An Act to Declare the Burial Site of the Late Sheikh Salamat Hashim, MILF Founding Chairman, and the Late Alim Abdul Aziz Mimbantas, MILF Vice Chairman & Vice Chairman for Military Affairs, as “Hashim and Mimbantas Memorial Site”, to Provide for the Preservation of the Same, and for Other Purposes

Five sections and two pages. This declares the burial site of Sheikh Salamat Hashim, founding chairman of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, and of Alim Abdul Aziz Mimbantas, its vice chairman and vice chairman for military affairs, at Camp Bushra Somiorang in Butig, Lanao del Sur, a Bangsamoro Historical Shrine to be known as the Hashim and Mimbantas Memorial Site.

The site is to be preserved and, where necessary, reconstructed as much as possible in its original form. The Bangsamoro Commission for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage exercises supervision and control over that work and issues the rules to carry it out. Funds come from the annual appropriations for public works, with disbursements made by the heritage commission. The act takes effect on approval.

That is the whole bill. It fixes no boundary for the site, names no management body, sets no amount, and gives no role to anyone outside the heritage commission.

There is no explanatory note attached to the filed copy, and the operative text argues nothing — it declares. What the bill treats as self-evident is that the graves of the MILF's founding chairman and its vice chairman for military affairs are a matter for regional heritage law.

It was filed on the same day as Bill No. 35, the Camp Abubakar memorial, and the two moved through Parliament together under one committee report. Read as a pair, they are the Government of the Day legislating the physical sites of its own movement's history in the first week it could.

What this bill leaves out is the whole of what the enacted act added. BAA 60 sets aside at least 1,000 square meters, creates a management board seating the education, public works and tourism ministries and the Darul-Ifta’, brings the site into the region's recognised tourism and heritage network, and appropriates ₱5 million. None of that is here. The filed copy declares a shrine and hands it to one commission.

The single most consequential addition is Section 5(f) of the act, which seats a representative of each family as a full member of the board. This bill gives the families nothing — not a seat, not consultation, not notice. A measure about two men's graves, drafted without them in it, became a law in which their descendants sit on the body that governs the site. That is the kind of change that happens in committee and leaves no trace in the published record.

One registry note. Parliament's bills index stops this measure at "Approved on Second Reading – 7/23/2024" and records no act. BAA 60 was ratified on 23 July 2024 — the same day. The index is recording the sitting, not the outcome, and a reader trusting it would conclude the bill never became law.