COTABATO CITY – Amid escalating tension in the Sabah standoff with Philippine and Malaysian authorities ruling out cordial negotiations with the “invading” followers of the Sulu Sultanate, local peace advocates are turning to Divine intervention as an ultimate source of relief.

This recourse holds true especially to ordinary government workers, who are restricted by law to protest or defy expressed decisions by higher authorities like Malacañang.

Thus, hundreds of rank-and-file personnel of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) held a prayer rally Wednesday afternoon to call for a peaceful resolution to the Sabah crisis involving followers of Sulu Sultan Jamalul Kiram III and Malaysian security forces.

“This is just a peaceful prayer gathering, imploring Divine intervention for a peaceful end to the Sabah crisis where even innocent Filipinos seeking greener pasture in Malaysia are affected,” a clerk in one of the ARMM’s line agencies, who joined the prayer gathering here, explained.

Muslim rally participants performed magrib (dusk) prayer Wednesday at an open area fronting the ARMM’s executive building here, while their Christian counterparts, including local workers of projects funded by foreign donor agencies, said their own Holy Rosary supplications.

The ARMM has political and administrative jurisdiction over the island provinces of Sulu and Tawi-Tawi, home to members of Kiram’s self-styled “royal army” now battling Malaysian forces in various areas of Sabah.

The Sulu Sultanate is reasserting ownership over Sabah, which, from historical accounts, was ceded as a gift to the Sulu royalty in the 16th century by the Sultan of Brunei for having helped quell an uprising that nearly toppled the Bruneian monarch.

ARMM caretaker-Governor Mujiv Hataman had reportedly sent a team of his lieutenants to Tawi-Tawi to help monitor the situation of thousands of Filipinos in Sabah, some of whom are reportedly exiting the island state through the southernmost province.

Merchants in Tawi-Tawi are now complaining of shortage in food supplies owing to the closure of the shipping route linking the provincial capital and island towns to trading ports in Sabah.

About 80 percent of consumer goods sold in the markets of Bongao, capital town of Tawi-Tawi, and surrounding island municipalities come from Sabah, which is inside the Malaysian territory. It is only six hours of boat ride from Tawi-Tawi.

“The effects of the conflict in Sabah are now being felt in parts of ARMM. That is why we need to pray for the speedy peaceful resolution of the strife there,” said an ARMM middle executive who attended the congregational prayer.