Moslem ethnic groups in the southern Philippines have been pushing for regional political autonomy since World War II. This struggle, which at times has included open warfare, has caused considerable displacement.
Since the 1972 declaration of martial law in the Philippines, the various Moslem ethnic groups in the southern Philippines have waged an ongoing armed struggle against the central government. Although the goals and the intensity of the fighting of this movement vary by region, ethnic group and faction, Filipino Moslems are united in their desire for political recognition of ethnic regionalism and an acute consciousness of being a minority in a largely Christian nation.
Although Moslems represent less than six percent of the Philippine population, they are heavily concentrated in many parts of Mindanao. In Sulu they are the overwhelming majority, consisting of two major ethnic groups: the Tausug and the Samal.
The Sulu Archipelago is a chain of islands stretching from southwestern Mindanao to northeastern Borneo. There are two major ecological zones, which very roughly correspond to ethnic divisions. The coral islands - both large and small - are oriented to the sea and fishing, with only marginal horticulture. The larger volcanic islands have fertile soils suitable for intensive dry rice cultivation with fishing along the coasts. With the exception of interior Basilan, the larger islands are populated by Tausug speakers, the dominant group in the old Sultanate of Jolo, an important 19th century trading state. The coral islands are populated by Samalan speakers, historically subject to the suzerainty of the sultanate.
Although Islam arrived in the Philippines as much as two centuries before the Spanish colonial empire, Islam was strongly influenced by almost constant warfare between the cross and the crescent. Spanish attitudes, hardened by their fight against the "Moros" - the Islamic conquerors of the Iberian peninsula - gave all subsequent relations with "Moros" in the Philippines an intensely religious cast which persists today.
Of course, the Spanish were eventually able to achieve a modest influence, particularly with the establishment of the garrison at Jolo in the 1870s, which exercised little control outside the walled town. The United States Army, in a series of operations lasting until 1913, acquired a certain amount of control in the interior, both because American motives were not perceived to be religious, and because Tausug were unable to obtain modern weapons in any quantity. By calling in out-of-date firearms, the Americans were able to achieve a certain fragile peace.
World War II drastically altered this situation. Japanese administration did not penetrate the interior of the large islands, which reverted to traditional patterns of leadership and political authority. The end of the war left Jolo Island a virtual arsenal of modern weapons. Since 1946, Manila has attempted unsuccessfully to collect so-called "loose" firearms. Private warfare and internecine feuding again became - as it was in the 19th century - endemic on Jolo. The Phillipine state, represented mainly by the Constabulary and the court system, was unwittingly drawn into playing the private warfare game largely on rules made by the Tausug. In reality, the Constabulary became merely one faction among many in the political and military landscape of the island. Not being able to assert its role as a neutral representative of the nation, it merely contributed to the local factional chaos. Further, the Constabulary was involved, through both policy and bribery, in the supply of ammunition and weapons to the Tausug.
The declaration of martial law in 1972, by increasing the power of the military and its independence from local political influence, profoundly changed the delicate balance of interests in Jolo. Prior to martial law a kind of working misunderstanding prevailed between the enforcement of national law and the Islamic and customary law of the interior. Tausug elected officials, operating partially in the Philippine system and partially according the Tausug norms, served as power brokers and informal mediators to mute the influence of the military. The government, through the Constabulary and a skeletal administrative apparatus, appeared sovereign, but its influence did not penetrate very deeply into the interior. Overzealous commanders who did not play the game according to local rules were quickly transferred.
Further, since the conflict was defined as a "law and order" problem and military operations were, in theory, only conducted against individual "outlaws," there were moral and legal limits to the hardware and tactics which could be employed. Use of air power, napalm, bombs, search and destroy missions directed against civilian support, and even the use of machine guns and mortars, were not politically feasible, even if available. The limited domestic functions of the Constabulary were, in theory, separate from the broader war-like powers of the regular armed forces. All of this changed with martial law: the military found that it no longer - as most commanders on Jolo had always felt - had one hand tied, while the Tausug in turn felt no further need to moderate their power, since ad hoc political solutions to numerous local problems were less likely.
Everyone who has ever fought against the Tausug - Spanish, Americans, Filipinos - has noted their military prowess and intense bravery under fire. The apparent paradox is that the Tausug do not value bellicosity as an end in itself - children, for example, are not encouraged to express conflict directly - but rather view conflict as an inevitable part of the fatefulness of the world - "a man does rightly and leaves the outcome to God." Men do not look for trouble, it is said, but rather "find" it; all violence is seen as counter-violence. Of course, not all men enjoy fighting - some do and some no doubt do not - but for the young fighting is the supreme adventure in a culture which quite radically separates the ethics of the young from the ethics of the old. The young are supposed to be - and most are - hot blooded, violent, adventuresome, and - within the contest of an ideal Islamic morality - "bad," while the old are supposed to be peaceful, religiously inclined, and "good." This is not a conflict of generations caused by rapid change, but a theme of Tausug culture which - judging from epic poetry - was equally prevalent in the past.
The Philippine popular press and government rhetoric attributes the causes of the rebellion to certain familiar troubles: poverty, lack of economic development, religious zealotry, lack of education, land conflict or some combination of all these. Yet as far as the Tausug are concerned, none of these explanations is quite on target.
Poverty is, after all, relative to your point of view, and it is difficult to see how a Tausug farmer engaged in more than adequate subsistence agriculture on land he effectively controls himself, eating a diet fairly rich in protein, can be sensibly compared to a tenant farmer anywhere else in the Philippines, however meager his material possessions may be in other respects.
Economic development is illusory in Sulu. Fishing is the only possibility, and the local market is already operating optimally for local needs, with an adequate and efficient technology suited to the ecology. Commercial fishing for outside markets would require capital inputs (and probable loss of local control) and result in local price increases, exploitative wage labor, harmful ecological effects and a long range drain of surplus value out of the area without an equivalent return. Whatever Sulu needs, it is not maritime plantation agribusiness. There is some need for very modest, decentralized, technological aid to reduce dependence on harmful techniques of fishing by dynamite, but this has never been given serious attention by the government.
Educational development in Sulu since 1946 has probably contributed to the current rebellion, at least in the sense that it has provided a core of leadership which did not exist before. Education, after all, can support the ideology of a modern nation only to the extent that the patriotic values learned in school are at least in some sense relevant to the student's outside experience. This has certainly not been the case in Sulu.
The frantic search for "causes" for the rebellion naively fails to recognize that the modern nation is, after all, an artifact in people's minds. The sensible question is not why men rebel, but why they do not do so. The Tausug have no history of loyalty to the Philippine state, and it is not surprising that given the right historical moment they should take up arms.
Consider the basic facts. Jolo is an island of about one quarter million people who own about 30,000 or so firearms, occupied by a single ethnic group which was at one time an independent state. It has a well developed warrior tradition sustained by an Islamic ethic and a long history of war with the Christian north. The island is remote and quite easy to defend, with difficult terrain and few usable roads. In a pinch it is economically self-sufficient and not easily blockaded. It has minimal economic or financial ties to the rest of the nation. It has an educated (and underemployed) elite which has for the most part not sought fame and glory in the metropolis, but has instead remained wedded to a local base. Finally, it is peripherally located next to a major Moslem nation (Malaysia) which makes offers of assistance fairly easy to implement.
The Philippine government has never made a sincere or serious attempt to develop a genuinely federal system in which the reality of Moslem culture in the south could be preserved through political means, rather than through vigilant Moslem use of force. President Marcos himself candidly expressed this dominant theme at the time of the breakdown of the Tripoli talks in May 1977. Speaking of the proposed (and later somewhat reluctantly implemented) Moslem autonomous region, he said, "This enclave may develop into a completely alien and strange culture which would not be assimilated into the national culture."
The government simply does not take ethnic regionalism seriously, and I have no doubt (if the official pronouncements are to be believed) that the long range implied goal is the elimination of Tausug culture in the name of national integration. A small amount of quaint nostalgia might be tolerated as a sop to the tourist trade: quaint costumes, marriage customs, native dances and the like. And, of course, individual religious freedom would be guaranteed. But religious tolerance which only recognizes individual rights to worship, as distinguished from the rights of the community of the faithful, is totally unacceptable for the Tausug or any Moslem society.
Given the military and geographical realities, and the lack of real strategic interest, it is hard to understand why any government would choose to fight a war with the Tausug, especially since a political solution is clearly feasible. This irrational war is as much a product of the internal politics of the martial law government as it is of any actual realities in Sulu.
In the long run, the Tausug are in the best position, as they are in control of a highly defensible island which is of no use to anybody but themselves. A political solution recognizing Philippine suzerainty, but effective local sovereignty, may be inevitable, given the untenable military situation of the government. The situation on Mindanao is much more difficult to solve, however, given the vested economic interests and the impossibility of shipping the Christian migrants back. The serious possibility of an independent or effectively autonomous Moslem region depends in the long run as much on what happens in the rest of the Philippines in the next few years.
In the meantime, the stalemate continues, with much bloodshed and refugee displacement. In the long run, the Tausug, no doubt, will survive as a viable culture, but the cost has been very great in life and suffering.

The Tausūg or Suluk people are an ethnic group of Sulu and Malaysia. The term Tausūg was derived from two words tau and sūg (or suluk) meaning "people of the current", referring to their homelands in the Sulu Archipelago. Sūg and suluk both mean the same thing, with the former being the phonetic evolution in Sulu of the latter (the L being dropped and thus the two short U's merging into one long U). The Tausūg people in Sabah refer to themselves as Tausūg but refers to their race as Suluk as documented in official documents such as birth certificates in Sabah, Malaysia. The Tausūg are part of the wider political identity of Muslim of Mindanao, Sulu and Palawan known as Moro ethnic group, who constitute the third largest Ethnic groups of Mindanao, Sulu and Palawan. They originally had an independent state known as the Sulu Sultanate, which once exercised sovereignty over the present day provinces of Basilan, Palawan, Sulu, Tawi-Tawi, and the eastern part of the Malaysian state of Sabah (formerly North Borneo).

The Tausūg presently populate the Filipino province of Sulu as a majority, and the provinces of Zamboanga del Sur, Basilan, Tawi-Tawi, Palawan, Cebu and Manila as minorities. There is a large population of Tausūgs in all parts of Sabah, Malaysia, who mainly work as construction laborers with a substantial number as skilled workers. The Tausūg workers tend to be confused with the more numerous Bajau workers in Sabah that are less skilled.

In Sabah, there are groups of Tausūg that had settled in the areas to the east of Sabah, from Kudat town to the north, to Sempurna, to the south east, since the Sulu Sultanate rule over the eastern part of Sabah. However most had interbred with other races in Sabah, especially the Bajaus, that what remained is only their Suluk race as documented in birth certificates.

The etymology of the conjugated word "Tausug" comes from the word "Tau" which means man and "Sug" which means current. Basically, they are the people of the current. Suluq-is a name of one place in Libya, suluq means a spiritual pathway in Libyan Arabic

The Tausūg currently number about 953,000 in the Philippines. The Tausug language is called "Sinug" with "Bahasa" to mean Language. The Tausug language is related to Bicol, Tagalog and Visayan languages, being especially closely related to the Butuanon language of northeastern Mindanao, sharing many common words. The Tausūg however do not consider themselves as Visayan, using the term only to refer to Christian Bisaya-language speakers, given that the vast majority of Tausūgs are Muslims. In Malaysia, they number around 300,000. The recent migrants also speak Chavacano or another Visayan language - Cebuano - , and Tagalog in the Philippines; Malay in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia; and English in both Malaysia and Philippines as second languages. Tausug is also related to Waray Waray.

Malaysian Tausūg, descendants of those resident when the Sulu Sultanate ruled the eastern part of Sabah, speak or understand the Sabahan dialect of Suluk, Bahasa Malaysia, and some English or Simunul, and those who are in contact with Bajau, those Bajau dialects. By the year 2000, most of the Tausūg children in Sabah, especially in towns of the west side of Sabah, were no longer speaking Tausūg; instead they speak the Sabahan dialect of Malay and English.

Tausūgs are experienced sailors and are known for their colorful boats or vintas. They are also superb warriors and craftsmen. They are also famous for the Pangalay dance (also known as Daling-Daling in Sabah), in which female dancers wear artificial elongated fingernails made from brass or silver known as janggay, and perform motions based on the Vidhyadhari (Bahasa Sūg: Bidadali) of pre-Islamic Buddhist

legend.

Prior to modern times, the Sultanate of Sulu for Tausūg was the head of the Tausūg people. The system is a patrilineal system, consisting of the title of Sultan as the sole sovereign of the Sultinate, (In Tausūg language: Lupah Sug, literally: "Land of the Current"), followed by various Maharajah and Rajah titled subdivisional princes. Further down the line are the numerous Panglima or local chiefs, similar in function to the Philippine political post of Baranggay Kapitan in the Baranggay system.

Of significance are the Sarip(Shariff) and their wives, Sharifah, who are descendents of Arabic royalty, well revered as religious leaders but many took up administrative posts as leaders of Society.

The history of Sulu begins with Makdum, a Muslim missionary, who arrived in Sulu in 1380. He introduced the Islamic faith and settled in Tubig Indangan, Simunul until his death. The Mosque's pillars at Tubig-Indangan which he built still stand.

In 1390, Raja Baguinda landed at Buansa and extended the missionary work of Makdum. The Arabian scholar Abu Bakr arrived in 1450, married Baguinda's daughter, and after Baguinda's death, became Sultan, thereby introducing the sultanate as a political system. Political districts were created in Parang, Pansul, Lati, Gitung, and Luuk, each headed by a panglima or district leader.

After Abu Bakr's death, the sultanate system had already become well established in Sulu. Before the coming of the Spaniards, the ethnic groups in Sulu—the Tausug, Samal, Yakan, and Bajau--were in varying degrees united under the Sulu sultanate, considered the most centralized -political system in the Philippines. Called the "Moro Wars," these battles were waged intermittently from 1578 till 1898 between the Spanish colonial government and the Muslims of Mindanao.

In 1578, an expedition sent by Gov Francisco de Sande and headed by Capt Rodriguez de Figueroa began the 300-year warfare between the Tausūg and the Spanish authorities. In 1579, the Spanish government gave de Figueroa the sole right to colonize Mindanao. In retaliation, the Muslims raided Visayan towns in Panay, Negros, and Cebu. These were repulsed by Spanish and Visayan forces. In the early 17th century, the largest alliance composed of the Maranao, Maguindanao, Tausūg, other Muslim groups was formed by Sultan Kudarat or Cachil Corralat of Maguindanao, whose domain extended from the Davao Gulf to Dapitan on the Zamboanga peninsula. Several expeditions sent by the Spanish authorities suffered defeat. In 1635, Capt Juan de Chaves occupied Zamboanga and erected a fort. In 1637, Gov Gen Hurtado de Corcuera personally led an expedition against Kudarat, and triumphed over his forces at Lamitan and Ilian. On 1 January 1638, de Corcuera with 80 vessels and 2000 soldiers, defeated the Tausūg and occupied Jolo. A peace treaty was forged. The victory did not establish Spanish sovereignty over Sulu, as the Tausūg abrogated the treaty as soon Spaniards left in 1646.

In 1737, Sultan Alimud Din I entered into a "permanent" peace treaty with Gov Gen F. Valdes y Tamon; and in 1746, befriended the Jesuits sent to Jolo by King Philip. The "permission" of Sultan Azimuddin-I (*the first heir-apparent) allowed the Christians Jesuit enter Jolo was against by his young brother's Raja Muda Maharajah Adinda Datu Bantilan (*the second heir-apparent). Datu Bantilan did not want the Christian Jesuits disturbed or dishonored the Muslims faith in the Sulu Sultanate kingdom. The fought of these two brother, made Sultan Azimuddin-I leave Jolo to Zamboanga, then to Manila in 1948. Then Raja Muda Maharajah Adinda Datu Bantilan was proclaimed as sultan, taken the name as Sultan Bantilan Muizzuddin.

Sultan Bantilan Muizzuddin was a "Saviour" to the Sulu Sultanate kingdom in 1748. If he did not fought his brother Sultan Azimuddin-I Sultan Azimuddin-I who allowed the Christian Jesuits to entor Jolo and to spread the "Christians Doctrine" among the Muslims in Sulu, it might have bcome a Christian area today.

In 1893, amid succession controversies, Amirnul Kiram became Sultan Jamalul Kiram II, the title being officially recognized by the Spanish authorities. In 1899, after the defeat of Spain in the Spanish-American War, Col Luis Huerta, the last governor of Sulu, relinquished his garrison to the Americans (Orosa 1970:25-30).

A "policy of attraction" was introduced, ushering in reforms to encourage Muslim integration into Philippine society. "Proxy colonialism" was legalized by the Public Land Act of 1919, invalidating Tausūg pusaka (inherited property) laws based on the Islamic Shariah. The act also granted the state the right to confer land ownership. It was thought that the Muslims would "learn" from the "more advanced" Christian Filipinos, and would integrate more easily into mainstream Philippine society.

In February 1920, the Philippine Senate and House of Representatives passed Act No 2878, which abolished the Department of Mindanao and Sulu and transferred its responsibilities to the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes under the Department of the Interior. Muslim dissatisfaction grew as power shifted to the Christian Filipinos. Petitions were sent by Muslim leaders between 1921 and 1924 requesting that Mindanao and Sulu be administered directly by the United States. These petitions were not granted. Realizing the futility of armed resistance, some Muslims sought to make the best of the situation. In 1934, Arolas Tulawi of Sulu, Datu Manandang Piang and Datu Blah Sinsuat of Cotabato, and Sultan Alaoya Alonto of Lanao were elected to the 1935 Constitutional Convention. In 1935, two Muslims were elected to the National Assembly.

The Commonwealth years sought to end the privileges the Muslims had been enjoying under the earlier American administration. Muslim exemptions from some national laws, as expressed in the administrative code for Mindanao, and the Muslim right to use their traditional Islamic courts, as expressed in the Moro Board, were ended. It was unlikely that the Muslims, who have had a longer cultural history as Muslims than the Filipinos as Christians, would surrender their identity. Fearing government persecution, he went to the hills. On "death row," he was finally pardoned by Pres Marcos on 11 September 1968. This incident contributed to the rise of various separatist movements-the Muslim Independence Movement (MIM), Ansar El-Islam, and Union of Islamic Forces and Organizations (Che Man 1990:74-75). In 1969, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) was founded on the concept of a Bangsa Moro Republic by a group of educated young Muslims. In 1976, negotiations between the Philippine government and the MNLF in Tripoli resulted in the Tripoli Agreement, which provided for an autonomous region in Mindanao. Nur Misuari was invited to chair the provisional government but he refused. The referendum was boycotted by the Muslims themselves. The talks collapsed, and fighting continued. On 1 August 1989, Republic Act 673 or the Organic Act for Mindanao created the Autonomous Region of Mindanao, which encompasses Maguindanao, Lanao del Sur, Sulu, and Tawi-Tawi. Many leaders of the Abu Sayyaf, a terrorist group operating in Mindanao, are of Tausūg descent.