November 22-30 (2009)

Madame Ambassador Kristie Kenney, you are leaving home soon. Thank you for being with us for three years and a half. Surely, we’ll miss you!

By your own account, you did not only say you have rich and wonderful experiences while here in the Philippines, but you have a “heart broken” at having to leave your post of more than three years. On the part of the MILF, our interactions made us see closely and understand clearly the softer part of your government that, hopefully, will enable us to firmly figure out the harder part.


Even as you said, your visit to the MILF administrative base in Darapanan, Sultan Kudarat, Maguindanao on February 19, 2008, was not carried out “in your official capacity as ambassador”, it nevertheless carried so many positive implications. Besides, to the MILF, the line between personal and official when one is an official of government is truly blurred. You also shared with us that frustrated moment over the botched Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD) in Kuala Lumpur on August 5, 2008.

No matter what others say, the MILF views the above as part of the growing international understanding of the legitimacy of the MILF-led struggle for freedom and right to self-determination of the Bangsamoro people. It cannot be less.

Madame Ambassador, the Bangsamoro people have never considered the American people or even the United States Government as their enemy; they cried when America departed from Mindanao in 1946. They learned to love America despite the deaths of so many brave Moro warriors during the Moro-American War. But to this day, they bitterly opposed their turn-over to the Filipinos in the grant of so-called Philippine independence in 1946. We sent several petitions to the US Congress asking for the separation of our homeland, but the US ignored our pleas completely. This we cannot forget until the US helps correct this “historic injustice” and give them their right to govern themselves either in the form of state or sub-state.

Yes, it is “history” because it happened in the past, but the seed of enmity and injustice continues to grow to the present --- and in more vicious form. The Moros are now strangers in their own homeland. And soon, they will become extinct, like the Mohicans.

Mind you, Madame, the conflict will not die; on the contrary, it will degenerate and become more complicated and noxious in the years ahead unless a true solution comes into the scene. The United States cannot afford to be passive like an onlooker; after all, recalling the words of the late MILF Chairman Salamat Hashim, “the US is the one responsible for the planting of the seed of enmity in Mindanao” when it turned over the Moros to the Filipinos for governance. The US still has that solemn obligation to help correct this historic injustice as it was when Mindanao was under its hegemony. The US can do this in many ways, even if it is not a part of the formal frameworks of the GRP-MILF peace process: the US vowed never to supplant the Malaysian facilitation and also it did not seek to become part of the International Contact Group (ICG). A colonial power over the Philippines and a superpower at that, oftentimes, the help can best be expressed or impacted outside of the formal peace process.

Even after your exit, Madame, we could only hope your successor, Harry Thomas, a career member of the senior foreign service and served most recently as director general of the foreign service and director of human resources will fittingly fit into the job. Judging by his record, he will certainly do his job with sterling record. He also previously served as a special assistant to the secretary and executive secretary of the department. He served as US ambassador to Bangladesh from 2003 to 2005. He also served in the White House as the director for south Asia at the National Security Council from 2001 to 2002.

His other postings include: New Delhi, India; Harare, Zimbabwe; Kaduna, Nigeria; and Lima, Peru. He has served as senior watch officer, deputy director, and director of the State Department Operations Center; special assistant to the undersecretary for political affairs; and staff assistant to the assistant secretary for African affairs.

Thomas holds a bachelors degree from the College of the Holy Cross.

And more importantly, we hope he will hear the voices of the Moros, whose sufferings run parallel to those of the American Indians and Blacks in the United States.