A reconstruction of the Jabidah unit patch based on the description of the sole survivor of the massacre in 1968. All details around the unit are secretive and no photos exist of the original patch, nor of the crime that saw its bearers murdered. Image Source: Guirnela, K, Wikipedia

It is a crime that illustrates how the pursuit of Sabah lies at the heart of Mindanao’s modern tragedies. The Tausug fighters had been training in secret for a mission most of them likely didn't fully understand: infiltrating Sabah in Malaysian Borneo to destabilize it in service of a territorial claim inherited from a sultanate that had already ceased to exist as a functioning state decades earlier.

When some of the Tausug men began to question, they were killed by members of the Philippine Armed Forces. Officially, almost nobody was held responsible. The exact reason why such a ghastly and extreme crime was carried out remains unconfirmed, though the widespread speculation is that then-president Ferdinand Marcos had a change of heart about the operation and sought to silence all witnesses.

Unofficially, the massacre became known as Jabidah, and the line from that killing field to organized armed rebellion in Mindanao is direct, not symbolic. The story broke in the Senate, and the ensuing investigation made the operation's outlines public: Muslim recruits, trained by the state, killed by the state, in service of a claim that had nothing to do with their own lives or homeland.

“Muslim recruits, trained by the state, killed by the state, in service of a claim that had nothing to do with their own lives or homeland.”

No one was ever convicted. That failure to deliver justice was itself a message, and young Moro leaders—Nur Misuari among them—heard it clearly. Within months, student and intellectual circles that had been debating Moro self-determination formed the Mindanao Independence Movement; by 1972, that current had hardened into the Moro National Liberation Front, organized explicitly for armed struggle.

When Marcos declared martial law later that same year, the fighting that had been building since Jabidah broke into full-scale war across Mindanao and Sulu, the consequences of which are still being managed with the Bangsamoro peace process and ongoing efforts to ensure Sulu representation in the Philippines.

What is easy to lose in that story is what the men died for. The Sabah claim was not a cause worth a single life in 1968, and it is not one now. It is a colonial-era legal ambiguity that has been repeatedly weaponized by ambitious men, at the expense of ordinary Moro people, for over a century. Jabidah was not just a tragedy for the families involved, but also a catastrophic blow to any prospect of Moro and Christian Filipinos building a shared national project together in the early decades of the Philippine republic.

Whatever fragile trust had existed between Manila and the Moro provinces in the years after independence did not survive the revelation that the state would train, use, and then kill Muslim citizens over a foreign policy adventure.

A massacre we've stopped talking about

Ask most people, in the Philippines or outside it, what explains the fighting in Mindanao, and the answer will almost always come back to religious differences and issues in representation: Catholic Manila that succeeded Spain and America, versus a Muslim minority in Mindanao that fought back against colonial powers with greater success.

That story isn't wrong, exactly, but it's incomplete in a way that lets everyone off the hook a little too easily. It treats the modern conflict as something that simply happened, the inevitable friction of two cultures sharing an archipelago, rather than something the Philippine state actively did to Moro communities through specific, nameable decisions. Jabidah is one of those decisions, and it has been quietly pushed out of the national conversation in favor of the tidier, less incriminating religious narrative.

A claim that keeps finding new victims

Tragically, Jabidah was not a one-off tragedy born of a single bad plan. It was the first time the Sabah claim got young Moro men killed, but it was not the last, and the pattern is the point.

In February 2013, roughly 200 armed followers of Jamalul Kiram III—a private citizen with no state authority, styling himself Sultan of Sulu—sailed to Lahad Datu in Sabah to physically assert the century-old claim.

What followed was five weeks of standoff and then open combat with the Malaysian military: air strikes, gun battles, and by the time it was over, dozens of Filipino fighters dead, Malaysian security personnel killed, and ongoing mutual suspicion between Tausugs and other populations in Sabah.

Lahad Datu was not an aberration or the true beginning of the Sabah dispute we see today. Instead, it was the latest iteration of a willingness to spend Moro and Sulu lives.

Why this history can't stay buried right now

This is not a hypothetical warning about a settled matter. In 2026, the Sabah claim has been actively revived. A Philippine senator has publicly urged Marcos Jr. to press the claim, tying it to Sabah's oil and gas reserves amid an energy price crisis; the country's national mapping authority issued an updated map depicting Sabah as Philippine territory; and the Department of Foreign Affairs has gone out of its way to formally reaffirm the claim.

That timing is not incidental. This resurgence is landing at the exact moment the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region is finally supposed to hold its long-delayed first parliamentary elections, after a "carousel" of postponements stretching back to 2022 — while Marcos himself is contending with a corruption scandal and falling approval ratings that give any administration an incentive to reach for a nationalist rallying cry that costs nothing in the polls and everything in Mindanao.

“Lahad Datu was not an aberration or the true beginning of the Sabah dispute we see today. Instead, it was the latest iteration of a willingness to spend Moro and Sulu lives.”

Nationalist mileage from Sabah is cheap precisely because the people who pay for it are not in Manila and not in the news cycle. They are Moro communities trying, again, to get a fragile peace settlement across the finish line.

That is exactly the dynamic that produced Jabidah in the first place: a state pursuing a claim for reasons that had nothing to do with Moro welfare, treating Moro lives as the acceptable cost of a nationalist project. Reviving that same claim now, while BARMM is trying to prove that self-governance can actually work and while the region is still short on the trust that decades of broken promises have worn away, risks the same collision it always has — a foreign-policy talking point in Manila landing, once again, as a burden on Mindanao.

Let dead claims rest and focus on the living

There will always be men willing to invoke the Sultanate's old glory and promise that this time, armed pressure will finally settle Sabah's fate. Jabidah and Lahad Datu are both proof of exactly what that promise actually delivers: not sovereignty, but funerals.

If there is a lesson to draw from tracing the Sabah claim's bloody history, it is that the claim itself has never once earned its cost. Mindanao does not need another chapter in this story. It needs the resources, development, and fair representation to finally bridge divisions in the Philippines.

REFERENCES

Bangsamoro Information Office. (2021, March 17). Remembering Jabidah and the seeds of the struggle. Bangsamoro Government. https://bangsamoro.gov.ph

Guirnela, K. (2016, May 29). Recreation of Jabidah unit patch [Image]. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org

KnowSulu. (2026, January 27). Why the Philippines' Sabah claim collides with its own Constitution. https://know-sulu.ph

Majangkim, R. (2026, February 28). Sabah: A sovereign choice the world witnessed. Jesselton Times. https://jesseltontimes.com

Ortigas, M. (2013, March 18). Remembering the Jabidah massacre. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com

Rocamora, J. N. L. (2026, February 20). Philippines reaffirms claim over Sabah. Philippine News Agency. https://www.pna.gov.ph

Royal Hashemite Sultanate of Sulu and Sabah. (2011, May 12). RHSSS award ceremony and CMDM attendees forum in July, 2010. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com

Royal Hashemite Sultanate of Sulu and Sabah. (2011, May 12). Sara Duterte and Fuad Kiram attend the 2nd MNLF Peace Summit, May 2008. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com

The 1987 Constitution of the Republic of the Philippines. (1987). The LawPhil Project. https://lawphil.net

Guirnela, K. (2016, May 29). Recreation of Jabidah unit patch [Image]. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org