A semi-autonomous Muslim region in the southern Philippines began voting peacefully to elect a new governor on Monday despite an uprising last week by the man being replaced.
Followers of Nur Misuari, the incumbent governor of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), attacked military posts on the island of Jolo last Monday in a bid to postpone the polls and some 160 people are estimated to have been killed in the subsequent fighting.
Misuari was arrested in neighbouring Malaysia at the weekend and is being held there.
Officials said people began lining up outside polling booths in five provinces and one city under the ARMM at the start of voting at 7 a.m. (2300 GMT Sunday). Voting was peaceful, said Colonel Romeo Tolentino, a senior military official.
He said thousands of people voted even on Jolo, the southern island where Misuari's followers staged the uprising. But rain in some areas meant a low early turnout, officials said.
Luzviminda Tangcangco, a senior official of the Commission on Elections (Comelec), said voting was ordered suspended in large parts of Jolo island because of last week's violence. Other election officials said the order was not legal because it was not endorsed by a majority of the Comelec.
Some 1.2 million people in the ARMM region, about 80 percent of them Muslims, are eligible to vote in the polls. They will elect a governor, a vice-governor and 24 members to a regional legislative assembly.
Muslims make up only about five percent of the Philippines' 76 million people but live mostly in the impoverished south of the Roman Catholic nation.
Misuari accepted a 1996 peace accord which made him ARMM governor in exchange for giving up a decades-long insurrection for an independent homeland. His Moro National Liberation Front was then largely amalgamated into the army and the police, but other Muslim groups continued to fight for independence.
Misuari rebelled anew after the government made it clear that it supported a rival for the ARMM governorship. He refused to contest and said the election was a violation of the 1996 accord.
The government has forged a ceasefire with the largest of remaining Muslim groups, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, but has vowed to wipe out the Abu Sayyaf, a smaller group of radicals which is holding two Americans and a Filipino hostage on the southern island of Basilan.
The United States has said the Abu Sayyaf is linked to the al Qaeda group of Osama bin Laden, prime suspect in the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
(China Daily November 26, 2001)
