The Maguindanaons are mourning the demise, due to illness, early Sunday, June 28, of the secretary of the central committee of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, who had supported the MILF’s struggle for self-governance by southerners through state-permitted autonomy.
Officials of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao and MILF leaders in BARMM’s adjoining Maguindanao del Sur and Maguindanao del Norte provinces separately announced at noon Sunday that Haron Abas, also a member of their regional government’s 80-seat parliament, died in a hospital in Davao City.
Abas, also known by his revolutionary nom de guerre Muhammad Ameen, had served as an immediate support staff to the founder of the MILF, the Egyptian-trained Islamic theologian Salamat Hashim, and subsequently to his successor Ahod Ebrahim, who eventually became the first appointed chief minister of BARMM and was at the helm of the BARMM government from early 2019 to March last year.
BARMM regional officials, among them current Chief Ministe, Abdulrauf Macacua, parliament members Kadil Sinolinding Jr. and Naguib Sinarimbo and Labor and Employment Minister Muslimin Sema separately condoled with the family of Abas immediately after learning of his passing.
‘We share with their grief,” Macacua, figurehead of the 80-seat BARMM lawmaking body, said
Lawyer Sinarimbo and physician-ophthalmologist Sinolinding had separately circulated written official statements expressing sympathy for the clan of Abas, an ethnic Maguindanaon like both of them.
‘He was a good person. Very cordial to people around him,” Sinolinding, also serving as BARMM’s health minister in concurrent capacity, said.
Sema, chairman of the Moro National Liberation Front, which also has representatives in the BARMM parliament, said he and officials of the MNLF in Central Mindanao shall remember Abas as a patriot for having helped push forward the Moro struggle that resulted in the creation of what is now the seven-year-old BARMM.
The cadaver of Abas was immediately brought home by relatives to be buried as quickly as possible, in keeping with the Islamic tradition of burying the dead within 24 hours after death.