Nur Misuari: An Authorized Biography

An Authorized Biography

Tom Stern

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An Authorized Biography

of

Professor Dr. Nur P. Misuari

Moro National Liberation Front Founding Leader and Central Committee Chairman, United Nations Peace Awardee, Nobel Peace Laureate Nominee, Aurora Quezon Peace Awardee, Supreme Datu or Leader of the Bangsa Moro Highlander Tribal Communities Throughout Mindanao, Royal Datu of the Sultanate of Sulu; and Datu Seri Panglima Darajat Kinabalu (State of Sabah, Malaysia), Ph.D. Honoris Causa in Humanities and International Relations, signatory to the 1976 Tripoli Agreement, the Jeddah Peace Accord, and the Jakarta-Manila Final Peace Agreement of September 2, 1996.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Of all factors, it is the cooperation of Chairman Nur Misuari that made this book possible. The family of Nur Misuari graciously provided the story of his home life, and of life in battle. Also, I want to thank the many people who consented to give information on and off the record, especially to his Excellency, Fidel V. Ramos, former President of the Republic of the Philippines. Always a good friend, President Ramos wrote his own take on Misuari’s life and personality in several excellent books. Sultan Esmail Dalus Kiram II carefully provided deep understanding of events in Sulu, home of Misuari. Former First Lady Imelda R. Marcos, who helped negotiate the Tripoli Peace Agreement, gave me her perceptions in her own inimitable style. Professor Cesar Majul, the recognized master of the history of Islam in the Philippines, became a good friend after he moved to California. Before he died, he provided much information.

My research staff, Mr. Bon T. Sindayen and Mr. Alih Faisal, helped me with research and resources, and I am grateful to both of them. Also, I want to thank several men who came for interviews but whose names are left out by special request. I also thank Karina Bolasco of Anvil Press and her staff in Manila for their editorial contributions.

I am especially thankful to Yolanda Ortega Stern, my remarkable wife, who collected important documents for decades, papers which detailed the events leading up to the 1998 Nobel Prize Nomination of Misuari and Ramos. While collecting an extensive library, Yolanda Stern has been pouring through aged documents at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. She is acknowledged as a world expert on Philippine culture and history. Fundamentally, without her I could never have written this book.

My wife and I know Nur Misuari’s story as eyewitnesses, in my case going back 12 years, and in the case of Yolanda, to her voyages as a young princess of the Mandi Clan. We traveled widely, almost always under the protection of one warlord or another, contributing what we could in medical assistance or educational programs to promote retention of cultural traditions. We aimed at catalyzing political discussions to promote peace in the troubled area. In 1996, Yolanda, in her role as President of the Federation of Philippine American Chambers of Commerce of the United States, flew to Mindanao to meet Nur Misuari. Immediately she brought together Misuari and the American Ambassador to the Philippines, Thomas Hubbard. With Ambassador Hubbard as witness, the Chambers of Commerce and the Moro National Liberation Front signed a Memorandum of Understanding aimed to relieve the economic plight of Misuari’s people. Yolanda and I believed that the 1996 Peace Agreement, fragile and imperfect, represented a nevertheless momentous achievement. To raise international awareness of this agreement, we organized a nominating group that put forward President Fidel Ramos and Chairman Nur Misuari as candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize. This involved gathering voluminous documentation from both men. Over the next years, we came to know Misuari well, hosting him in America and arranging speaking engagements for him at the University of California, Berkeley, and consultations with scholars from Stanford University’s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, plus assisting him with meetings at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. Because by 2005 I had written several books, he selected me as his official biographer, and because of her influence and sophistication, he appointed Yolanda as MNLF Ambassador to the Americas. I agreed because what I had learned about Misuari and the geopolitics in East Asia convinced me of both his importance as a historical figure, and of the importance of Sulu, Mindanao, North Borneo and the Philippines to world events.

Tom Stern, M.D.

Stanford University

Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace

What is done in far places need seldom cumber the books. The dumb earth drinks the blood.

Katherine Mayo

Isles of Fear, 1924

Isles of Fear includes many observations and experiences of the author during her visits to Mindanao and Sulu almost a century ago.

Chapter 1

The Prize

Photographers’ flashes illuminated the slim figure of the Philippines’ Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) Chairman Nur Misuari, a Muslim war leader striding to the podium in Dakar, Senegal’s Centre Internationale to receive his UNESCO Peace Prize, the United Nations’ equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize. Cheered by a throng of Muslims and Christians alike, he opened his remarks with an invocation of Almighty God in a prayer for harmony. Disasters would be galloping toward him, but in his moment of triumph, Misuari did not see the shadow of their impending approach.

That night, June 17, 1998, MNLF Chairman Nur Misuari shared the limelight with His Excellency, Fidel V. Ramos, President of the Republic of the Philippines. They had been bloody adversaries in the Philippines, yet on the world stage, they had become joint nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize. After seriously considering the Filipinos, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the prize to peacemakers in Ireland that year, but still forwarded the Filipinos’ file to Paris, headquarters of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). With the Nobel Committee’s endorsement, Ramos and Misuari won UNESCO’s nod in Paris, with the award ceremony for their UNESCO Peace Prize scheduled to follow soon after in Senegal.

Previous winners included United States President Jimmy Carter, South African political prisoner Nelson Mandela, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres of Israel, Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization, King Juan Carlos of Spain, and other prominent people. An august jury headed by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger chose the pair to receive the UNESCO Peace Prize in recognition of their process that ended an anti-colonial, anti-Philippine government, Muslim-Christian war, a war for Muslim independence and self-determination in the Philippines, where Muslims are called Moros. The little-known but brutal territorial war claimed a quarter of a million lives. Conducted in what amounted to a news vacuum, the war created a refugee problem reaching a million Internally Displaced Persons, far larger than The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Misuari, as chairman of the Moro National Liberation Front, led as many as 50,000 fighters trying to carve out and restore a Muslim nation amid the predominantly Catholic Philippines, which they saw as an unwanted colonial power that had unjustly taken control of their beloved islands in the southern Philippines. The Manila-based national government held the view that the Constitution of the Philippines required holding and defending those same lands.

Representing the government, Philippine President Fidel V. Ramos, a 1950 West Point graduate, had faced Misuari, first as a general in the Armed Forces of the Philippines, with some two hundred thousand brave warriors armed largely by America, then as Philippine president and Commander-in-Chief in 1992. And finally, like two weary and bloodied boxers in a clinch, Ramos and Misuari hammered out a peace agreement. For that, they were internationally celebrated, awarded plaques and gold medals, and appeared well on the way to a permanent solution to the problem of the southern Philippines.

Three years later, the wheel of fortune had turned. President Ramos’s term had ended, and he chafed on the sidelines, pacing like a football coach. Nur Misuari languished in prison, charged with leading a rebellion against the Philippines, a crime punishable by death. At the very center of the Philippine National Police training camp, with hundreds of Special Action Forces marching about with high-powered weapons, a small bungalow hunkered down behind three perimeters of chain-link fences topped with concertina wire.

To see him, visitors escorted by heavily armed soldiers passed through the first fence into a holding area perhaps six feet in width. Before the padlock to the second gate was opened, the first gate was slammed behind the visitor, trapping him in the narrow space with two aggressive guard dogs, German Shepherds, careful bomb-sniffers who took their work seriously. Only after the dogs wagged approval did guards unlock the second gate, leading into another holding area that guards locked after entry, where two more dogs patrolled and repeated inspection. Finally, the third gate was unlocked, the visitor allowed inside before it was locked behind him. At the next stage, an armed guard patrolling the inner perimeter turned a hefty key in a padlock that secured the only door to the bungalow. Once inside the house, even that door was locked behind visitors to secure everyone inside, converting a visitor to a prisoner for the duration.

Yet even under such high security, Misuari was never alone. Unarmed so Misuari could not get their guns, three guards with martial-arts training, agile men who could use their hands or kicks to kill with ease, sat alertly in vinyl sofas cracked by years of hot, humid weather. Misuari’s personal cleric was incarcerated with him, a co-defendant who was arrested with Misuari on the high seas after hot pursuit by the Philippine Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force. They lived in sparse surroundings: no telephone, no computer, and a television that could only receive local channels broadcasting uncontroversial news. No matter how many thousands of armed followers swore allegiance to Misuari, there could never be a jail break.

Thus, the morning he woke and swung his bare feet to the floor, only to find seven poisonous snakes slithering and hissing about his bedroom, raised questions about whether he would live long enough to endure a series of trials, after which he would be condemned to die. And, in another report confirmed to me by his cellmate, the day a bullet whizzed past Misuari’s ear while he walked inside his cage made him think his days were numbered in single digits.

Neatly dressed as always, Misuari greeted visitors warmly with his trademark toothy grin, humbly understating, I’m so embarrassed my friends cannot easily visit me. His prison’s stark contrast with the Peace Prize celebration—and the triumphal tour of America which followed—raises many questions. How did a man soaring so high fall from the glittering heavens so abruptly? Was it international intrigue against him, or a reiteration of the tale of Icarus, an excessively proud man who flies too close to the sun? Might Misuari’s fall be an almost inevitable result of the historical dialectic—massive clashes of cultural forces that had brought him to prison according to their own grand logic? Or was he being used by other, more powerful men who ruled entire nations?

All of those forces united to crush Misuari—what kind of man would have the inner strength to remain powerful under such conditions?

Once, Misuari had a strange encounter with America’s intelligence community, when a serious man with an especially high-tech movie camera arrived in the Philippines, unannounced, and asked for an appointment, which Misuari granted out of curiosity. Misuari recalls, He told me while filming, ‘I came from New York City to Jolo to see you. I have only four questions. First, what is your policy toward the American people?’

Misuari answered, Our policy is to make friends. Tell the Americans we love to have friendship with them, especially them in all the world. We are ready to forget the past.

What type of political system will you have? You are so enigmatic, the agent asked.

We want peace, Misuari replied. We cannot have peace without democracy.

The man adjusted for a close-up of Misuari’s face. What kind of democracy?

Something like your American system.

Keeping his promise, the mysterious visitor asked his fourth and final question. Would you be willing to have help from America?

Why not? Misuari said. "There is no harm accepting any help from anyone. Seriously, all doubts about me and the Moro National Liberation Front could be put aside if we had a presence in the U.S.A." The man filmed everything Misuari said, thanked him, and departed in a few minutes.

As recognized by whichever intelligence agency sent that visitor, Misuari’s story is important for America and Europe to understand, especially at this critical moment of world conflict. It is particularly important to inform America’s foreign policy, because very few people in Washington, D.C., know that America conquered Misuari’s people and colonized them before turning them over to Filipinos from distant islands. Arguably the brightest writer in American literature, Mark Twain wrote article after article warning America not to take this path ultimately taken.

Why and how did a brainy professor of Political Science at the University of the Philippines become a fierce fighter against the government of the Philippines? Nur Misuari’s story transcends merely being another discontented Filipino on a planet full of discontented people. There stands something vitally important in his saga, for example, a lesson that can help civilization avoid the quicksand of a widening Muslim-Christian conflict, a clash that threatens to polarize nations into two camps that have little choice but to do battle. His experience gives thinking people an early warning about a little-known flashpoint in North Borneo, a place of such strategic value that it could drag America and her allies into yet another shooting war.

This book reveals the inside story of both Nur Misuari and of his Bangsa Moro Republic. Central figures include Libya’s Moammar Khaddafy, former First Lady Imelda R. Marcos, President Ferdinand E. Marcos, and the United States of America. Almost no one is aware the United States made war against the Filipino Muslims, especially in Sulu, from 1898-1946, the very conflict which prepared the soil for the rise of Nur Misuari decades later. Oddly, a search of the vast archives of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University, conducted by a research librarian on April 6, 2010, found not one reference to Nur Misuari, a man who received a standing ovation in 2009 by the Plenary Session of the Organization of Islamic Conference of 57 nations.

At the time of writing, deposed President Joseph Estrada of the Philippines had received executive clemency on plundering charges. Despite his conviction, he was freed and, remarkably, ran for the presidency again in 2010, finishing second to Benigno S. Aquino III. Until recently, Nur Misuari remained a prisoner of legendary stature beloved by his people, confined by the Government of the Philippines, perhaps more powerful than ever precisely because jail martyrized him, empowering those who believe in his cause and are inspired by his steadfastness. Misuari was detained for more than seven years without a judgment against him.

Chapter 2

Misuari’s Childhood

Nurullaji Pining Misuari was born March 3, 1939, in the village of Kabingaan, on the island of Tapul, in the heart of the Sulu Archipelago. There, more than eight hundred islands with white sand beaches are guarded by phalanxes of coconut trees swaying in gentle breezes, nodding above warm seas teeming with marine life.

In the mid-1300s, Muslims from Indonesia and Malaysia brought Islam to the animist peoples of Sulu. The Sulu Sultanate was established, which paid tribute to the Ming Emperor of China in the form of pearls, edible bird’s nests, and dried sea cucumber. The Sultanate controlled the seas and grew rich. In the late 1500s, Spanish Conquistadors took control of the Philippines and began a three-century campaign to rid the Philippines of Islam, as they had rid Spain of the Moors. In 1898, America won the Spanish-American War and purchased the Philippines at a fire-sale price of $20 million during the settlement. When America took over, the Sultanate of Sulu had full control of the Sulu Archipelago, save for one or two walled enclaves in which Spanish soldiers garrisoned themselves against the fierce Muslim fighters outside the walls. These Muslims felt the absolute conviction that they were a sovereign nation not subject to any colonial ruler.

Once American soldiers under General John Black Jack Pershing pacified the Muslims in the southern Philippines, an era of political and economic progress took hold in Sulu that was favorably received by the Muslim citizens, who saw that their religion and customs were generally accepted by American bureaucrats. But gradually, the American colonial government began to Filipinize all of the islands with government officials sent from Manila, even though the Muslims sent representatives to the United States Congress, with a Declaration that:

WE ARE LOYAL UNTO DEATH TO THE UNITED STATES.

THAT IN PROOF OF THIS LOYALTY WE HAVE PLEDGED OURSELVES BY THE MOST SOLEMN OATH KNOWN TO MOHAMMEDANS TO DIE RATHER THAN SUBMIT TO DOMINATION BY CHRISTIAN FILIPINOS FROM THE NORTH,

THAT IN THE EVENT THE UNITED STATES GRANTS INDEPENDENCE TO THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS WITHOUT PROVISION FOR OUR RETENTION UNDER THE AMERICAN FLAG, IT IS OUR FIRM INTENTION AND RESOLVE TO DECLARE OURSELVES AN INDEPENDENT CONSTITUTIONAL SULTANATE TO BE KNOWN TO THE WORLD AS THE MORO NATION. IT IS THE DUTY OF THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED ‘MAKE PROVISION AT ONCE FOR THE SECURITY AND PROTECTION PROMISED TO US WHEN WE SURRENDERED OUR ARMS TO THE UNITED STATES ARMY. THIS PROMISE IS JUST AS SACRED AS ANY ALLEGED PROMISES YOU HAVE MADE TO THE CHRISTIAN FILIPINOS. YOU HAVE LEFT US DEFENCELESS AND IT IS YOUR DUTY TO PROTECT US OR RETURN TO US THE WEAPONS YOU TOOK FROM US AND WHICH WE FREELY GAVE YOU, RELYING ON YOUR PROMISES.

YOU ARE FORCING US SURELY AND STEADILY TO RECOURSE TO DESPERATE AND BLOODY MEASURES WHICH ARE ABHORRENT TO US, IN VIEW OF OUR LOYALTY TO THE AMERICAN FLAG, OUR GOVERNOR-GENERAL, AND OUR GRATITUDE TO THE UNITED STATES FOR THE LIBERTY AND SECURITY OF LIFE WHICH WE ENJOYED UNTIL YOU DELEGATED YOUR POWER AND AUTHORITY TO THE CHRISTIAN FILIPINOS. (A Declaration of Rights and Purposes Addressed to the Congress of the United States of America, 1923 (Katherine Mayo, Isles of Fear, 1924, p. 334)

But America turned a deaf ear to Muslim pleadings, and over the coming decades handed power over Mindanao and Sulu almost exclusively to Filipinos from Luzon. In those days, when communications required days or weeks, the Moros comforted themselves with notions that, America will remember one day. But it is true that America never hears of your troubles. How can she learn? Do not think ill of America. She is very far away. (Mayo, Ibid. p. 321)

According to Misuari, it was all part of a dark colonial ideology, continuing almost four centuries of Spanish efforts. He describes it thusly:

But then there was the black scourge that descended upon three-quarters of the world. Western and American colonialism, possessed by over-powering urge to plunder and to spread Western civilization, encroached upon the sacred land of our people and inaugurated a war of conquest that spread the whole span of nearly four centuries. (Misuari, Nur. Appeal to the Islamic World for Support of the Moro People of the Southern Philippines. Sixth Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers. Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 1975.)

Hundreds of American sailors, including the commander of the American Navy Fleet reconnoitering the world as a Presidential Exploration, have described Sulu as the most beautiful islands on earth. But perhaps in some form of cosmic justice or equilibration, these spectacular islands rank with the most troubled and dangerous places on the globe. From birth, Misuari was raised to be their warrior-defender.

His father was Saliddain Misuari, and his mother Dindanghali Pining, both devout Muslims. Putting infant Misuari to bed each night, his mother sang him the traditional lullabyes of Sulu,

Sleep my child,

So you can grow up

To be a strong warrior.

My father was a humble man, Misuari says, who fished and traded in fish. He was the youngest of six brothers descended from a line of warriors who defended the sovereignty of the Sulu Sultanate from the Spanish. My grandfather, Panglima (Mayor) Saladdin, was the bravest of men and toward the end of Spanish presence in the Philippines, he led the destruction of Spanish garrisons in Tawi Tawi and forced their garrison in Siasi to surrender.

Misuari’s paternal grandmother also came from the warrior class, fighters in Jolo who slaughtered Japanese invaders and drove them out before the Americans came. According to Misuari, his warrior lineage reaches back more than 400 years, to an ancestor who helped the Sultan of Sulu reinforce the Sultan of Brunei—now truly the world’s richest man—in a fierce fight against usurpers trying to overthrow the Sultan of Brunei. For rescuing Brunei, the Sultan of Sulu was formally awarded North Borneo as part of his sultanate, or royal domains. Some of Misuari’s power comes because Misuari, rightfully by tradition, says he could press his own claim to Sabah lands captured by Malaysia.

Although during much of his life, Misuari has criticized the traditional leaders of the Sultanate as ineffective and obsolete, his family in reality has several centuries of loyal relations with the Sultan of Sulu. According to Sultan Esmail Dalus Kiram II, the father of Nur Misuari was made majarajah of Tapul because he refused to do some bad things, his rectitude drawing the approval of the Sulu Sultan. Despite the honor, Misuari’s family remained very poor.

Everyone agrees that Misuari seems happiest when walking the lands of Jolo, where he talks politics and about his life with a constant stream of visitors. Several million people live in the domain of the Sultan of Sulu and North Borneo, most of them in grinding poverty but not in total hopelessness, for their land and waters save them. Fecund seas feed them boatloads of fish and crabs. Nutritious rice grows in vast paddies or in the upland fields, where it grows in abundance. Trees groan with exotic tropical fruits unknown to American palettes: durian, giant mango, jackfruit, purple mangosteen. And vegetables grow intercropped below towering coconut palm trees, the palms arranged in precise ranks and rows like drill teams on a parade ground.

My mother was soft-spoken and we never talked politics…that came from my father, Misuari says. But she taught me to read the Koran. She was the great-granddaughter of famous warriors, of the Bangingi clan who fought against Spain on the sea. So from both sides I came from those who fought against Spain’s colonialism in the Sulu Sultanate.

Misuari had six brothers, with him toward the middle, and two sisters who died young. The youngest of his six brothers, Abdul Karim Misuari, died in battle in Jolo in 1974 supporting his elder brother’s cause. Misuari named his first-born son after his martyred brother.

While Misuari was still a youth, his father moved the family to Jolo Island, to the village of Tulay, where the family lived in a house built on stilts over the sea, a durable home built of teak. Jolo island, nearly a hundred miles in circumference, is the seat of the Sultan of Sulu, who for more than five hundred years ruled the archipelago and North Borneo.

Where a man grows up shapes him in ways he never escapes, though he may transcend them. All of his life, Misuari bore the imprint of his rural, Muslim origins. He dressed plainly, spoke simply, ate sparingly—chiefly fish that swim in deep waters—and faced the world with a serious demeanor, listening gravely to the voice of his conscience. In an economic sense, Misuari was a child of the poor, he lived among poor people, he knew what every poor Moro or Filipino wants.

As a young man, Misuari prayed with his father at the Tulay mosque, where he remained for Islamic studies that often kept him so late into the night that he slept there. From his family and from devoted studies at the mosque, Misuari developed a kind-spirited Islam that lasted his lifetime. In our troubled era, we must distinguish different kinds of Islam, which ranges from extreme, as in Salafism, to gentle, as in Sufism. Misuari’s variety of Islam emphasizes justice and peace, not extermination of non-believers. Hence, the mere fact of his Muslim faith should not sway observers into believing he bears any grudge against Christians, who in fact Misuari deeply respects as People of the Book, all descendants of Abraham.

Beginning in youth, he behaved as if unconsciously aware of his destiny to emerge as the leader everyone knew must come one day. While other boys played games, Misuari began to train himself in mock battle. Weaponless, he worked at physical conditioning, stretching and strengthening his body, becoming a fine long-distance ocean swimmer. He and friends would hitch rides on ferries until they were far from enough from shore for a challenging open-water swim back after they plunged into the turquoise sea.

Unlike some leaders born to wealth, Misuari’s revolution began with nothing but his body and mind. Later, the youthful Misuari added his first weapon when