Can't view it here... looked at the synopsis, though, and noticed this:

A few kilometres further south, the Ligawasan marsh covers 3000 square kilometres of central Mindanao. It's at the heart of the war, and is home to many of the MILF units. And here Unreported World reveals that the conflict is not just about religious hatred - it's also a fight over land and mineral wealth. The area includes vast deposits of natural gas and oil worth billions of dollars. With so much at stake, Muslims and Christians are equally determined they will never surrender.
Did they actually cite any evidence to support the allegations of "vast deposits of natural gas and oil"? This claim has been floating about for some time, generally without any serious supporting data. As far as I know, the area is regarded as promising but no meaningful exploration has ever been done due to the long-running security problems. It does make lovely fodder for all kinds of conspiracy theorists though.

Quote Originally Posted by davidbfpo View Post
I was not aware that post-1945 Christians have arrived on the island and the war can be seen as a local, sectarian conflict over land ownership. Christian militia are also visited and interviewed.
This is one of the core issues of the conflict, especially in the MILF areas on the Mindanao mainland. During the 50s and 60s the Government ran homestead programs giving away Mindanao land to settlers, predominantly from the Visayas. The primary reason appears to have been alleviating agrarian unrest and overpopulation in the plantation-dominated sugar producing islands of Negros and Iloilo, though some claim that dilution of the Muslim majority was also intended. If that is the case, the goal was accomplished: Muslims are now a numerical minority in much of what they regard as their ancestral domain.

When fighting started in 1970, the actual combatants were immigrant and indigenous gangs and militias. The government had an opportunity to send military forces in to keep peace and act as a neutral broker in the conflict, instead they took sides, fighting on behalf of the settlers. The consequences of that decision are still being felt.

Many of the settlers are now in their 4th and 5th generations, and regard themselves as native to Mindanao. They have nowhere else to go. Most are poor, though their political leaders are quite wealthy (leaders on both sides use the conflict to justify their own control and their own corruption: "you need us to protect you from them" is a constant refrain). This situation makes a direct vote on autonomy or any ancestral domain issue complex, as the immigrant population, a majority, will vote against any such deal. Indigenous leaders claim that only the indigenous population should be allowed to vote on the question, a proposal that is naturally rejected out of hand by the immigrants. Adding to the complications, immigrant and indigenous villages are not geographically contiguous. A village-to-village vote on inclusion in an autonomous region would result in what has been called a "dalmatian region", obviously not manageable.

Very ugly situation with no easy solutions...