That depends on who you listen to. As discussed elsewhere, both sides in that conflict have adopted self-serving historical narratives casting themselves as victims and their opponents as aggressors. Neither narrative is particularly credible. There were acts of outright aggression and atrocity on both sides, and the militias on both sides preferred to target the other side's unarmed civilian base.
That would be Feliciano Luces, no?
Again, I've heard that version of the story... spent a lot of time with Mindanao Ilonggos in the late 70s and early 80s and emerged well steeped in their mythology. I then spent some time in Cotabato listening to their mythology. The two are very different, and obviously incompatible, yet both sides accept them as absolute truth.
The refrain about settlement on "unused land" only goes so far. Anywhere that you still have indigenous control in the Philippines, tribal units have extensive tracts of "unused land" within their ancestral domain claims... these may be disputed by different tribal groups, but none of the disputing parties would generally be amenable to outside settlement. In my area forest, hunting grounds, watersheds, and simple buffer zones between groups are all considered an integral part of the tribe's territory, even though those areas might seem "unused" to an outsider. Certainly if someone tried to settle there and claim the land (none of which has government-recognized titles) an immediate and probably violent reaction would ensue. Looking back at the history the surprise is really that settlement went on so long before it produced a violent backlash.
I never heard anyone claim that "Ilaga" was actually intended to stand for "Ilonggo Landgrabbers Association", and I've listened to some extreme propagandists on both sides. It was an assigned meaning, bit of black humor. Lang grabbing did go on, and lots of it, often with the cooperation and in some cases participation of the military.
You could go on forever trying to decipher who started the actual violence, and never come up with a really satisfactory answer. Certainly you'd have no chance of coming up with an answer accepted by both sides. Ultimately, though, the cause of the conflict was clearly the sponsored large-scale migration into Cotabato and Lanao. That had been going on a long time, but it accelerated dramatically in the 50s and 60s, to the point that areas where settlers achieved a numerical majority and political control in areas where indigenous groups once had both. There's no way a government can impose that sort of demographic change without producing violence.
It's useful to see the Moro propaganda for what it is, but the propaganda from the other side is no less distorted. It's a bit like listening to Israeli and Palestinian narratives: it's useful (if depressing) to know what both sides think, but one wouldn't want to confuse either version with truth.
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