Guns now silent in contested Maguindanao agricultural lands

COTABATO CITY, Philippines — Various sectors have urged the Bangsamoro government to lead cross-section efforts in resolving the land conflict in Pagalungan, Maguindanao del Sur that worsened with the latest encounter of two protagonist groups that left 19 from both sides dead.

The series of gunfights on Wednesday, October 30, between two factions in the Moro Islamic Liberation Front that are squabbling for control of agricultural lands in Sitio Gagiranen in Barangay Kilangan, Pagalungan reportedly displaced 496 marginalized Moro families.

Major. Gen. Antonio Nafarrete, commander of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division, told reporters on Friday, November 1, that the 602nd Infantry Brigade has deployed "buffer troops" in the area to prevent a repeat of the incident.

Officials of the municipal police and Pagalungan Mayor Salik Mamasabulod said on Friday that they tried to settle the dispute, but the parties to the conflict, one led by an engineer, Alonto Sultan, who has allies in the MILF, and the other by Ekhot Dandua and a certain Bawsi, both field commanders of the front, have rejected solutions based on the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law, known as the Republic Act 6657.

“As if both sides don’t want the issue settled amicably. That problem is supposedly resolvable via traditional Moro conflict resolution processes,” Mamasabulod said.

The Army’s 90th IB and the 602nd Brigade had separately confirmed the recovery of 14 cadavers of gunmen from the enemy MILF factions that figured in gunfights on Wednesday in Barangay Kilangan.

Local officials, barangay leaders, government health workers and public school teachers, two of them scions of noble Moro clans, separately told reporters that five other men from the two rival groups died from multiple bullet wounds sustained in the encounters, their cadavers carried away by companions who fled towards Maridagao area at the border of Pagalungan and Carmen town in Cotabato province.

Nafarette and Brig. Gen. Romeo Jaime Macapaz, director of the Police Regional Office-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region, separately said that their units will cooperate in restoring normalcy in Barangay Kilangan via community peacebuilding projects.

Members of the multi-sector Pagalungan Municipal Peace and Order Council and two retired officials of the Department of Agriculture-12, one residing in Kidapawan City and the other now based on Isulan town in Sultan Kudarat, said the group of Sultan and the MILF forces led by Dandua are fighting over 280 hectares of state-owned farming demonstration site developed in the 1960s by the Bureau of Plant Industry, or BPI.

The facility was abandoned by BPI workers as the Moro secessionist uprising broke out in 1972, taken over then by guerillas of the Moro National Liberation Front, who joined the MILF in the 1980s. Pagalungan is the hometown of MILF's founder, the late Sheik Salamat Hashim, who had studied Islamic theology at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt. 

Local executives in Maguindanao del Sur’s adjoining Pagagawan and Pagalungan towns and the nearby Pikit, Cotabato, said Sultan came to Pagalungan just a few years ago, claiming that his clan has documents proving ownership of the 280-hectare government reservation.

Highly-placed MILF sources said the first to oppose Sultan’s assertion were guerillas who had been tilling parcels of the contested lands that were once BPI’s showcases for propagation of short-term crops and orchard trees.

Officials of the Bangsamoro regional police said they have requested the joint government-MILF ceasefire committee to help restrain Sultan and his supporters in the MILF and their adversaries, who are also members of the front, while efforts to settle the deadly land conflict are underway.