NDF Mindanao scores Misuari’s “ambition”, Aquino’s “brutality”

National Democratic Front (NDF) Mindanao spokesperson Ka Oris (davaotoday com photo Jose Hernani)

By DAVAO TODAY

Davao City– National Democratic Front Mindanao spokesperson Ka Oris released a statement criticizing both Nur Misuari, chair of the Moro National Liberation Front, and President Benigno Aquino III for the armed standoff in Zamboanga City that has cost properties and lives.

Ka Oris said the MNLF leader’s “own ambitions have gamely trifled with the lives of heroic Moro freedom fighters, and have disingenuously planted false hopes on the minds of the Moro people over what he declared last August 12 as ‘Bangsamoro Republic.’”

The NDF spokesperson describe’s Misuari’s show of force in Zamboanga as a “reckless and futile attempt…using the MNLF freedom fighters to dramatize his long lost cause and get concessions from the GPH and the Arab world to grant them their share of crumbs in the on-going “peace process” between the GPH and the MILF.”

Misuari according to MNLF spokesperson Atty. Emmanuel Fontanilla felt the talks on review of the Final Peace Agreement between his group and the government is being terminated, as talks with the government and the MILF is carving a different autonomous region for the Bangsamoro.

Likewise, Ka Oris condemned Aquino’s handling of the Zamboanga crisis by deploying thousands of PNP and AFP troops as “overkill reaction… (that) cost not only billions of pesos in damage to properties and the economy in general, but, more appallingly, the lives of nearly a hundred innocent civilians and MNLF freedom fighters, including GPH mercenary troops, displacing over a hundred thousand people.”

He also said the aerial bombing and strafing of MNLF fighters who held civilians “(demonstrated) the Aquino government’s disregard for the safety of the civilians and violating the Protocols of War.”

Casualties in the gunbattle now on its second week reached 140 including 12 civilians, 18 soldiers/police and 110 MNLF fighters. Some 23,794 families or 118,819 persons were displaced, according to the National Risk Reduction and Disaster Management Council.

Damages from fires affecting houses and closures of business cost as much as Php 10 billion.

Ka Oris believed that “outnumbered, ill-equipped and ill-supplied freedom fighters of the MNLF” are easily subdued by the “combined, far-superior reactionary armed forces.”

But he slammed the intervention of the US military with the use of spy planes or drones reportedly seen during the gunfight.

The NDF spokesperson also said the Moro struggle would not end with the recent armed conflict, pointing out that the “(t)he reactionary regime’s divide-and-rule tactic would merely delay the fruition of the true aspirations of the Moro people.”

“We are most certain that, should the GPH succeed to encumber one group, others would rise in its place to continue the struggle to resolve the fundamental problems of the Moro people,” Ka Oris aid.

Ka Oris further said the struggle of the Moro for self-determination would be carried on with various struggles of the 13 Moro tribes in Mindanao.

“Under the reactionary rule of the current regime, no other solution for the Moro problem is more feasible other than for the Moro people to launch a combination of both revolutionary armed struggle and open militant mass movement in order to reap the widespread support of the Bangsamoro as well as the entire Filipino people,” he said.

The NDF’s own peace negotiations with the Aquino government bogged down since February 2011. (davaotoday.com)