October 1972 - October 21, 1972 (Saturday)

October 21, 1972 (Saturday)

• The Moro National Liberation Front began the first of many clashes with the government of the Philippines, with an attack on a police station in Marawi City and on Mindanao State University.
• Siad Barre, the President of Somalia, implemented a program to have the Somali language written using a standardized Latin alphabet in place of Arabic orthography, and, as part of a nationwide campaign against illiteracy, to make Somali the only official language for government and education. The last governmental changes of orthography had been in the Soviet Union in 1940 (from Latin script to Cyrillic for the Tajik language), and in Turkey in 1928 (from Arabic to Latin script for the Turkish language).
• Born: Masakazu Morita, Japanese voice actor