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Ethnicities
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Ethnic Identity and Popular Sovereignty

Notes on the Moro Struggle in the Philippines

E. San Juan, Jr

Philippines Cultural Studies Center, USA

The Moro (the preferred term for ‘Muslims’ in the Philippines) people’s struggle for national self-determination has placed under critical interrogation the hallowed theories of cultural pluralism, liberal tolerance, and multi-culturalism that continue to legitimize the domination of diverse ethnic groups under elite control in contemporary Filipino society. Bourgeois political norms and laws have led since colonial times to the severe dispossession, exclusion, and impoverishment of the Moro people as a distinct historical community united under Islamic faith and an uninterrupted history of preserving its relative autonomy through various modes of anti-colonial resistance. Since the Spanish (1621-1898) and American colonial periods (1899-1946), up to the present Arroyo government’s neocolonial polity subservient to US hegemony, the Moro people have suffered national, class, and religious oppression. The Moro insurgents are labeled ‘terrorists’ and stigmatized daily by the media, schools, Christian churches, and international business. It is the obligation of Filipino radicals and progressive organizations around the world to recognize the Moro people’s right to self-determination and offer solidarity. This article is a modest attempt to express this solidarity by a preliminary critique of neoliberal ideology (including a certain type of sectarian ultra-leftism) that apologizes for, and foments overtly and covertly, the genocidal wars currently raging in the Moro homelands of southern Philippines.

Key Words: Abu Sayyaf • Bangsa Moro nation • ethnicity • multiculturalism • national democracy • self-determination

Ethnicities, Vol. 6, No. 3, 391-422 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/1468796806068326
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