at the least, by first quarter of 2021.
The highway straddles through Basilan’s densely forested Sampinit Complex where the Abu Sayyaf once ran a shadow government and where it held, in a span of 11 years, more than 300 captives kidnapped in different towns in the province and from the nearby Zamboanga peninsula.
Abu Sayyaf bandits started abandoning their enclaves in the Sampinit Complex in 2016 as a result of a domestic peace program of the Salliman administration, the military’s Western Mindanao Command, the Philippine National Police and the then Regional Gov. Mujiv Hataman of the now defunct Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.
Hataman, now congressional representative of Basilan, and Salliman, first elected as Basilan governor in 2016, are reintroducing now to mainstream society some 300 Abu Sayyaf gunmen, many of them from the Sampinit Complex, whom they both convinced to return to the fold of law.
The transcentral road project was started two years ago by the office of Salliman using funds from the ARMM that, subsequently, got replaced with the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao in February last year.
The BARMM government has continued funding the construction of the transcentral road, designed to complement Malacañang’s Mindanao peace process and stir economic growth in areas the Abu Sayyaf dominated with impunity before.
Salliman said he will personally invite BARMM’s chief minister, Hadji Ahod Ebrahim, to lead the inauguration of the road project once completed.