MNLF Officials Want Peaceful End to Hostilities in Palestine

COTABATO CITY – The top official of Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) on Saturday called on transnational humanitarian groups to initiate interventions needed to have peaceful end to the escalating conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

MNLF chairman Muslimin Sema, who is also the minister of Labor and Employment of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM), said the central committee members had urged their followers across the country to be circumspect in expressing their sentiments on the issue on social media.

He said emotional and irrational posts on Facebook can only intensify the escalating disgust of Moro communities in Israel.

“We in Mindanao had seen the ugliest images of armed conflicts when we fought for three decades for self-self-governance, obviously not as bloody and destructive as that of the conflict in Palestine, but enough for us to learn that wars are savage and absolutely primitive,” Sema said.

As a minister of labor and employment in the Bangsamoro region, Sema has initiated programs promoting religious and cultural solidarity among Moro and non-Moro in the labor sector.

Sema said the United Nations (UN) and its relief agencies and various peacebuilding units of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) must cooperate in defusing tension among the Israelis and the Palestine.

The OIC, composed of 57 Muslim states, including petroleum-exporting countries in the Middle East and North Africa, brokered the September 2, 1996 peace compact between Malacañang and the MNLF.

The government-MNLF truce is a product of drawn out negotiations that started with the crafting by both sides of the 1976 Tripoli Agreement in Libya that was to become the main reference in forging the 27-year accord.

“For the MNLF, it is the United Nations that can solve the escalating conflict now in Palestinian territories. We want that resolved on the negotiating table,” Sema said.

He said the conflict, though happening in an area too far from the Philippines, is both saddening and annoying for the Moro people in Mindanao.

The escalating hostilities have to be resolved in negotiating table and arrive a peaceful end, he said. (John Felix Unson)

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