An Act Declaring May 2 of Every Year as Battle of Bayang Day in Commemoration of the Heroic Sacrifices Made by the Sultan of Bayang and His People Against the Atrocities Committed by the American Expeditionary Forces

Four sections. This declares 2 May of every year the "Battle of Bayang Day", in commemoration of the heroic sacrifices made there.

The Ministry of Public Order and Safety, the Bangsamoro Commission on the Preservation of Cultural Heritage and other concerned agencies ensure its proper observance. The heritage commission, with the education ministry, monitors the annual activities prepared and implemented by regional government agencies, schools, colleges and universities. The Act takes effect 15 days after publication.

It declares no holiday, creates no body and appropriates nothing.

The Battle of Bayang was fought in May 1902 in Lanao del Sur, when Maranao defenders resisted United States forces during the American campaign in Mindanao. It is among the earliest set-piece engagements of Moro resistance to American rule, and it ended in heavy Maranao losses.

Commemorating it is a claim about when the Bangsamoro struggle began — well before the movements of the 1970s, and against a colonial power rather than the Philippine state.

The day already exists in law, and this bill does not know it. BAA 39, the Bangsamoro Legal Holidays Act, was enacted in July 2023 and lists Bayang on 2 May among the region's special *working* holidays — commemorated with funded activities, with nobody getting the day off. That act came from Bill No. 192, filed by the Government of the Day in June 2023. This bill, also a Government of the Day measure, was filed in September 2022 and is still listed at Second Reading, Committee Stage.

So the region's own cabinet filed 2 measures about the same date 9 months apart, and the later one — which handled the whole calendar rather than a single day — overtook the earlier. That is the most economical illustration in the registry of what the absence of a coordinating mechanism inside Parliament costs: not a policy dispute, just 2 bills doing the same thing with no visible awareness of each other.

What this bill would have added, had it moved first, is the monitoring. BAA 39 requires ministries, agencies and local governments to allocate funds and hold commemorative activities for working holidays; this bill goes further by naming the heritage commission and the education ministry as the bodies that monitor what schools and agencies actually do. A commemoration nobody checks tends to become a memorandum, and that is the gap the enacted act leaves.

The choice of 1902 is the substantive point and worth stating plainly. The region's commemorative legislation otherwise centres on the modern conflict — the memorial marker at Camp Abubakar, the burial site of the MILF founders, the Mujahideen memorial wall, the Day of Shuhada for the 1968 Jabidah killings. Bayang reaches back 2 generations further, to resistance against the Americans, and locates the struggle in a longer history than the peace agreement's own timeline.