The Peacemakers: MILF Peace Panel

The MILF Peace Panel

Chairman: Mohagher Iqbal

photosource:dl.voanews.cn

Mohaqher Iqbal, 62, is Information Chief Officer of the MILF Central Committee. He is also known by another name, as Salah Jubair, author of the book, Bangsamoro: A Nation Under Endless Tyranny and the 2006 book, The Long Road to Peace. Iqbal was panel chair from July 9, 2003 until the last agreement signed under the Arroyo administration on June 3, 2010. He was reappointed panel chair in early 2010.

Datu Michael O. Mastura

photos credit: cenpeg.org

Datu Michael O. Mastura, 69, is a lawyer and historian. He is also founding president of the Sultan Kudarat Islamic Academy Foundation in Sultan Kudarat, Maguindanao. A delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1971, he later served as Deputy Minister of Muslim Affairs. He has written several books on the Bangsamoro Struggle, among them “Muslim in the Philippines”, The Muslim Filipino Experience: A Collection of Essays (1984), Islam and Development (1980) and has recently completed a new book “Bangsamoro Quest: The Birth of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front” which will be off the press soon.

Mastura served as representative of the first district of Maguindanao. He is now referred to as “senior panel member”. He has been a panel member since 2001.

Maulana Alonto

Maulana Robert Alonto, writer and activist, has been a panel member since 2003. He used to edit a community newspaper. He is based in Lanao del Sur. In the early 1970s, Alonto was with the Northern Mindanao Revolutionary Committee of the Moro National Liberation Front tasked to handle propaganda and “like the other brothers had to fight in the Moro war of Liberation and defense against the Marcos dictatorship.

Abhoud Syed Lingga

Prof. Abhoud Syed Linga, 61, Executive Director of Institute of Bangsamoro Studies in Cotabato City, and Chair of the Bangsamoro People’s Consultative Assembly, is a new member of the peace panel. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Datu Ibrahim Paglas Memorial College. Like Iqbal and Mastura, Lingga has written several papers on the Bangsamoro Struggle, published in the Philippines and abroad.

Abdulla U. Camlian

Abdulla U. Camlian, a Tausug-Sama Bangui-ngui from Zamboanga City and Basilan, is a former head of the MILF peace panel’s technical committee. A graduate of the Cairo Military Academy in 1965, Camlian founded that year the Green Guards, “an associate idealist Muslim youth…which eventually formed the nucleus of Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) in Western Mindanao.” He served the Southern Philippines Development Authority for several years and in 1989 was Deputy Executive Director with the rank of Assistant Secretary, of the Office on Muslim Affairs under the first Aquino Administration.

In 1990, he was named as member of the Philippine Lobby Mission to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in Baghdad, Iraq, in Riyad, Saudi Arabia, in Morocco and in Kuwait. He had been assigned also to head the Philippines delegation to the International Qur’an reading competitions in some ASEAN countries.

Datu Antonio Kinoc, a Blaan, is alternate member of the MILF peace panel.

Source: Page 11, Our Mindanao, Volume 1 Issue 1, December 2010.

This was distributed on the 2^nd National Solidarity Conference on Mindanao.