COTABATO CITY (Sunday, September 7, 2025) — Followers from across Central Mindanao of Moro National Liberation Front founding chairman Nur Misuari commemorated in this city on Sunday, September 7, the 29th anniversary of the government-MNLF truce and together proclaimed their candidates for the Bangsamoro parliament during the October 13, 2025 regional polls.

Negotiators of the government and the MNLF forged on September 2, 1996 a final peace agreement after decades of negotiations that the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of more than 60 Islamic states, including petroleum-exporting nations in the Middle East and North Africa, helped facilitate.

Two ranking MNLF officials who are both members of the Bangsamoro parliament, the lawyer Randolph Parcasio and Misuari’s daughter, Nurredha Misuari, separately told reporters, during a dialogue at the campus of the Cotabato City State University on Sunday morning, that their regional party, Mahardika, is keen on fostering interfaith solidarity among Muslims, Christians and the indigenous non-Muslim communities.

“We are also focused on socio-economic programs meant to boost the productivity of residents of the autonomous region,” said Misuari, a representative to the 80-seat Bangsamoro parliament of the MNLF, which his patriarch established as an armed secessionist group in 1972.

The Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao covers the provinces of Maguindanao del Sur, Maguindanao del Norte, Lanao del Sur, Basilan and Tawi-Tawi and the cities of Lamitan, Marawi and Cotabato.

The BARMM parliament members Parcasio and Misuari and a senior MNLF official in Maguindanao del Sur, Yahodza Simpal, had separately told reporters that their Mahardika Party also aims to help address peace and security issues besetting far-flung areas in BARMM via cross-section peacebuilding initiatives.

Parcasio said the MNLF is also trying its best to have the island province of Sulu returned to the core territory of BARMM after the Supreme Court took it out via a ruling in 2024 based on a petition for its separation from the autonomous region by then Sulu Gov. Hadji Abdusakur Tan, Sr.

Tan, who is touted as Sulu’s “political kingpin,” was elected vice governor of the province during the May 12, 2025 elections.

President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. had recently issued an order fusing Sulu with Administrative Region 9, which groups together four cities and three large provinces in the Zamboanga peninsula.

“Certain members of the Bangsamoro parliament had drafted resolutions like knocking on the hearts of the members of the House of Representatives to help us work out Sulu’s return to the Bangsamoro autonomous region via a plebiscite,” Parcasio said.

He said Sulu, historically, is the birthplace of the MNLF that waged a longtime uprising for self-governance by Southern Moro communities in the context of Philippine sovereignty, via an autonomous regional government.

“We are for the return of Sulu to the Bangsamoro region,” Parcasio said.

Photo shows officials of the MNLF during their dialogue with reporters on the peace and development goals of their regional political party, Mahardika, at the sideline of their commemoration in Cotabato City on Sunday of the 29th anniversary of the front’s peace compact with the national government.