Ethiopia Is a Unique African Country

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Ethiopia is that rarity among African states: a country with a very long continuous history and one of the two never conquered by Europeans during the 19^th century partition of Africa. It also has one of the world’s oldest Christian churches, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, dating back to the fourth century. Christianity was declared the state religion in the Kingdom of Axum, forerunner of today’s Ethiopia, in 330 AD.

The medieval Christian kingdom was known to Europeans, often in the form of myths regarding Prester John, a mythical Christian king in the heart of Africa.

Unlike most parts of Africa, Ethiopia also had a feudal social system, with a land-owning nobility ruling over a peasantry from which it exacted tribute.

The Italians had tried to incorporate Ethiopia (also known as Abyssinia) into their empire but were defeated by Emperor Menelik II at Adwa in 1896, thus allowing Ethiopia to retain its independence.

But 40 years later, Ethiopia was subjugated by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and amalgamated with neighbours Eritrea and Italian Somaliland into an East African empire. Mussolini’s dream didn’t last long, though; in 1941, during World War II, the British expelled the Italians and restored Emperor Haile Selassie to his throne.

However, Ethiopia remained a feudal backwater. This came to a sudden end in 1974, when Haile Selassie was overthrown in a military coup, and was dead a year later, probably murdered by the revolutionaries who had assumed power.

The next few years marked a period of turmoil, as the Derg, the military council now running the country, quickly fell into internal conflict. In 1977 Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam became Ethiopia’s leader. Calling himself a Marxist-Leninist, he instituted a regime of terror, killing thousands of his opponents.

He also began to collectivize agriculture. All rural land was nationalized, stripping the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the Imperial family, and the nobility of all their sizable estates. But within a matter of years the country was suffering from a major famine which killed hundreds of thousands of people.

By now the country was beset by various separatist movements, operating in regions inhabited by peoples who were not Amhara, the ruling ethnic group who represent only about one-fourth of the population. The Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front launched a war for regional autonomy; the Oromo Liberation Front started political agitation in the Oromo areas; while in the Ogaden, the eastern part of the country inhabited by Muslim Somalis, the Western Somali Liberation Front began armed struggle. In 1977 Somalia invaded the Ogaden region in an attempt to annex it, but with Cuban and Soviet aid, Ethiopia drove its army back.

All of these different struggles merged into an overall civil war in the 1980s. Mengistu was finally toppled by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), an alliance of the various insurrectionary movements, and he fled to Zimbabwe in 1991. He remains there despite an Ethiopian court verdict finding him guilty in absentia of genocide for the deaths of some two million Ethiopians overall.

With Mengistu’s removal, the country, which had been run as a centralized state by both emperors and Marxists, acknowledged its diverse nature. In 1993 Eritrea, which had been attached to Ethiopia against its will after the Second World War, and had fought against its incorporation for decades, was granted independence. A year later the rest of the country, under a new constitution, was reorganized as a federal polity.

The first multi-party election took place in 1995, with Meles Zenawi Asres, head of the EPRDF, elected prime minister; he served until his death in 2012. Allegations of human rights abuses were levelled against his government, which continued to battle political opponents and secessionists.

In 2005, a disputed election led to violent unrest, and security forces killed nearly 200 people while putting down demonstrations. The 2010 election was also marred by irregularities. A leader of the country’s largest opposition group, the Forum for Democratic Dialogue in Ethiopia, Gebru Asrat, said that “The ruling party has completely turned the country in to a one party state.”

Under Meles Zenawi’s tenure Ethiopia also fought a boundary war against Eritrea from 1998 to 2000, and sent troops into Somalia in 2006 to halt the gains of the al-Shabaab Islamist militants; some are still involved there. The current prime minister, Hailemariam Desalegn Boshe, was Meles Zenawi’s deputy.

The 94 million Ethiopians are now divided into nine ethnically based and politically autonomous regional states, and two chartered cities, Addis Ababa, the capital, and Dire Dawa. The constitution assigns extensive power to them; on paper, they even have the right to secede. In practice, though, Ethiopia is far from being a democratic state.

 

Canadian - South Korean Relations Over Five Decades

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Canada and South Korea, and on Sept. 12-13 the ambassador of the Republic of Korea, Cho Hee-yong, visited Prince Edward Island to celebrate 2013 as “the year of Korea in Canada.”

While bellicose North Korea languishes under the Orwellian dictatorship of the Kim family, focused on building nuclear weapons while its people starve, South Korea has gone from strength to strength, and is now a modern democratic state, with one of the world’s strongest economies.

Few people in the 1950s would have predicted this. Long a Japanese colony, Korea was partitioned between a Communist north and a capitalist south after 1945. The north, calling itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, attacked the south five years later, and soon Communist Chinese troops entered the war on the northern side.

Canada, as part of a 16-nation American-led United Nations force, fought in the war on behalf of the south. A total of 26, 791 Canadians troops participated; more than 1,200 were seriously wounded and 516 Canadians died in the conflict. Canada supplied the third-largest military contingent, after the United States and Britain, on the Allied side.

The Korean War lasted from 1950 to 1953. By the time it ended, the south was a wasteland, its capital Seoul, destroyed. In the 1960s, its economy was still comparable with levels in the poorer countries of Africa and Asia.

But South Korea over the past four decades has demonstrated incredible growth and global integration to become a high-tech industrialized economy. It adapted an export-oriented economic strategy, with finished products such as electronics, textiles, ships, automobiles, semiconductors, computers, wireless telecommunications equipment, and steel being some of its most important exports.

Some of its major firms are known throughout the world: Hyundai and Kia are major automobile manufacturers, and LG and Samsung produce televisions and other electronics.

Today South Korea, with its 49 million people, is one of the “Asian tigers,” along with Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. Despite a lack of major natural resources, the economy ranks 15^th in the world, with a gross domestic product (GDP) of $1.116 trillion, and it is a member of the G-20.

South Korea is Canada’s seventh-largest trading partner, and Canadian-South Korean two-way trade reached $10.1 billion last year. South Koreans have invested more than $11 billion dollars in Canada over the past four decades, mostly in the field of energy.

More than 23,000 Canadians currently live in South Korea, including over 5,000 English teachers. Altogether, over 100,000 Canadians have taught English in the country over the years. As well, Canadian missionaries were active in the country from the late 19^th century on; the first Korean-English dictionary was compiled by a Canadian.

“We are strong allies and partners,” Ambassador Cho told an audience at the University of Prince Edward Island, “and relations have never been stronger.” He expressed his thanks for the “tremendous contribution” Canadians played in the war sixty years ago and also noted that Canada is concerned about the disregard for human rights in North Korea.

Short Guide to the PQ's Charter of Values

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The so-called “Quebec Charter of Values” unveiled by the governing Parti Québécois has, predictably, been met with almost universal condemnation in the rest of Canada, as well as by most non-francophones in Quebec itself. However, a significant percentage of Québécois francophones are in support, according to polls.

The charter would forbid all public employees from wearing “overt and conspicuous” religious symbols and headgear, including Muslim face veils, Jewish yarmulkes, Sikh turbans, or large crucifixes. “This restriction would reflect the state’s neutrality,” the proposal for the charter states.

The regulations would apply only to publicly-paid employees. These include police officers, prosecutors, doctors, teachers, daycare workers and other government workers.

The PQ considers itself a left-of-centre party, yet to many advocates of multiculturalism in the country, this seems to place them in the same category as those xenophobes, and even racists, who oppose diversity.

To understand where this charter is, so to speak, coming from, it’s necessary to view the context in which it is being proposed. We have to examine the different historical circumstances that are behind it. This is not to condone it, but to understand its ideological roots.

I have identified four important issues:

First, Quebec is a French Canadian “homeland” nation, like Serbia or Sweden. It’s not just a “Nebraska” or “Saskatchewan,” places that don't “belong” to a specific ethnic group. In those places, no other community can be seen as a “threat” to the “nation.” The rest of Canada actually accepts this definition – the province is considered a “distinct society,” after all.

Secondly comes the fact that this people was conquered, in the 18^th century, by others who didn’t accommodate themselves to the majority culture. The British Protestants who took over after 1759 didn’t become French-speaking Catholics. And the immigrants that followed, especially non-Catholics, moved into the anglophone sphere, humiliating the majority population as a conquered people without control over their own “homeland.”

So for decades, the accommodation ran the other way – only with the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s did French Quebeckers become “maîtres chez nous” (“masters in our own house”). And so there is a fear, however unfounded, that a new wave of immigrants, even if speaking French, will also not become part of “la patrie.”

Third, in Quebec there is a strong strain of anti-clericalism, one that has followed centuries of what many consider cultural and religious oppression by a hegemonic Roman Catholic Church. The secularization of French Canadian society only began in the 1960s, and so many see all religion as repressive.

Pre-1960s Quebec is now viewed by those on the left as “la grande noirceur” (“the great darkness”), an era when so many Québécois were uneducated and under the supposed thumb of priests and nuns, and it makes many in the province wary of any religious presence. There was no equivalent to this in the pluralistic, largely Protestant, English Canada, where separation of church and state does not involve removing religion from the public square.

Finally, many strands of Quebec feminism, unlike the multicultural version prevalent elsewhere, consider all religious garb as inherently oppressive to women and forced on them by males.

If the charter ever manages to be passed into law by Quebec’s National Assembly, most of it will probably be struck down by the Supreme Court of Canada. The separatists will then claim that this demonstrates the need for Quebec to become a sovereign nation.

 

 

Israel and North American Jewish Youth

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

There has been no shortage of articles and books in recent years lamenting the apparent lessening of interest in and emotional ties to Israel on the part of North American Jewish youth. Peter Beinart’s book The Crisis of Zionism documents this in great detail. There are many programs, such as Birthright Israel, which sends teenagers from Canada and the United States to visit Israel, that have struggled against this trend, with only limited success.

Very often, the blame is placed on specific Israeli policies, in particular relations with the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. North American Jewish kids are mainly liberal, the argument goes, and they find much of what Israel does distasteful; as a result they feel defensive and uncomfortable when defending the Jewish state against its many detractors.

But perhaps the problem is even deeper than this. Perhaps today’s English-speaking North American young Jewish kids don’t see in Israelis “themselves,” the way older Jews did when they were young.

For the first 70 years or so of modern Jewish settlement in Palestine, following the creation of the Zionist movement in the late 19^th century, the community in Palestine, and then in the new state of Israel, was largely the child of secular east European Jewry. And so were the Jews who came to North America. The two were, so to speak, twins, and indeed, in many cases, individuals in the two communities were actual relatives. In almost all cases, they also spoke a common language, Yiddish.

This has changed dramatically. In recent decades very few North American secular Jews have moved to Israel. Today, the image of an Israeli might be a very religious “messianic” Zionist settler in the West Bank; a Jew from the Arab or Iranian Middle East; an Ethiopian or central Asian Jew; and a Jew from the Slavic republics of the former Soviet Union. Finally, there are the ultra-Orthodox. And most Israelis speak Hebrew (with some English), whereas North American Jews speak English – almost none can converse in Hebrew.

Therefore most Israelis today do not feel or sound or, in many cases, even look, like North American Jews. And even if some are relatives of people on this side of the world, they have typically never met them.

The West Bank settlers view the state in an eschatological context, seeing the entire land of Israel as having been given to the Jewish people by Divine decree, with not a square centimetre to be transferred to non-Jewish Arabs. Most North American Jews, especially younger ones, cannot subscribe to this view.

Other Jews in Israel, even if not religious, are also more likely to hold attitudes towards Arabs (including those who are Israeli citizens) that are at variance with the views of children on this continent, who are brought up in multicultural societies, where nationalism is often considered to be, ipso facto, racist and xenophobic. The Russian Jews, too, tend to be “hawks” when it comes to foreign policy.

So this chasm is clearly widening, despite the efforts of Jewish communal organizations to instill a sense of unity between Israel and the Diaspora, as it is a product of the current zeitgeist.

As this generation of North American Jews become adults, an embattled Israel may in future years find less emotional and uncritical support from among overseas Jewish communities than it did in, say, 1967 and 1973, when Israel was involved in major wars. This is for Israel a worrisome prospect.

 

It's Not the Zanzibar of Fantasy

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

For western travellers, the Zanzibar archipelago has long conjured up images of enchantment: palm-fringed beaches, ancient palaces and forts, and narrow streets overlooked by elaborately carved doors in the capital, Stone Town.

Books and films have long portrayed the Indian Ocean islands off the coast of Africa as an exotic paradise. Typical of the genre was “Road to Zanzibar,” a 1941 film starring Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour.

The real Zanzibar was always quite different. Slavery was a large part of Zanzibar’s commercial power, and from 1700 to 1850 the sultans of Zanzibar, who were Omani Arabs, effectively controlled the slave trade in East and Central Africa.

The British gained control in 1890 and ended the slave trade. However, the sultanate was allowed to remain in place and the Arab elite remained dominant over a Black African majority.

Independence from Britain in 1963, as an Islamic monarchy, was followed by a bloody revolution in which thousands of Arabs were killed or expelled. The Black majority gained control and the following year Zanzibar merged with mainland Tanganyika, as a semi-autonomous part of the United Republic of Tanzania.

Many Zanzibaris were unhappy about the union. Ever since, the islands have always been on the edge of political turmoil, with a sense of grievance against mainland political control and economic exploitation. This is exacerbated by tensions between the broadly Christian mainland and the predominantly Muslim islands.

Zanzibar has been wracked by political violence in recent decades. Contested elections in 2000 led to a massacre when the army and police shot into crowds of protestors, killing at least 35 people. Violence again erupted in 2005 when there were accusations of fraud by the losing party.

The push for independence, or at least greater autonomy from the mainland, gained new impetus after politicians and jurists began work last year on a new constitution for Tanzania. At first, the status of the union was off the table, enraging Zanzibari nationalists. (Zanzibar’s own constitution, amended in 2010, refers to the archipelago as a sovereign state, with no mention of the union with Tanganyika.)

There are many who would prefer a Zanzibar with its own currency and a seat at the United Nations. They maintain that an independent Zanzibar could develop into another Singapore or Hong Kong, an island entrepot for international trade (as was the case historically). But mainland politicians, they argue, don’t want Zanzibar to be free.

Some Zanzibaris have begun to blend their nationalism with religion. In recent years, a group called Uamsho, or “Awakening,” has called for an independent Zanzibar governed under Muslim shariah law.

Two churches were set ablaze in May 2012 in the midst of rioting after the police arrested leaders of the separatist group. On Christmas Day last year, a priest was shot in the jaw but survived. Another priest was shot and killed on Feb. 17.

The acid attack in August on a pair of British teenagers engaged in charity work on Zanzibar is likely to have a deleterious effect on the tourist industry. Tourism officially accounts for a little more than a quarter of the island’s economic activity, but 70 per cent of its foreign-exchange earnings. Fifteen thousand people work directly in tourism, and 50,000 are employed indirectly.

The minister of tourism, Said Ali Mbarouk, said that the episode had “shocked and shamed” his country. Security was increased in tourist areas, and measures were taken to curb the distribution and production of acid. However, Uamsho wants to enforce strict dress codes on foreign visitors and ban alcohol outside private hotels.

Forget the dated images of Zanzibar as portrayed in films and novels. It has become a fairly insecure place.

Hannah Senesh Should Not Be Forgotten

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune


When I was a teenager in Montreal back in the late 1950s-early 1960s, I was a member of the Zionist youth group Young Judaea. There, we learned the story of Hannah Senesh, the heroic young woman who, during World War II, left Palestine for Nazi-occupied Europe to try to save Jews.

Senesh was a young poet and diarist who was captured and executed in 1944, at age 23, after parachuting into Yugoslavia and then entering Nazi-occupied Hungary to try to smuggle Jews out of the country.

Hannah Szenes (the original spelling) was born in Budapest on July 17, 1921, to a wealthy, distinguished, and assimilated Hungarian Jewish family. Though given a modern Hungarian education, she was exposed to antisemitism during her high school years, and decided to join a Zionist youth movement, learning Hebrew in preparation for aliyah to Palestine.

In October 1938, she recorded in her diary: "I've become a Zionist. This word stands for a tremendous number of things. To me it means, in short, that I now consciously and strongly feel I am a Jew, and am proud of it. My primary aim is to go to Palestine, to work for it."

She came to Palestine in 1939 to study at the Agricultural Training Farm in Nahalal, and after two years became a member of Kibbutz Sdot Yam near Caesarea.

In 1943, however, Senesh enlisted in the British Army and began her training as a paratrooper. She and some others were parachuted into occupied Yugoslavia in mid-March 1944 in order to aid the anti-Nazi forces. Two months later she smuggled herself into her native Hungary but was captured.

Imprisoned and tortured, she refused to reveal details of her mission and was sentenced to death. She refused an offer of clemency and was executed by a firing squad in Budapest on Nov. 7, 1944.

In 1950 Hannah Senesh’s remains were brought to Israel where they were buried in the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. In the same year a kibbutz was founded and named Yad Hana in her memory.

A poet and playwright, writing both in Hungarian and Hebrew, Senesh’s best known poem is probably "Halikha LeKesariya" ("A Walk to Caesarea"), often known as "Eli, Eli" ("My God, My God"), written in 1942. Her last poem "Ashrei HaGafrur" ("Blessed is the Match") was the title of a documentary about her life produced in 2008. Israeli President Shimon Peres, who knew Hannah as a young pioneer in the 1940s, appears on camera.

A number of books have also been published about her life. An early one, Blessed is the Match: The Story of Jewish Resistance, by Marie Syrkin, published in 1947, also takes its title from "Ashrei HaGafrur."

Yet for all that, I have always wondered why the story of Hannah Senesh is not as well known as that of Anne Frank. Senesh was much more the "agent" of her own life than was Frank. Is it because somehow the outside world prefers a Jewish victim to a Zionist heroine?

Don’t get me wrong. This is not a critique of Anne Frank, who was herself just a teenager. We have long ago rejected the callous insult to the victims of the Holocaust made by ill-informed people who had asserted that the Jews of Europe went "like sheep to the slaughter."

What, precisely, could a family like the Franks have done? They were, like most Jews, civilians, young and old, without weapons, hidden in a house, and facing the most fanatically trained killers the world has ever seen, masters of most of Europe between 1939 and 1945.

We have learned from this. If Anne Frank symbolizes the doomed stateless Jews of Europe, in the story of Hannah Senesh we see the glimmer of the Jewish state about to be born.

 

 

What Now for Obama and Syria?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

There’s a reason German statesman Otto von Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor,” once advised an emissary to “strike while the iron is hot.” Because if you are indecisive, hesitate and temporise, you lose the moment and prove yourself weak.

It has now been two weeks since Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad crossed Barack Obama’s “red line” regarding chemical weapons and gassed almost 1,500 of his own people, including hundreds of children, on Aug. 21. That red line must have been drawn in shifting sands, because Obama has now announced that, while he remains prepared to punish the Syrian regime for this war crime, which he once declared would be a “game-changer,” he will seek approval from the U.S. Congress first.

According to various sources, he has nurtured doubts about the political and legal justification for action, even one of limited scope and duration, given that the United Nations Security Council had refused to sanction a military strike that he had not put before Congress.

Critics called it an example of a less than flattering Obama characteristic: delaying major decisions, muddling the power of his argument and, in this case, perhaps blunting the effectiveness of military action. After all, the delay allows Assad to move his assets elsewhere and strengthen his defences.

Meanwhile, there has been growing opposition in the United States and around the world from right-wing isolationists, pacifists, and assorted anti-Americans, including the Russians, who have effectively disabled the UN. (Vladimir Putin called the planned attack “foolish nonsense.”)

Even the American military, despite the bloated annual defence budget of more than $600 billion, are reluctant warriors – are they really afraid of Syria? Or is it Iran that looms in their vision?

What if the Congress votes to oppose Obama? There are many Republicans and left-wing Democrats, especially in the House of Representatives, opposed to any more involvement in overseas wars after the negative experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan. After all, British Prime Minister David Cameron lost a similar vote in his parliament on Aug. 29.

Obama claims that he doesn’t need congressional approval, but seeks it merely to make certain that the country is behind him. But will a defeat allow him to back down from his commitment to hold Syria accountable for this clear breach of long-standing international norms?

Obama himself in 2008 ran for the presidency as the “anti-Bush.” Is this now going to come back to bite him? That would indeed be ironic.

The president is an example of the worst muddle-headed thinking that came out of the 1960s – the concern about “exit strategies” and “quagmires” and “escalations” and “timelines” is as much a reaction – still -- to the disaster of the Vietnam War as it is to Iraq and Afghanistan.

During the Kosovo War, the United States bombed Serbia for 78 straight days, and Slobodan Milosevic never used chemical weapons. Madeleine Albright, the then Secretary of state, called the U.S. the “indispensable nation.” Under Obama, it’s no longer indispensable.

 

 

The Philippines: An American Ally in Southeast Asia

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 

The United States and the Philippines have had a long, and sometimes problematic, relationship. The 7,000-island nation became an American possession following the Spanish-American War of 1898, though it took many years for U.S. forces to subdue the entire archipelago.

 

Conquered by the Japanese during World War II, the country received its independence from the U.S. in 1946 but continued to maintain a close relationship with the former imperial power. Domestically it was embroiled in a counterinsurgency campaign against the Hukbalahap pro-Communist guerrillas on Luzon for many years.

In June 1950, American alarm over the rebellion during the Cold War prompted U.S. President Harry Truman to approve special military assistance that included military advice, sale at cost of military equipment to the Philippines and financial aid under the Joint United States Military Advisory Group. The insurrection petered out by the mid-1950s.

The Philippines also faced the growing might of Communist-ruled China after 1949. The Philippines sent an expeditionary force of around 7,500 combat troops to Korea in August 1950 as part of the American-led effort to push back the Chinese and North Korean troops that had invaded South Korea.

 

The country signed a mutual defence treaty with the United States in 1951 and joined the anti-Communist eight-member South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) upon its formation in 1954. SEATO ceased to exist in 1977 and after the fall of the Soviet Union and the decline of the threat of communism in the 1990s support for the mutual defense treaty has also declined in the Philippines. It does remain in force, though, and was reaffirmed with the November 2011 Manila Declaration.

 

The strategic location of the archipelago in the South China Sea, northeast of Malaysia and Indonesia, south of China and Taiwan, and east of Vietnam, made it a favorable location for American military bases during the Cold War, and the Clark Air Base and Naval Station Subic Bay were among the largest facilities maintained by Washington during much of that period, in particular when they were centres of logistical support for American forces during the Vietnam War.

 

With the Cold War over, Clark Air Base was closed in 1991, partly due to the refusal by the Philippine government to renew the lease; this was followed by the closing of Subic Bay a year later.

 

However in 2012 Manila approved limited U.S. deployments to the former American military outposts, after a tense standoff between Chinese and Filipino warships in the South China Sea, spurred by conflicting territorial claims to the contested waterway and some of its small island chains.

In more recent years, the country has been battling an Islamist insurgency in its southern island of Mindanao and in the Sulu Archipelago, led by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF).

 

Since 2002, the United States has provided non-combat assistance to the Philippine armed forces through the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines. Counterterrorism efforts, along with development aid, have helped to significantly reduce the size and strength of Islamist organizations.

After warfare that left tens of thousands dead, the MILF and the government signed a landmark peace deal in October 2012 aimed at ending the long-running insurgency.

The accord paves the way for a new autonomous region to be administered by Muslims in Mindanao, according to Philippine President Benigno Aquino III. “Today, we sign a framework agreement that can finally seal a genuine, lasting peace in Mindanao,” he announced in a speech. He said that the MILF is no longer seeking to form a new nation.

The deal sets up mechanisms to tackle issues such as power structure and revenues in the southern region, which will be named Bangsamoro. The new region is expected to replace the current one, the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, by 2016.

However, Nur Misuari, founding chair of the MNLF, rejected the deal, and remains in favour of declaring an independent Bangsamoro state. “We encourage Mr. Misuari to be a partner in ensuring the welfare of MNLF communities and actively engage with us in the drafting of the Bangsamoro Basic Law which will include the agenda of the MNLF,” stated Jose Lorena, a government advisor dealing with the peace process.

Still, things have definitely improved in the southern, Muslim areas of the country.