A Brief History of the Bangsamoro Struggle

The History of the conflict in Mindanao can be tracked back to Spanish colonization in the 16th century. Introduced in the 14th century by Arab traders and further promoted by missionaries from Indonesia and Malaysia in the 15th and early 16th centuries, Islam had taken root in Mindanao. In line with Islamic tradition, a governance structure in the form of the Sultanates was already in place.

The ability of the Muslim to thwart successive attempts of the Spanish colonial forces to subjugate them and set them apart from the northern inhabitants of the Philippine archipelago, who were mostly conquered and converted to Christianity. Deep distrust and suspicion were cultivated by the colonizers among the Christian converts against their Muslim brothers as a way of ensuring their control of most of the country and its inhabitants. Intermittent wars were fought between the Spanish invaders and their local Christian allies against Muslim fighters throughout three centuries of Spanish colonial rule.

The advent of the American colonial rule did little to change the situation. During the american regime a series of land laws that favored Christian settlers and private corporations at the expense of the Moros and Indigenous People (IPs) were passed. This, along with the implementations of land based programs in Mindanao, anchored on a property rights regime alien to the customs and traditions of the Moros and the IPs, which led to massive dispossession of Moro lands by Christian settlers and private investors.

After the country gained independence from the United States, a series of land resettlement programs in Mindanao in the 1950's to 1960's in further accelerated this dispossession. The resettlement programs were undertaken to ease the social unrest spawned by the Communist rebellion in the northern islands of Luzon and the Visaya's and, purportedly, to further develop Mindanao by exploiting its vast natural resources. By the late 1960's and and the early 1970's tension increased between the Christian settlers and Moros doe to growing land scarcity and fueled by centuries of distrust between two groups.