Before dawn chased away the darkness on March 18, 1968, Moro military trainees were shot dead on the Corregidor airstrip. Their assailants, lone survivor Jibin Arula said, were their training officers.
Arula took a bullet in the left knee before swimming for his life in Manila Bay. He was eventually rescued by fishermen off the coast of Cavite.
If you want to trace the roots of the Bangsamoro separatist movement, you must study the deep bloodstain on our history known as the Jabidah massacre.
Tausug and Sama Muslims aged 18-30 from Sulu and Tawi-Tawi were recruited for the military operation known as Oplan Merdeka. The recruits underwent training in Simunul, Tawi-Tawi, before they were brought to Corregidor off the Southern Tagalog region.
Arula said he was one of the trainees brought to Corregidor on Jan. 3, 1968, to train in guerrilla warfare. Instead of a full course of training, they received a lethal rain of bullets on an island honored for the valor of its defenders in World War II.
On Dec. 30, 1967, between 135 and 180 Moro recruits boarded a Philippine Navy vessel bound for Corregidor in Luzon for “specialized training.” (A Tausug soldier left a piece of graffiti there: “Pvt. Plaza, Ladjasali from Bato-Bato Sulu was here in Corregidor on Jan. 3,/68.” There is a photograph of it on www.xiaochua.net, which the website www.bantayog.org cited as the source in the story on the Jabidah massacre that it carried on its webpages.)
Arula recounted the massacre in interviews with the Philippine Daily Inquirer
in March 2008 and March 2009, before he died in a vehicular accident in 2010. He
said members of the Jabidah unit was promised an allowance of P50 a month, yet “we received not a centavo. We were fed dried fish, and for coffee, we would use rice leftovers. The commanders were
living in luxury while we were living with almost nothing at all.”
By Arula’s account, the trainees were aggrieved by this and wrote a secret petition to then President Ferdinand Marcos. The letter may have been intercepted by their military trainers, and it may have led to the tragedy that ensued.
Oplan Merdeka was a secret operation to destabilize the territory of North Borneo (also called Sabah), which was incorporated into the Malaysian Federation after the British granted it independence in 1957.
That territory belongs to the Sultanate of Sulu. It was rented out by padjak lease agreement to the British East India Co. in 1878 by the Sultan of Sulu. The claim of the Sultanate remains active even now, though there is no progress in reclaiming the territory. The padjak predates the existence of both the Republic of the Philippines, of which the heirs of the Sultanate of Sulu are now citizens, and the Federation of Malaysia.
While the Malaysian government claims that this territory belongs to the federation, it pays annual rental to the heirs of the
Sultan of Sulu per the padjak. If that is not tacit recognition of the sultanate’s ownership of North Borneo, I don’t know what is.
This parcel of land is part of the Moro homeland. It was given by the Sultan of Borneo to the Sultan of Sulu for the bravery of the Tausug warriors of the Sultanate of Sulu, who helped the Sultan of Borneo put down a rebellion. That land was won with Tausug blood.
Oplan Merdeka resulted in Malaysia’s lodging of a formal complaint at the United Nations. The Jabidah unit would be disavowed and the government would lie by saying these Moros were part of the private army of the Sultan of Sulu.
I’ve been writing about this issue annually for four years because it is part of our narrative and we must keep the story alive—especially because there is still no justice for the slain.
Five decades have passed and there is yet no closure for this injustice—and it has spawned even more injustice.
Filipinos ask why we seek a homeland and self-determination, why we don’t simply integrate into the mainstream of Filipino society. It’s hard to answer that question when the mainstream of society is still in denial or unaware of the unresolved injustices we in the Bangsamoro must remember, lest history repeat itself. It is hard to tell your countrymen of a different faith that we are killed just for being Muslim.
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Amir Mawallil is a former executive director of the Office on Bangsamoro Youth Affairs. He is now the executive director of the Bureau of Public Information of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.