Category Archives: Myshel

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?

Written January 11, 2015

We have traveled, inside the villages now, deeper inside the voices of this place and the material facts from which these voices emerge.

Animals tied to the roadside, goat and cows, this majestic horned caribao, an ancient waterbuffalo imported to the island a long long time ago.  Pulling carts or standing, roped through the nose, huge dark liquid eyes, living, laboring, dying mute.

What do they do with the carcass when these strong silent beasts drop dead in the field?

So many flowers, little gardens.  Blooms I don’t know, pale purples, extravagant fushias.

Hungry dogs everywhere.  I catch moments of tenderness, two dogs touching their noses together, a mother cow licking her calf.

Little houses, they seem to be woven more than built, woven like baskets in contrasting geometric patterns.  Some have what seems to be tiger grass on the roof, others are corrugated steel.  Occasionally there are structures of cement.  Ocasionally there is a large gated home, an SUV in the driveway.  Often there are churches, many denominations.  Less often, there are mosques.

It is hot.  There are mosquitos.  Some of us are taking malaria pills, some of us are not and this is discussed.  There is always the search for a bathroom.  For toilet paper.  For soap.  Our guide from CRS travels with us and we ask question after question. But everyone greets us with kindness, as we step over thresholds of culture and class and tradition and beliefs, sometimes clumsily, and everyone answers our questions.  And the lines, the lines we have been conditioned to know as absolute, between civilians, combatants, religions, idenities, they begin to shift.  Roles are often surprisingly interchangeable here, roles are simultaneous.

On the division between Moro tribes and the new Bangasamoro Basic Law.  “Catch the chicken before you divide it.”  On the necessity of living together as Lumad, Christian, and Muslim in a Peace Zone, “It takes three stones to support the cooking pot.”

Every severe expression I see from the window of the van we travel in changes with recognition of being looked at into a smile, a smile that is as warm as welcome to a familiar place, to a place you might belong.  We see more children now.  We see more elderly.  Shy old women, one hand masking smiles of broken teeth.

Palm and cocunut, banana, fields of rice and corn and sugarcane.  Wooden shacks along the riversides.  Small shops along the road, glass coke bottles filled with a red liquid, diesel, to buy fuel for a single trip.

We see many on motorbikes, 2, 3, 5 people… sometimes carrying produce, bundles, once a guitar.

And what about the killing?  Mostly they tell us it didn’t happen here.  It happened in the next barangay.  It happened but it happened somewhere else.  But maybe it was here.  When here was somewhere else.

They tell us we walked along the road and we had nothing.  In one place, in one time, a mother gave birth in an evacuation center and the military protected us from “them”, in another place and another time four children starved to death in the evacuation center and  we went back to our village and the military was “them.”  There was no food, we were all rebels to them. We went back and declared peace because it was the only door to life.  One man calls it “primal courage.”  The courage that chooses any risk over death.

We walked along the road again and again.  We walked between the bullets.  There are landmines out there, they tell us.  “Where?” we ask. “The way you came.”

I have only seen one cemetary.  Large aboveground tombs, with these touchingly flimsy wooden shelters above them, to shade them, to protect the ones we can no longer protect, shelters as fragile as we are.

Written January 9, 2015

Everyone tells us that at the core, this is a conflict about land. That it was the waves of Christian “Settlers” who came from other parts of the Philippines in the 1930-50 and the resultant radical change in the demographics (which transformed the Moro population from a 70% majority to a minority) that lead to the modern conflict, the rise of the armed Moro group, the Black Shirts, and the Christian paramilitary, the ILAGA, then the fighting between the Moro National Liberation Front or MNLF and the Armed Forces of the Philippines or AFP, or with the MILF, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front or the communist NPA, the New People’s Army. Millions of villagers have been caught in the middle of these clashes. This displacement and the terrible experiences in the evacuation centers, the violence and especially the hunger, is a lasting scar on the people here. In the barangay they mention crimes of all kinds, rape, torture, burnt homes, stolen livestock, stolen lands. One Moro man tells me that they used to go to shelter from the military sometimes in the municipal building, saying that at the time they thought “If they kill is, they will kill us in their own structure.”

But we are also told that time is over. Interreligious and interethnic bias and prejudice is referred to but carefully, as a thing of the past, or as something “over there,” elsewhere. This is a time of high-level negotiations, between the Government and the MILF, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a splinter group from the MNLF inspired by international Islamization, as well as the communist NDF, or National Democratic Front, but also of ground level civil society efforts, peace zones, peace education, dialogue, “culture of peace” training. After so many years of war this sustained and permeating activity seems remarkable. In a conflict that has wounded almost everyone in Mindanao in some way, how is almost everyone now equally engaged, at some level, in building peace? The military officer told us that his transformation came from the realization that the armed forces were not fighting an external enemy but that “We are fighting our own.” But one man in the barangay told us that what lead his community to work for peace was simple: the alternative was only more of the same. “We saw it was endless,” he said.

Still it also a time not just of peacebuilding and development but of what one Mindanaoan called “aggressive development” that damages and disenfranchises poor communities, of development program and projects that are incomplete or insufficient. We learn about the devastation in some communities from mining and the small scale gold mining efforts of the poor, children using mercury and cyanide, making just enough from what they find to eat for the day. And back in Davao a child approached us, tiny hand outstretched for money.

We didn’t give him anything.

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.

Written on January 5, 2015

Arrived in Davao and as Anoop has noted, the first song we heard in this city was “Material Girl” by Madonna. Zarina and Anoop and I shared a taxi to the hotel. The driver asked for 500 pesos, we gave him 150, only about three dollars and thrity cents USD, which was still probably more than we needed to pay. We entered the cab and the radio was playing “We are living in a material world…” as we drove through the narrow streets of the city while scrawny dogs hurried out of the street before us. While Davao is probably the most developed city in Mindanao, the poverty here is easily seen.

I sat in the front. The driver had a crucifix hanging prominently from his rearview mirror. As Anoop mentioned, he asked us if we are missionaries and I laughed a little to myself as I answered “No,” because of the incongruous nature of that question and my own background, and Madonna’s voice echoing in the cab, but of course that is a serious issue on Mindanao and not a laughing matter. Given the history here, the role of missionaries, conversions, and invasions into the native culture and lands, to come to Mindanao is a political act in a deep and complicated context where the question of who you are, and how you identify yourself is a serious one.

A solider stopped the taxi as we left the airport and asked for our last names. I gave mine which he seemed to consider momentarily. The taxi driver then said that we were Americans and then the solider impatiently waved us through. I’m not at all sure what that was about but I remembered crossing in to Israel and being asked by a young female soldier behind a computer screen what my Father’s name was. I told her and she looked at her screen and nodded. She asked then what his Father’s name was, and again, I told her and she looked at her screen and nodded. She then asked for my Great Grandfather’s name, and I answered, “I don’t know. Do you?!” She looked back at her screen and smiled. Who knows what was really on it, maybe a vast intelligence database of family trees, maybe youtube videos of cats. But I wondered here in Davao as we left the airport if it was at all related, if they wanted to identify our religion or ethnicity before allowing us to pass.

So we come to Mindanao not as missionaries but Americans (although Zarina, of course is actually from Kazakhstan and Anoop was born in India). I am now acutely aware of how much I don’t know about the period of American colonialism in the Philippines, which is an embarrassing thing to realize having arrived here. I know of course that the US period had a significant impact on the evolution of the conflict in Mindanao, in particular through population movements and discriminatory land laws but so much is still unclear. I’m not entirely clear on the current level of military involvement and the work on economic development and I find myself wondering which US corporations are here and how American and other foreign business interests might have and might still be unintentionally (or intentionally) exacerbating both the poverty and the violence here. “Material World” after all.

My sense of the Mindanao conflict and the identity issues at play here before I left was very much shaped by the analyses of external actors, but it was the descriptions of those for whom Mindanao is home, who are working inside conflict communities as a community member, such as Father Bert Layson, and the collaborations of local villages with the military and armed resistance groups to create zones of peace, that most inspired me to come. I am excited for the beginning of our journey here and really looking forward to meeting the staff of Catholic Relief Services (CRS) who are so generously hosting us here. It will be my first opportunity to meet those who have accepted the challenge of working to build peace alongside the people of Mindanao in the villages and hear from them first hand what they believe the real issues and challenges are and what brought them to do this work.