By Hader Glang
ZAMBOANGA CITY, Philippines
Some 50,000 elementary school pupils launched kites into the skies of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao this week to amplify a message of peace and the rights of every child, including the freedom from violence and conflict in the region.
Mindanao has been wracked by decades of conflict from armed groups, which a recently inked peace deal between the government and the Philippines’ one-time largest rebel group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), aims to bring to a close.
Regional Youth Academy Executive Director Anwar Upahm told reporters that Kites for Peace - part of the Mindanao Week of Peace - seeks to send a message to those responsible for the violence that has taken the lives of many young people.
"Now is the time for the youth to express their need for security, especially in Moro areas, which have always been affected by man-made calamities," he told reporters in Cotabato City.
The event hopes to break the present Guinness World Record for kite flying, which was set by 13,000 children in the Gaza Strip in 2011. Organizers said Wednesday that they remained in touch with Guinness to evaluate if Tuesday's record attempt had been successful.
The event - which coincides with a Bike for Peace to be held Saturday in many parts of Mindanao - is part of the month-long celebration of the region’s 25th founding anniversary, which started Nov. 17.
It has received the support of local government agencies, civil society organizations, youth groups, and stakeholders in the Philippines peace process such as representatives of the MILF.
The silver anniversary of the region, established by plebiscite in 1989, might very well be its last if it is replaced next year by a new political entity based on the peace deal between President Benigno Aquino III and the MILF.
The March 27 agreement brought to a close 17 years of negotiations and ended a decades-old armed conflict in Mindanao -- the second largest and southernmost major island in the Philippines -- while granting Muslim areas greater political autonomy.
It commits Aquino and the MILF to pass a law creating the Bangsamoro Region -- which will supplant the current region once the law is passed and ratified -- before the 2016 presidential elections.
Aside from the hundreds of kites flown from the ARMM compound in Cotabato City, other provinces in the region held similar events.
Hundreds of non-Muslim ethnic Teduray schoolchildren also flew kites in their school campuses in Maguindanao’s adjoining North and South Upi towns.
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