COTABATO CITY — The Bangsamoro government had lengthily briefed ranking officials of the Indonesian Embassy in Makati City on how it is providing health interventions to the local communities benefiting from a peace process that Indonesia is helping push forward.

Indonesia is a member of the influential Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a bloc of more than 50 Muslim states, including petroleum-exporting countries in the Middle East and North Africa, that helped broker the separate peace compacts of the Moro National Liberation Front and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) with Malacañang.

Radio reports in Central Mindanao on Wednesday morning stated that the physician-ophthalmologist Kadil M. Sinolinding, Jr., health minister of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM), had talked lengthily about the “good practices” of the Ministry of Health (MoH) in BARMM in extending health services to constituent Muslim, Christian and indigenous communities during the Indonesia-Philippines Health Forum last Monday.

“That activity gave us a chance to brief them on our best practices in health services that we extend to the local communities,” Mr. Sinolinding said.

The MoH-BARMM covers five provinces and three cities in Mindanao, grouped under the Bangsamoro autonomous government, established in 2019 based on the peace agreement between the MILF and the national government, forged with the support of OIC-member states.

Among the topics discussed in the Indonesia-Philippines Health Forum were the MoH-BARMM’s extensive vaccination campaigns to forestall measles outbreak and the spread in the autonomous region of other diseases preventable with vaccines.

“Our health workers involved in those very taxing missions hike far distances, cross rivers and marshlands and ride boats to cross islands in the seas and inland swamps to reach the villagers they ought to vaccinate. That, I told them in my briefing,” he said. — John Felix M. Unson

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