Written January 9, 2015
It’s been a challenge to make a whole picture of everything we’ve learned so far, to locate the core of this conflict. Our first meetings have already completely immersed our group in the landscape of acronyms that populates any description of the conflict in Mindanao, a fact that is immediately apparent upon initial study. AFP, MILF, MNLF, ILAGA, CPP, NPA, BIFF, AARM, MOA-AD, BBL, IP, BLGUs, and the more familiar CSOs, CBOs and of course the inevitable NGOs, just to name a few. And there is a long list of critical dates, events, and agreements, legislation; especially 1972, the time of martial law under Ferdinand Marcos, 1976, the Tripoli Agreement, the 1995 Mining Act, the 1996 peace agreement, the 1997 IPRA or Indigenous People’s Rights Act, the “Total War” of 2000 under Estrada, the 2008 failure of the MOA-AD or Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain, the 2013 siege of Zamboanga.
But all these letters and references are no longer cryptic codes deciphered academically, they are coming alive as real human story and struggle in the mouths of those who have lived with the actors and events that were only real to me before in concept. Already we are learning about the high human costs, hopes, and struggles behind those dates, acronyms, and numbers, and already we are also being told about transformations underway in this region, politically and developmentally, but also within the individuals who are the living breath of its story.
We met with our Catholic Relief Services or CRS host team who gave us a wonderful welcome and introductory presentation. Since then, we have followed an amazing itinerary, we met with development and research organizations, military officers, a former bishop, and visited one “barangay,” or a village where CRS has been actively assisting in development and livelihood projects as well as governance and planning training. It’s very clear from all of these exchanges that this is a time of tremendous change in Mindanao, a time when “development” and “peacebuilding” seems to be in everyone’s vocabulary, including that of the military which, as the officer who hosted us stressed, has been working to transition to a peacetime development role, especially in the fringe communities where the military is the only government service that people have access to. It is a time of transformation in this “Land of Promise,” as it has often been referred to, for it’s rich water, forests, agricultural produce, and mineral resources that too often been the source of contention and ultimately profit for a few and conflcit and poverty for many.
It’s surprising to me that so far everyone, Christian or Muslim, government or military or villager, tells us the same historical story, it’s an uncommon unity in my previous experience of conflicts that involve identity issues. They tell us what we know because we read it but they tell us because they are living it: that IPs or Indigenous Peoples or “Lumad” were here first, that Islam came in the 14th century and Mindanao was a Sultanate, that Christianity came through the Spanish in the 16th century, that there were good relations between the Christians and Muslims or Moros of Mindanao until changes in land use and ownership and traditions of communal ownership gave way to new and frequently contradictory land rights which typically dispossessed both Moros and Lumads of their ancestral territories. We hear little about the US role here, though, and I wonder if that is simply tact.