BARMM lawmakers’ pro-poor efforts benefit non-Muslims

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June 20, 2026 | 5:10pm

COTABATO CITY, Philippines — Three Muslim members of the Bangsamoro parliament separately embarked on humanitarian projects that benefited non-Muslims, supporting multisectoral efforts meant to boost interfaith solidarity among constituents in culturally pluralistic communities.

The Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, which has five provinces and three cities, is home to mixed Muslim, Christian and non-Moro indigenous communities.

Radio reports on Saturday, June 20, stated that the office of the deputy floor leader of the BARMM parliament, the lawyer Naguib Sinarimbo, facilitated the turn over last Thursday of P1 million to the management of the Notre Dame Hospital in Cotabato City, which can freely be allocated, in fractions, as shares, for settling bills of patients from marginalized families.

Operating since the 1950s, the Notre Dame Hospital in Cotabato City is owned by the Catholic Dominican Sisters congregation. It is only about 200 meters away from Cotabato City's largest hospital, the Cotabato Regional Medical Center, where other Muslim BARMM parliament members, among them the lawyer Ishak Mastura, earlier deposited millions worth of funds too from their offices for the same purpose.

Sinarimbo’s office also released last Thursday P1 million to the administration of the Cotabato Sanitarium General Hospital in Sultan Kudarat town in Maguindanao del Norte and P500,000 for patients in the Doctor Ramon Pesante Clinic and Hospital in the predominantly Christian Libungan town in Cotabato province in Region 12, about 40 kilometers north of Cotabato City, where BARMM’s regional capitol is located.

Muslim patients can also avail of the support fund to partly cover their bills in any of the three hospitals, according to radio reports.

The office of the lawyer Jet Lim, who is representing Tawi-Tawi to the 80-seat BARMM parliament, facilitated last week the distribution of more than a thousand school bags to mixed Christian and Muslim grade school children in 15 government elementary schools in the province.

The office of Lim, also spokesperson of the BARMM parliament, procured last month an airconditioned bus, now shuttling, for free, Christian and Muslim residents of Bongao, capital town of Tawi-Tawi, to schools, to seaports and trading sites in the area.

"Imagine Muslim and Christian passengers riding a bus, sitting close to each other, becoming friends. That is so good," Lim said. 

A regional lawmaker who is a physician-ophthalmologist, Kadil Sinolinding, Jr., and his subordinates together facilitated, from between middle of April to last week of May, the circumcision of 581 then vacationing grade school pupils, many of them from Christian and non-Moro ethnic Menufu Aromanen families, in the Bangsamoro Special Geographic Area in Cotabato province.

The eight newly-created towns in the Bangsamoro Special Geographic Area covers 63 barangays under the BARMM government, but are inside the core territory of Cotabato, one of the four provinces in Region 12.

Among the boys circumcised for free during the period by the public service team from Sinolinding’s office in the parliament in Cotabato City and medics from the Ministry of Health-BARMM, are children from non-Moro communities in Cotabato’s Carmen, Matalam and Kabacan towns and in Kidapawan City, whose local executives are all under Gov. Emmylou Taliño-Mendoza.

“Our humanitarian activities are partly meant to build strong cultural and religious understanding among Muslim and non-Muslim beneficiaries,” said Sinolinding, who is also functioning as BARMM’s health minister in a concurrent capacity.

Their circumcision of hundreds of boys for free was assisted by peace-advocacy groups and volunteers from the Deseret Surgimed Hospital in Kabacan, one of the 17 towns in Cotabato province.

Sinolinding had told reporters that the now second-term governor Taliño-Mendoza, a Christian, supported extensively and even provided relief supplies and oral antibiotics for the Muslim children they circumcised during their separate medical missions in the Bangsamoro Special Geographic Area and in barangays under her administration.