These are all documented in local and international reports. We need not narrate here in great detail the horrific accounts of atrocities committed by the Marcos regime against the Bangsamoro. Martial Law turned the Bangsamoro into one huge military garrison long before Gaza in occupied Palestine came into existence. In addition, more than 300 Mosques were destroyed and desecrated while farm and farm lots by the thousands of hectares were forcibly abandoned by their Moro owners and seized by politicians, military men, and entities fronting for Marcos crony corporations. He had to risk life and limb in his efforts to seek help from any source willing to capacitate the Moro communities into defending themselves from the attack dogs of the Marcos regime.
The horrendous atrocities and ritual mutilation of innocent and defenseless Moro men, women and children were too much to bear for my father. In 1970, many parts of the Bangsamoro homeland were laid to waste by the ethnic cleansing depredations of the Ilaga paramilitary gangs unleashed by the Marcos regime. This massacre ushered in the Bangsamoro struggle against the Marcos regime and resulted in the birth of the Moro Liberation Movement that my father helped create especially in the recruitment and preparation of the Moro youths for the armed resistance ahead. The Moro trainees who were mostly from Sulu and Tawi-Tawi refused to continue their military training after they found out that their mission was to invade a neighboring state. This was the infamous Jabidah massacre that ensued out of “Operation Merdeka”, a Marcos covert project to invade Sabah, Malaysia and seize this piece of real estate in North Borneo. In March 1968, more than 100 Muslim Moro youths undergoing clandestine military training on Corregidor Island were mercilessly massacred by their military trainers. He and his siblings shared this premonition that the Marcos regime would plunge Moro land into conflict and place the whole country under authoritarian rule moored on wholesale repression of human and civil rights and an insatiable greed for power and wealth. Marcos, a despotic, violent streak, as early as the 1960s. In retrospect, my father already saw in Ferdinand E.
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