Buldon, Maguindanao del Norte—Bangsamoro officials laid cornerstones on Monday for the construction of a public market building and four barangay hall buildings in this town where armed conflict began in 1969.
Senior Minister Abdulraof “Sammy Gambar” Macacua of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) then a young dissident, this time led the ground-breaking ceremonies for the infrastructure projects together with regional interior and local government Minister Naguib Sinarimbo.
They were hosted here and joined by Mayor Phamia Manalao and Vice Mayor Abolais Manalao in the ceremonies that signaled the continuity of government development programs long stalled by armed conflict.
Development of conflict-affected areas formed part of the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (CAB) signed in 2014 which the succeeding administrations of former President Rodrigo Duterte and now President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. have upheld.
Sinarimbo said the projects—a public market building and four two-story barangay hall buildings—were a part of BARMM’s program on strengthening local governance from the village level in the region.
He said the projects under this program are funded by the Office of Chief Minister Ahod Balawag Al-Hadj Murad Ebrahim, and are implemented by the Ministry of the Interior and Local Government (MILG).
“By this, we will be providing the village-level governance with appropriate barangay hall buildings, so they can improve on their level of delivery of services for the locals,” Sinarimbo said.
It was in Buldon where the first firefight occurred in 1969 that led to the formation and evolution of the Moro fronts. Armed young Moros, fresh from foreign training in a Malaysian territory, fought government constabulary troops backed by armed militias clad in military uniform.
Buldon formed part of President Ramon Magsaysay’s vast (1955) Edcor Settlement Proclamations to address agrarian issues in the north left unresolved by the administration of President Elpidio Quirino. As Quirino’s defense secretary, Magsaysay managed the agrarian uprising in Central Luzon by resettling leftist elements and their families first to Western Visayas.
Many of them were armed members of the leftist Hukbong Bayan Laban sa Hapon (Hukbalahap). In one of the provinces in Panay, the remnants of the World War II Hukbalahap established their recruitment and military training ground they called a “Stalin University.”
The “promised land” that was the Edcor Settlement in Mindanao (now comprised of at least four municipalities) was the final destination of the expedition—where a convergence of four families of constabulary members around one family of a Hukbalahap member, had been “experimented.”
The settlement areas were an “experimental ground” in which a government agrarian program hosts former enemies to coexist as one community, according to UP Prof. Arnold Molina Azurin.
Resistance by the early armed Moro group against the final wave of the exodus—composed mostly of younger recruits from the Visayas—actually sparked the armed conflict in Central and Northern Mindanao in 1969.
Some government officials had reportedly armed the younger leftists’ recruits from Western Visayas, effectively turning them into rightist militias beef-up the agrarian program and to fight Moro-occupants of the lands covered by the Magsaysay settlement proclamations. Some were clad in constabulary uniform, like the “Barakuda Unit” whose records in the Philippine military organization purportedly did not exist—but were powerful enough to even harass politicians or their relatives.