BATANGAS STATE UNIVERSITY

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A COMPREHENSIVE ANALYSIS OF THE JABIDAH MASSACRE

Submitted by:

FLOR, RENATO JR.- 21-05034

GONZALES, CHARLENE A.- 21-00886

Group 4

BSNAMENG-1101

Bachelor of Science in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering

First Year Department

A Final Requirement under the guidance of

Mr. Jed Tolentino

GEd-105

Readings in Philippine History

September 30,2021
 I. INTRODUCTION

This underscores why the Jabidah Massacre - the assassination of scores of

Muslim recruits undergoing covert training on the island of Corregidor on that fateful day
in 1968 – has recently resurfaced in national memory. The military had recruited over a
hundred young men, mostly Muslims from various ethnolinguistic groups, into a special
guerrilla training program aimed at destabilizing Sabah—a vast geographical space that
formed part of the newly formed Malaysia but was interpreted by the Philippine
government as rightfully theirs. The cadets were apprehensive after months of hard
jungle amphibious training. March 18 is a day that many Muslims in the Southern
Philippines and elsewhere associate with both profoundly emotional and political
experiences. It marks a pivotal point in Philippine history in their imaginations and the
language of the elites in their presence, laying the groundwork for a long-running
separatist movement in the Muslim South. When the recruits' remuneration was withheld
and the training camp's supply of basic necessities ran out, everything came to a head.
Soldiers revolted and switched sides, prompting harsh retaliation from their superiors.
Shots were fired on the night the men were meant to be sent home, killing a dozen or
more Muslim soldiers. The Mindanao Garden of Peace is a tribute to the victims of the
1968 Jabidah Massacre, which occurred in Mindanao. In the Philippines, it is widely
assumed that this incident triggered the still-unresolved violent conflict in Mindanao. The
recent creation of the peace garden marks a significant shift in the tone of
commemoration of the atrocity, from fiercely combative to tamed, civilized, and
aestheticized. This moves reflected President Benigno Aquino III's administration,
Muslim rebels, and civil society organizations' optimism about the chances for peace in
Mindanao. Those prospects have become questionable since the election of a new
president, and the direction of the ongoing process of remembering is in doubt. The
interactive of the heritage-making process is highlighted by this development. The core
of the Jabidah massacre allegation is that the trainees refused to continue their training
for one reason or another and demanded to be evacuated.

II. EVIDENCES

‘Jabidah’ was a massive hoax

The so-called Jabidah "massacre" of March 1968, about which an uninformed

writer in another publication lamented the lack of a memorial on its 50th anniversary
yesterday, was the Yellow Cult's first massive fake news. If anyone was killed, it was as
a result of President Marcos' hidden efforts to take over Sabah, which we had — and
continue to have — valid claims to under international law, but which Malaysia arrogantly
ignored, and continues to reject. The episode merely served to highlight the Liberal
Party's complete lack of nationalism and deception in furthering its political aspirations,
as well as its most articulate leader, Benigno Aquino, Jr. The Yellows effectively ratted
on Marcos and his preparations to penetrate Sabah under the premise of investigating
tales of a so-called slaughter of young Muslims being trained by the Army Special
Forces to infiltrate Sabah on Corregidor Island. They hoped that by doing so, they would
jeopardize Marcos' reelection in the following year, 1969, especially since he had grown
in popularity, even succeeding in portraying himself and Imelda as the Filipino
equivalents of the Kennedys. Even the Lopezes, a strong oligarchic clan with a media
empire, were backing Marcos at the time, whose vice president was patriarch Fernando
Lopez. The Jabidah fraud put a halt to what would have been a huge nationalist
achievement for Marcos: regaining Sabah, a resource-rich territory around the size of
Mindanao.

According to the military's Operation Merdeka ("Freedom") plan, Muslim Tausug

recruits would be trained to infiltrate Sabah and incite an uprising among their ethnic
group against the Malaysian government. The insurrection would provide as justification
for the Philippine military to invade Sabah and claim it as part of the country. That wasn't
an outlandish plan. Our country had a stronger military at the time than Malaysia, which
had recently been created in 1963, and needed only a reason to take over Sabah. The
Yellows predicted that by exposing the scheme, Malaysia would respond and force the
one-year-old Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) to denounce Marcos,
tarnishing his reputation in the country. The Jabidah fake perpetrated by the Yellows
was the turning point in our attempts to regain Sabah, with all the rumors of a slaughter
making the topic of returning Sabah so unpopular that Marcos decided to leave it behind
him. Malaysia, a young country, beefed up its management of the large area and rushed
to persuade the world community that it was the rightful owner of Sabah. The Jabidah
fraud would have one major negative consequence for the Philippines, which still hounds
it today: the emergence of the Muslim insurgency, which currently threatens to
dismember the country under the guise of establishing a Basic Bangsamoro Law.
 In yet another example of the law of unintended consequences, the newly formed
Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) exploited the allegation to enrage Muslim youth
and mobilize them to the fledgling organization, which was rebuffed by more prominent
Muslim traditional politicians. The MNLF (and its offshoot group, the Moro Islamic
Liberation Front) mythicized Jabidah to the point where it became the “sacral occasion
recalled from time to time to mobilize Muslims to the cause of the movement,” as one
academic expressed it, Muslims to the cause of the movement. According to Misuari, it
is the conclusion of genocidal onslaught against the Moros, necessitating the creation of
a Bangsamoro—a Moros-led independent nation-state. However, in the MNLF's myth-
making, the rationale was altered to a virtuous one: Muslims declined to fight their
Muslim Malaysian brothers. It was an ingenious retelling of a fictional story. When the
top-secret Merdeka was made public, Sabah's first Chief Minister, Tun Mustafa, was
furious and agreed to pay the MNLF and let them to use Sabah as a base and refuge.
Mustafa also arranged for 201 MNLF militants, including Murad Ibrahim, the current
chairman of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, to be trained in Sabah by former British
Special Action Service officers who served as the Muslim organizations' officers' corps.
Malaysia's assistance has thus played a significant role in the expansion of the Muslim
insurgency. Former Cavite governor Delfin Montano, one of Marcos' fierce political
opponents, had one Jibin Arula, allegedly one of the Muslim recruits, file charges against
Army major Eduardo Martelino and ten other officers and soldiers on March 28 at the
Cavite Court of First Instance, alleging that they were involved in the purported horrific
crime.

Despite this, not a single victim of the "massacre" has been identified, and no
relatives of the purportedly "11 to 68" massacred have surfaced, according to Wikipedia,
even under Aquino 3rd's dictatorship. Jibin Arula, the sole claimed witness to the
"massacre," avoided returning to his home province of Suluhome and stayed in Antique.
The MNLF and MILF never took him under their protection, and neither organization's
official documentation have ever stated that the'massacre' took place. Arula moved to
Naic, Cavite in the late 2000s, impoverished, to be offered odd jobs by the son of
MelencioSagun, the town's chief of police in 1968, who supposedly "discovered" him
following his alleged dramatic escape from Corregidor. Sagun was the one who
introduced Arula to then-Cavite Governor Delfin Montano, a supporter of the Liberal
Party. After becoming a full colonel and retiring from the service, the villain portrayed by
the Yellows, Air Force Maj. Eduardo Martelino, who led the Merdeka plan, settled in
Tawi-Tawi to live with his Muslim wife in a Tausug village where he had recruited the
young Moros for his after leaving from the service and becoming a full colonel, he
participated in the Sabah operation. Would he have done that if he had ordered the
Jabidah "massacre," as the Yellows officially claimed? The Jabidah deception had one
unanticipated outcome that had a significant impact on the course of our country. The
investigations enraged the military, as did the Yellows' hidden purpose, which was to
disclose their plan to take over Sabah. Its senior brass and those involved in the
investigations even ran front-page newspaper advertising criticizing Congress for
"politicking" at the expense of the military's prestige. It didn't take Marcos long to
persuade the military that representative democracy was collapsing, and he had no
choice but to proclaim martial law. Karma has been a pain in the neck for the Yellows.
Marcos' 13-year reign would almost completely wipe them out.

Ninoy, on the other hand, did not join the crowd in criticizing the "massacre." He
traveled to Jolo, like any good journalist, to examine the facts and hunt for the family of
the Muslim teenagers who were allegedly slaughtered. On March 28, 1968, he gave his
famous privilege address to the Senate, with the deceptive title "Jabidah! Special Forces
of Evil," Ninoy presented major, even fatal, doubts about Arula's assertion based on data
he acquired himself. In a speech, Ninoy explained his conclusions: In its banner headline
one morning, the Manila Times cited him as declaring that he did not believe there had
been a massacre on Corregidor. And he claims it wasn't a rushed decision, but rather
one based on thorough conclusions. After questioning Jibin Arula, a self-professed
massacre survivor, suspicion crept in that there had been a slaughter. He met the first
set of 24 recruits aboard RP-68 in Jolo yesterday. This group had previously been
reported missing – or, worse, believed to have been killed. One of the Muslim recruits'
commanders, William Patarasa, 16, denied the allegations of the massacre. According
to Aquino, there were certain deductions. "What was the point of the ‘massacre?" The
trainees were allegedly liquidated in order to silence them, according to certain sources.
However, 24 youngsters have already arrived in Jolo in good health. It defies sense to
free 24 men who can spill the beans and then liquidate the remaining 24 ‘to seal' their
lips.”, “Arula's anxieties, which may have been justified in his time, may no longer be
justified in light of current events. The (supposedly massacred) twenty-four recruits have
been found alive in their home province.” There has never been a single person
recognized as a victim of the "Jabidah massacre." No family has ever claimed his
brother, son, cousin, or husband was slain in Corregidor, despite the ethnic group's
close yet broad kinship system. In 2013, when a commemoration plaque for those killed
in the false "Jabidah massacre" was put in Corregidor, Ninoy's son said: "In March 1968,
my father uncovered the Jabidah Massacre."

Reminiscing about the "Jabidah Massacre"

In the 1960s, the administration of then-President Ferdinand Marcos reportedly

trained a special commando force called Jabidah to create havoc in Sabah. All of this
was allegedly part of a special strategy to destabilize Sabah so that Marcos could start
the process of regaining control of it from Malaysia. (The dispute over Sabah's
ownership dates back to a Sultanate that ruled from a seat in the southern Philippines
until the 19th century. Malaysia still pays a fee to the Sultan's descendants.)

When the claimed “Take Back Sabah” scheme was exposed by the late
opposition senator Benigno Aquino Jr, the Muslim militants Marcos allegedly recruited
from the southern Philippines were slain by government forces in an effort to destroy any
proof of the operation. Regardless, the incident has created significant tensions in the
Philippines and resulted in one of the world's oldest insurgencies – a decades-long
Muslim secessionist struggle.

For the first time in 45 years, a sitting Philippine president joined remembrance
services on the island where the massacre is believed to have unfolded. President
Aquino III (the late opposition senator's son) acknowledged categorically in his speech
that the massacres "really happened." Many see this as a carefully timed attempt to
appease a rekindled rage among (though not exclusively among) Filipino Muslims over
Aquino's perceived "mishandling" of a more recent, also Sabah-related, event: the stand-
off at Lahad-Datu between a group of Filipino fighters calling themselves the "Royal Sulu
Forces" and Malaysian government troops.

The Aquino regime has been accused of selling out or capitulating to Malaysia by
failing to do more to stop the Malaysian security forces' attack against around 200
Filipino fighters who attempted to retake Sabah on their own.

Malaysia should not be neglected in all of this. The complexities of the linkages
spanning time and location in this novel are dizzyingly complex. Malaysia has been
mediating the peace talks between the Philippine government and Muslim insurgents,
which are now nearing completion. Nevertheless, as Al Jazeera reported last week, both
Muslim rebel leaders and a former Malaysian prime minister admit that Malaysia
provided much of the backing for the Philippine Muslim insurgency in the hope that it
would quell and deflect the Philippines' attention away from its claim to Sabah.
Furthermore, the nearly 40-year insurgency also meant that millions of people attempted
to leave the war by fleeing to Sabah, causing a myriad of other issues for Malaysians.

III. COMPARISON AND CONTRADICTION OF THE ARGUMENTS

It is a story conveyed in the absence of something substantial, such as printed

historical facts or actual evidence that can withstand inspection from a skeptic. A few of
seasoned journalists allege that it was invented in 1968 by political opponents to taint
the dictatorship of former President Marcos, despite being known to be aligned with
certain political personalities but nonetheless respected, if ignored by their own
colleagues. When the country was placed under Martial Law, all traces of their deaths,
including their identities, were hidden and subsequently utterly destroyed. It has since
been forgotten in the consciousness of Filipinos and the annals of the country's history,
which is a tragedy for Filipinos who are unaware of the value of historical memory in the
creation of a nation. However, the Jabidah Massacre lives on in the minds of the
Bangsamoro people since it is a vital element of the nation's battle for self-determination.
The tragedy of the Jabidah Massacre is not only historical; it also contains the whole of
the people's hopes and desires as a community and as a nation. It can be presented
from several viewpoints, but it will be remembered as a watershed moment in the history
of the Bangsamoro Struggle.

President Aquino III (the late opposition senator's son) acknowledged

categorically in his speech that the massacres "really happened." Contrary about what
his son, President Benigno Aquino III, assertions, his father, late senator Benigno Ninoy
Aquino Jr., a staunch critic of Marcos and a prominent opposition leader, conducted his
own investigation and went as far as Sulu, where he discovered that the 11 other
recruits named by the sole witness Jibin Arula were all alive. Ninoy Aquino did not
disclose the Jabidah massacre, but instead rejected it with clear evidence acquired
throughout his probe. In his Senate speech, he stated unequivocally that the supposed
massacre was a fake.
 IV. CONCLUSION

Recollections of the Jabidah Massacre came full circle on March 18, 2008,
formalizing the outcome of a series of actions over the previous decade. Since 1968, the
memories of the Jabidah Massacre have earned unprecedented space in the national
imagination, made possible and sustained by the major role assigned to them in the civil-
society-led struggle for peace in Mindanao. Without exaggerating its symbolic
significance, the Peace Caravan participants' laying of the commemorative marker on
Corregidor Island demonstrates that, despite systematic containment by Marcos'
dictatorship and amnesia during the administrations of Aquino, Ramos, and Estrada,
favorable socio-political conditions allowed memories of the Jabidah Massacre to be
resurrected.

It took time for the truth about the atrocity to come to light. Moro students in
Manila held a week-long protest vigil in front of the presidential palace in March 1968,
over an empty coffin labeled "Jabidah." They claimed "at least 28" Moro army recruits
were killed. Court-martial proceedings were launched against the twenty-three military
personnel involved. The Philippine press erupted, blaming not so much the soldiers
involved as the guilt of a political administration that would hatch such a plot and then try
to cover it up with indiscriminate murder. In 1970, the Supreme Court heard the case on
a preliminary question.

Nonetheless, enough evidence was gathered in time to file court-martial charges

against twenty-three members of the Jabidah group, and, in time-honored Philippine
tradition, matters were dragged through the maze of the Philippine legal system until
nearly everyone's attention was diverted elsewhere. Whatever the sum, it is clear that
the rich tapestry of Corregidor's history did not end when the United States handed it
over to the Republic of the Philippines. There have undoubtedly been some
assassinations. These, however, are murderous acts. And, in order to do so, the guilty
must be brought before our legal system and forced to account for their actions. And, as
a result of the bunglings and muffings that have accompanied the so-called Corregidor
Controversy, President Marcos is just as responsible as his Jabidah officials for
jeopardizing and harming Philippine international relations, which may take a long time
to repair.
 The perspectives of non-political entities have tended to be drowned out in this
process. Jibin Arula, the massacre's sole survivor, has repeatedly requested restitution
from the government and Muslim political organizations. These requirements, however,
have not been met. His recollections of the incident were significant only insofar as they
bolstered already powerful interests.

V. RELEVANCE

Like our ancestors did five decades ago, Moro youth and students resolve to
continue the battle for the right to self-determination in defense of the Bangsamoro, even
as the government disregards the Moro people's civil and political rights and pursues
wars that devastate people's lives and communities. The Jabidah massacre recalls how
the Philippine government prepared the takeover of Sabah via a secret military operation
dubbed "Oplan Merdeka" that utilized Moro youth as troops to conduct an offensive that
would claim Sabah. These young people were slain for defying the operation, and
evidence of the operation was buried up.

The Jabidah massacre validated the Moro people's right to take up arms in
defense of their communities and people, and to fight for their right to self-determination.
The fervor to continue the arm struggle grows as the government continues to perpetrate
wars and a genocidal campaign. The slaughter that occurred decades ago opened the
path for the resurgence of the Moro people's armed struggle, and the Bangsamoro's
current plight may rekindle the desire to revolt.

VI. IMPLICATION TO THE PHILIPPINE HISTORY

The Jabidah Massacre is widely regarded as the catalyst that sparked and
ignited the Moro liberation movement. In recent years, the landscape of Corregidor has
learned to tell the story of the tragedy. In 2015, the National Historical Commission of the
Philippines (NHCP) erected a marker for the "Mindanao Garden of Peace," stating that
the island "served as a camp for training Moro youth as a secret group led by the
Philippine Army" and that reports of killings "sparked the conflict in Mindanao, which led
to a national crisis in the 1970s."
 The impact is amplified by the fact that it refers to the massacre of Bangsamoro
men by Philippine government forces on an island associated with honor and courage in
Philippine history. Because of the historical significance of the island, a national festival
now known simply as "Araw ng Kagitingan (Day of Valor)" was previously known as
"Bataan and Corregidor Day."

A smaller, seven-year-old monument is just a few steps away from the NHCP
marker. According to Mujiv Hataman, then Anak Mindanao Rep., the Jabidah plaque is
"dedicated to the Moro youth who were martyred" in the massacre that "sparked the
Bangsamoro campaign for national self-determination." That's when I realized the NHCP
marker didn't mention Jabidah, let alone Marcos or Merdeka.

The Jabidah Massacre is remembered as the main incident that sparked the
Moro independence movement, and it is thus recognized as a watershed moment in
Bangsamoro history by the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao
(BARMM). We must remember the tragedy and significance of the Jabidah massacre in
Moro struggle history, as well as the challenges that lie ahead.

VII. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Curaming, R. A., & Aljunied, S. M. K. (2013). On the Fluidity and Stability of Personal

Memory: Jibin Arula and the Jabidah Massacre in the Philippines. Oral History in

Southeast Asia, 83–100. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311672_5

Chong, T., Loh, B., & Montesano, M. (2016). Editors’ Note. Sojourn: Journal of Social

Issues in Southeast Asia, 31(1), v–viii. https://doi.org/10.1353/soj.2016.0009

Curaming, R. A., & Aljunied, S. M. K. (2012). Social memory and state–civil society

relations in the Philippines: Forgetting and remembering the Jabidah ‘massacre’.

Time & Society, 21(1), 89–103. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463x11431337

Wikipedia contributors. (2021, October 11). Jabidah massacre. Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabidah_massacre

Tiglao, R. D. (2018b, March 18). Jabidah ‘massacre’ was the Yellows’ first big fake
news. The Manila Times.
 https://www.manilatimes.net/2018/03/19/opinion/columnists/topanalysis/jabidah-
massacre-was-the-yellows-first-big-fake-news/387146
Cabrera, A. ‘10 reasons why the SC voted to bury | as easy as ABC

10 reasons why the SC voted to bury (pwc.com)

Uedo, M. (2016, November 19). ‘Hero or Villain? Burial Reveals Philippines’ Deep

Divide on Ferdinand Marcos

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