Jabidah, Sultan Kiram and the President

An old man, says a mischievous imputation, remembers incidents (and rumors, if I may add) that happened quite a long time ago, but forgets fairly recent events. This is a run-about way of translating the Cebuano “ang tiguwang mahinumdom sa butang nga dugay nang nahitabo, apan malimot niadtong bag-ohay lamang”.Because I am an old man, I can validate that derisive assertion. Plus he, he he.

Here is an example. One incident that happened a long time ago was a revelation made by the late Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr., shortly before Michel Legrande’s Windmills of Your Mind became a hit. That song, by the way, was the theme of the 1968 movie, Thomas Crown Affair, which was shown when I was only a first year college student.

I recall that Sen. Aquino, Ninoy, to many, divulged the presence of a so-called Jabidah force. Ninoy’s detractors though claimed that he was simply plucking something out of a myth. The ensuing public debate on the topic succeeded only to muddle the issue even further such that we never came to ascertain if it was fact or fiction. Anyway, the Jabidah was reputedly an elite military force of nearly of brigade strength. In military parlance, a brigade is composed normally of three companies with three platoons making up a company.

I further remember the senator’s expose saying that Muslim soldiers mainly comprised the force. After they bivouacked for a regular military course in a Mindanao island, they had secret special training in the Corregidor island. The group reportedly rebelled ending in a massacre that supposedly resulted in a court-martial proceeding of its alleged leader, one Maj. Abdul Latif Martelino.

Added to the Ninoy revelation was the story that the Jabidah was organized to reclaim Sabah and North Borneo. It would have been an understandable objective. Every one of my college peers spoke highly of the Philippine claim over Sabah and North Borneo although our government was rebuffed firstly by Great Britain and later by the Federation of Malaya when we presented the documents of lease secured by a foreign trading company from the Sultanate of Sulu. It was a legitimate claim such that it gave birth to the constitutional provision defining our territory as including over which we had “historic right of legal title”. And had it progressed, it would have also benefited the Sultan, a Filipino citizen.

It was just unfortunate for the Sulu Sultanate (although fortunate for the republic from the perspective of international law) that the Jabidah story was not completely declassified. The credibility of the story suffered because no person was named as responsible for engineering such idea much less for putting substance to the plan. Or if there was such a person, his name was only whispered. In the same vein, no one dared to put the accusation before a bar of justice.

I remember that event of long ago because of a very recent incident. Filipinos are reportedly holding ground in a small patch of Sabah for and in behalf of the Sultan of Sulu. I might as well say that they are also doing this for the benefit of the Republic.

The current action of our brother Muslims in the service of Sultan Kiram is long overdue. What the sultan is doing is, in fact, the espousal of our national cause. This move of the sultan asserting the Sultanate’s propriety rights needs the unqualified support of the government and of the entire Filipino people.

Having said that, it is the duty of the His Excellency, President Benigno Simeon C. Aquino, to undo what, in effect, his father had done to the Jabidah. The president must unite the whole Filipino country to back up Sultan Kiram, and lead in all efforts, short of war, to press his claim. When he asked that the group of the sultan go home, the president is doing something very similar to his father’s scuttling the Jabidah. Further, the president should make all government moves in this unified direction. When, for instance, he tolerates his secretary of justice to threaten the Sultan and his men with prosecution for whatever criminal offense she perceived them to be liable for, he is very much like his father’s act of scuttling the Jabidah and believe me, I am horrified by this inexplicable direction.

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