For our final visit to our tireless hosts at Catholic Relief Services in Davao, near the end of our course, each student came up with a short presentation including three key points and a final question relevant to peacebuilding or an aspect of peace building in Mindanano. The below is from my own presentation on January 20th:
I came here to study peacebuilders in Mindanao and how, after living in such a protracted conflict they find it within themselves to make that commitment to work for peace. I think because of my background studying the Israeli Palestinian conflict I expected to hear a lot of identity-based narratives and I did hear some, but mostly I heard that there was no other option. As one man who had been in and out of evacuation centers told us, “We have no choice now but to hope.”
So while we did see that this is a dynamic time of transformation in Mindanao and learned about some really inspiring peacebuilders and peacebuilding projects and programs we also saw and heard a lot about the effects of deep systemic poverty. This poverty seemed to be most extreme for the IP community as the most consistently marginalized of the tri-people communities. But it also seemed like maybe development efforts followed the same patterns of historical disparities, that the most successful and the largest number of projects and programs were in the Christian and Settler communities, and the least were in the Lumad communities; we often heard simply that they “cannot be reached.”
We also heard a lot of fascinating discussion about peace and development. Some told us that peacebuilding must come first, like Lory Obal in Columbio, or that peacebuilding and development are inextricable and have to come together, like Father Bert Layson in Pikit. But I think more often we heard that development has to come first. And sometimes we heard that development IS peace, one man in Tulanan stood up and told us that peace is a full belly and Baba Mike of IMAN (Integrated Mindanaoans Association for Natives) said that the way to help young men who might become or have been combatants to work for peace is first to give them livelihoods. And that makes sense when basic needs are not being met and yet it seems that all of those development gains become meaningless when the violence returns and there’s a new cycle of displacement and again deepened poverty and a new generation of combatants.
There is obviously a strong relationship between poverty and armed groups. We’ve heard from PAMAS that the poverty level among the Lumad was about 70% and that the NPA is also about 70% Lumad. And the reason given for this majority presence in the NPA was, that young Lumad men who have nothing to eat will join the NPA not because of the ideology but for a bag of rice. We also heard a story from the Bishop about a Christian he recognized who participated in an Abu Sayyaf kidnapping, where the possibility of ransom money superseded not just ideology but religious identity.
But of course fighting with arms is not the only form of violence. Galtung’s theory of structural violence includes systemic impoverishment as a form of violence, and institutionalized disparities in resource ownership, extraction, and allocation fits that concept. So I’m wondering now if the source of both the armed violence and the systemic poverty in Mindanao is the land conflict and there are still these top down development strategies and laws in place that privilege agribusiness, mining, and land use rights of outside interests, and if existing disparities between Christian, Moro, and Lumad are reflected and maybe even entrenched in the way development is conceived of and deployed, can these often wonderful bottom up community level development projects really have a scalable impact on the root causes of poverty and violence in Mindanao or will continued conflict here be inevitable?