03/10/2026
REMEMBRANCE AND REFLECTION
Bringing the Mindanao Experience of Martial Law into the Classroom
On September 26, 2026, Meranaw Cultural Heritage Center (MCHC) Director Ayesha Merdeka M. Alonto served as guest speaker at the 54th Martial Law remembrance and reflection program organized by the Supreme Student Government and the Asosasyon ng mga Mag-aaral ng Kasaysayan.
Following the viewing of The Kingmaker, Director Alonto invited the students to look beyond Malacañang and into another dimension of the Marcos years: the experience of Mindanao, where Martial Law became intertwined with war, displacement, political struggle, resistance, family, fear, and the long search for peace.
Speaking as a Meranaw, a daughter, and a child who lived through Martial Law, she emphasized that history is not experienced only through presidential decrees, political institutions, military operations, and peace agreements.
Here in Mindanao, she said, the experience of Martial Law cannot be separated from the war and the emergence of the Moro struggle.
Director Alonto shared the story of her father, Abul Khayr Indol Dangcal Alangadi Alonto, whose life traced a significant part of the political history of Muslim Mindanao.
The son of the first elected Governor of Lanao del Sur and grandson of the first elected Muslim senator of the Philippines, her father became involved in the organization of the Muslim youth during a period of growing political consciousness.
In 1964, while studying in Egypt, he was chosen together with Hashim Salamat and Saleh Loong as the triumvirate of the Muslim Youth Movement in the Philippines, representing Lanao, Maguindanao, and Sulu. In 1965, he was imposed on to return to the Philippines to organize the Muslim youth and became the first Grand Emir of the Lam Alif, which became a voice of Muslim youth during the protest era later known as the First Quarter Storm.
Then came the Jabidah Massacre in 1968.
For many young Moro leaders, it became a turning point.
Among the 90 young Moro men who would form the Moro National Liberation Front, 41 were Meranaws. Alonto recalled that her father proposed the use of “Moro” as their common identity, explaining that the word carried more than four centuries of Muslim history in the Philippine archipelago. "We were never Moros until the Spanish conquistadores arrived in our shores."
He also proposed the names Moro National Liberation Front and when they were naming the armed wing of the MNLF, it was he who proposed it be called the Bangsamoro Army, connecting the emerging movement to a much longer history of Moro resistance. "As their rule was all in or no vote, they debated and deliberated each time and in each time, his proposal was unanimously ratified. We call ourselves by those names today."
But for Director Alonto, one of her father’s most important lessons was not about names, positions, or prestige.
Her father considered himself and the other young Moro leaders of his generation “incidental.” He believed that any Muslim youth confronted with the circumstances of their time could have responded as they did.
"The circumstances came first. The injustice came first. The responsibility came first. And the Moro youth of that time, young college students like yourselves responded. They became from young men to leaders overnight."
She shared this with the students because she believes it remains relevant today, particularly in a time when surnames, titles, political families, positions, and prestige can sometimes overshadow the work itself.
History, she said, should not teach young people to wait for important people to make history for them. It should make them ask what they will do when their own moment arrives.
WHEN HISTORY BECOMES MEMORY
Director Alonto then brought the discussion from political history to personal memory.
She was four years old when her father was underground during the armed conflict. At times, he would make clandestine visits to the family, followed by the arrival of military trucks and uniformed men at her grandfather’s compound.
The soldiers would ask her in broken Meranaw, “Anda Papang ka?” and “Sisaya Papang ka?” Where is your father?
Too young to understand Martial Law, the MNLF, revolutionary commands, or the politics that had driven her father underground, the child understood only that men in uniform were looking for him.
She would run to her grandmother and insist:
“Kunaba ako wata i Abul, wata ako i Kohlong!”
I am not Abul’s child. I am Kohlong’s child.
Decades later, she said, seeing soldiers in full battle gear can still evoke, for a brief moment, that same childhood terror.
For Alonto, this is what it means to say that history is lived.
“A military operation can become a line in a historical account. For somebody’s child, it can become a memory that remains in the body for decades.”
She reminded the students that the history of Martial Law was national, but it was not experienced uniformly throughout the country.
In Mindanao, it became deeply intertwined with armed conflict and the Moro struggle. Christian and other non-Muslim communities likewise experienced displacement, fear, loss, and the disruption of ordinary life.
FROM ARMED STRUGGLE TO THE SEARCH FOR PEACE
Director Alonto also traced the evolution of her father’s political life beyond armed struggle.
By 1974, her father had become involved in efforts to seek a political settlement to the conflict. Together with five other MNLF officers, he brought to the Organization of the Islamic Conference the Manifesto of the 20,000 card-carrying members of Ansar’ul Islam. This contributed to OIC Resolution No. 18 and to negotiations that eventually produced the 1976 Tripoli Agreement.
But an agreement on paper does not immediately end a war.
The MNLF eventually divided in 1977 and the creation of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, and the conflict and search for a political settlement continued for decades.
In 1978, her father came down from his revolutionary command to work for the institutionalization of autonomy. His decision was rooted in the human cost of the continuing war.
Alonto qouted her father in his letter to both Misuari and Salamat. “It is not you who has to face the mothers or wives of our fallen comrades, sometimes with no bodies to show and see their orphaned children. I will go down and implement the Agreement if only to grant reprieve from this war to our people.”
For Alonto, this reflected an important question in understanding the Bangsamoro struggle: not simply what people were fighting against, but what the struggle was ultimately supposed to achieve for the people who carried its cost.
For her father, the answer had to include peace with justice and equitable development.
His later work in government, including his service as the first Muslim Chairman of the Mindanao Development Authority and as a member of the Philippine Cabinet, reflected that continuing belief that peace could not remain merely an agreement on paper.
It had to produce something tangible for ordinary people.
His mantra in his final years was:
“A free Bangsamoro, One Mindanao in a Unified Philippines.”
HISTORY, IDENTITY, AND HERITAGE
Director Alonto connected these experiences to her present work in cultural heritage.
As Director of the Meranaw Cultural Heritage Center, she emphasized that heritage is not limited to artifacts, architecture, music, weaving, and other tangible and intangible expressions of culture.
Heritage also includes memory.
For the Meranaw and the wider Bangsamoro, that memory includes not only cultural achievements and traditions but also war, displacement, political struggle, loss, and the difficult process of rebuilding trust and peace.
“We cannot preserve only the beautiful parts of our past,” she said. “We have to be mature enough to remember the painful parts too.”
Yet remembering pain does not mean remaining imprisoned by it.
For Alonto, this is where historical understanding and cultural heritage meet. A community cannot fully understand what it is preserving without understanding the history that shaped it.
She challenged the Meranaw students to recognize that inheriting a name, language, or history is not the same as understanding it.
“To be Meranaw today is not simply to know that your grandparents were Meranaw. It means knowing something about the historical experiences that shaped the community into which you were born.”
At the same time, she reminded the non-Muslim students that understanding Moro history does not require them to become part of that identity or agree with every political position taken by Moro leaders.
“You do not have to carry someone else’s identity in order to respect their historical experience.”
THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE NEXT GENERATION
Director Alonto urged the students to approach history not by inheriting ready-made conclusions, but by examining sources, comparing accounts, asking who produced them and why, and recognizing what particular sources may leave out.
She encouraged students to listen to their parents and grandparents while also going beyond memory to documents and historical evidence.
“There is no single Mindanao memory. There are many.”
The task of students of history, she explained, is not necessarily to make those memories agree, but to learn how to hold them together, examine them, place them in context, and understand what they reveal about the past.
For Alonto, this process is personal.
“I am my father’s daughter. I inherited his stories. I have my memories of him. But I am also a student of history. That means I have to examine what I inherit.”
Now a grandmother herself, she reflected on what one generation passes to another.
She wants her grandchildren to know where they came from and what their grandparents and great-grandparents endured. But she does not want them to inherit only the wounds of the past.
“I want them to inherit the lessons.”
Her father’s words remain a guide:
“To hope is a form of worship to Allah SWT.”
For someone who had lived through war, she explained, hope was not naïveté. "It was and is the decision to believe that the future could be better than the past."
Director Alonto ended by returning to the child who had once run to her grandmother whenever soldiers arrived. That child, she said, is still somewhere within her. “But she is no longer running. She is standing here, trying to understand what happened.”
"Perhaps this is what history allows us to do: not erase what happened, not romanticize it, or remain imprisoned by it, but understand it well enough that what is inherited from the past can become wisdom for the future."
The responsibility ultimately belongs to the next generation.
“History does not end with the names a generation leaves behind,” Alonto told the students. “It asks what the next generation will do with what it inherited.”
And perhaps the question to carry forward is not only, “What happened?”
It is also, “What will you do with what happened?”
"May Allah SWT grant us the wisdom to remember truthfully, the humility to examine what we inherit, and the courage to ensure that the children who come after us will know war as history, rather than as childhood memory." And she ended the lecture with her now trademark line, "Meranaw Ako. Meranaw Tano."
