MNLF renews commitment to Mindanao peace process

COTABATO — Thousands of members of the Moro National Liberation Front gathered for a reunion on Sunday, September 21, in Cotabato City, where they pledged to continue strictly adhering to their 29-year peace agreement with the government.

Leaders of the MNLF from across Central Mindanao and the island provinces of Basilan and Tawi-Tawi took turns urging their followers to protect the gains of their Sept. 2, 1996 peace agreement with the government, which was brokered by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

The OIC is a bloc of more than 50 Muslim states, including petroleum-exporting nations in the Middle East and North Africa.

MNLF’s chairman, Muslimin Sema, the labor and employment minister of the Bangsamoro government, and senior officials of the front had also prodded their followers to exercise wisely their right of suffrage if the first-ever Oct.13, 2025 regional parliamentary polls push through as scheduled.

The MNLF’s Bangsamoro Party had anointed a member of the regional parliament, the lawyer Omar Yasser Sema, as its candidate for party representation in the lawmaking body, besides its bets for the parliamentary districts in the autonomous region.

“We value our peace agreement with the national government with great pride and honor,” Sema told reporters on the sidelines of their grand reunion at a function facility in the KCC Mall in Cotabato City.

The MNLF and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which has a separate final truce with the government, both have representatives in the 80-member parliament in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

Two senior MNLF officials who are both members of the BARMM parliament, Hatimil Hassan and Adzfar Usman, had separately called on their followers to continue supporting the peace overtures between Malacanang and the two Moro fronts, aiming to put a durable closure to the Mindanao secessionist issue via governance and other constitutional interventions.

“The struggle for progress and strong autonomy now is via governance, not through the barrels of the guns anymore,” Hassan, an ethnic Yakan who, as a young MNLF commander in Basilan in the 1970s, had figured in bloody clashes with state security forces in far-flung areas in the island province.