Gardeners reflect on the centuries-old conflict in southern Philippines
Scaruffi
In a summary listing of “Wars and Genocides of the 20th Century” made by author Piero Scaruffi one comes across the following numbers of deaths incurred:
1969-79:Idi Amin, Uganda (300,000) 1969-02:IRA – Northern Ireland’s civil war (2,000)
1969- : Philippines vs. the communist New People’s Army (40,000)
1972- : Philippines vs. Muslim separatists (150,000)
1972-79:Rhodesia/Zimbabwe’s civil war (30,000)
An update of the deaths in the Philippines due to those two wars – of insurgency and separatism – may easily double. Using conservative estimates, the figure for separatism-related deaths and casualties may actually reach 300,000 or more, in the land-sea-and-air war since the late seventies, not counting the number of internally displaced persons.
How did all this come about?
When a great Filipino author once made a joke from Philippine history, with hopes that we might better understand our present condition, he played with the numbers 400, 40, and 4.
He said that as a people we were almost 400 years in a Convent, or under Spain; 40 years in Hollywood, or under the USA; and 4 years in a Concentration Camp, or under Japan.
Joaquin
No wonder, Nick Joaquin said, that what defines Filipino most is confusion. To be Filipino is to be culturally confused because, in his words, “imagine being the illegitimate daughter of three mothers!” Nick Joaquin meant, of course, Mother Spain of the Convent, Mother America of Hollywood, and almost-Mother Japan of the Concentration Camp. I did not know whether he was trying to make us laugh or cry.
To be confused is one thing; to be amnesiac, however, is something else, maybe worse. It was not long ago that neither we nor anyone else called us Filipinos, for there was as yet no Philippines.
I know you cannot, for even a moment, imagine a time when there was no Philippines, but there was. We were around or our ancestors were – but nobody called us Filipinos, not then.
And what do we remember of those pre-Filipino years? Almost nothing, most gardeners agree – nothing significant.
But for many Muslim youth, and older folk, daily events tend to be reminders of many things. As they listen to the radio, or read the newspapers – a body count does not stop: how many wounded, how many killed, how many forced out of their homes and fields, how many in the refugee and social welfare camps – all happening in Muslim Mindanao RIGHT NOW. This does sound like a “Believe it or not!” line, doesn’t it?
But just listen to the US Embassy publicly warning on June 15, 2012 of the risks of travel “in particular to the Sulu Archipelago and the island of Mindanao.” The Warning “reflects continuing threats in those areas due to terrorist and insurgent activities.”
They mention “particularly the Sulu Archipelago, due to the high threat of kidnapping of international travelers and violence linked to insurgency and terrorism there.”
They say “groups have clashed sporadically with the Philippine Armed Forces, particularly in rural areas, and terrorist groups have kidnapped international travelers and carried out bombings that have resulted in injuries and deaths. In Cotabato City, and in the Maguindanao and Sultan Kudarat provinces, the government maintains a state of emergency that compels a greater police presence in those areas.” This is not past tense, mind you, but June 15, 2012.
Satria Candao, a teenage college girl, said it for many Muslim youth in a recent school oration: “To be young and Muslim in our country is quite a challenge these days. Given the longest civil war in memory, can the Philippines fully accept us as Filipinos? To some of my friends, that question may not even be as hard as the next, which is: can we ever consider ourselves Filipinos at all? Can we be the youth of two nations in one state, two cultures and two faiths?”
Gardeners wanted to understand what this young Muslim girl meant.
Moros, Indios, Filipinos
The Spaniards called our ancestors “Moros”. This was not a new name. It was taken from the ancient Mauri or Mauritania, and applied on the Berbers of North Africa to those who came and conquered Spain. So, the name was not limited to a distinct nationality but to religious faithful transcending geography, race and time.
In fact, the first to be called Moros in the Philippines were not the Islamized inhabitants of Mindanao and Sulu but the people of Manila and neighboring towns who were already Muslims.
“Thus, you see,” said Satria, “that we Moros were so-called as a result of animosity and warfare and our resistance to foreign pressure, while Indio or, later, Filipino signified allegiance or subservience to Spain. Thus, if Filipino referred to a people conquered and owned by Felipe, a Catholic monarch halfway across the world, Moro referred to people who were determined to own themselves.”
In sum, Filipino signified “vanquished” by colonialism and Moro meant “unconquered” and anti-colonial, generally speaking.
(Ah, that is a seed hard to swallow. The gardeners’ advice: plant it somewhere.)
The undeniable fact is this: before the coming of the Spaniards, as Jose Rizal never tired of saying, our Moro ancestors had already perfected the art of governance, and already had trade and diplomatic relations with the other states of Southeast Asia, Arabia, India, Japan, and China. And they fought the Spanish invaders less out of nationalism than out of loyalty to Islam that they perceived to be under threat from advancing imperial Catholicism.
Muslims were forbidden to open hostilities: “Fight for the sake of Allah those that fight against you, but do not attack them first. Allah does not love the aggressors.” (2:191) The word “Islam” comes from the same Arabic root word that denotes “peace”. Thus the Koran regards war as an abnormal state of affairs opposed to God’s will. Only wars of defense were justified. But such struggles for justice – the jihad – were not only justified but also blessed. They always believed that “the fire of Hell shall not touch the legs of him who shall be covered with the dust of battle in the road of God.”
The Spaniards did invade us and stayed a few hundred years but never really acquired Moro land either by conquest, purchase or any other means. The next colonizer, however, the American forces, fared differently. Superior in deceit, the Americans also had superior firepower.
One time they followed a Scorched-Earth Policy. At another time it would be a Policy of Attraction. They quickly understood how to calibrate physical massacres of the Moros with benign, attractive policies of “national integration”.
The so-called “Bates Treaty” was one such tactic, taking off from American wars against and “treaty-making” with American Indians.
This Treaty established Moro neutrality in the Philippine-American War, and allowed the Americans to establish a few outposts in Moroland while nominally recognizing the autonomy of sultanates and such. Interestingly enough, even much later, an exchange of letters between President Bush (the second) of the USA and Chairman Salamat Hashem of the MILF incredibly renewed the validity of the Bates Treaty, not without interesting consequences both for the present MILF concerns for autonomy and US concerns for their most precious SLOCs or sea lanes of communications which they are guarding not with invasion forces but the more PR-sensitive visiting forces.
Before the turn of the 20th century, 98% of all the lands in Mindanao and Sulu belonged to the Moros. American-style legalized land grabbing changed this picture fast. An American law was promulgated, CA No.141, declaring all Moro ancestral landholdings as public lands. By a stroke of the pen, Moros became landless, deprived of their ancestral lands.
The Moro was allowed to apply for only four hectares while a Christian was entitled to own up to 24 hectares, and a corporation, even those not wholly owned by non-Moros, was permitted to get 1,024 hectares.
It was then inevitable that the valiant Moro would fight again, and fight again they did – this time for independence from the Philippine state in which they had no future. All-out war ensued between the Moro secessionist fronts and the Philippine government.
“We the Muslim youth,” Satria said, “can never forget that in our lifetime and in that of our forebears, hundreds of thousands have been killed and millions dislocated because of the Moro wars. At root is the fact that so many of us just continue to close our eyes and deny the existence of a Moro nation afraid that such an acknowledgment may undermine the unitary character of the Philippine state.”
The gardener suggests, however, that the deeper view of unity is simply to recognize that the Philippines is a nation of nations. There exist in our country two distinct nationalities with their particular patriotism, the mainly Christian Filipinos and the predominantly Muslim Moros.
“We the Muslim youth are not confused,” said Satria. “We can see this all too clearly. Seeing this, we can only hope that peace be given a chance by the older folks in government and outside it. We share the hope we saw among the faces of those ready to witness the historic signing of a MOA on Ancestral Domain a few years ago.”
The official representatives of the United States, the European Union, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and others were so expectant and eager that those of us who had hitherto been at each other in land, sea and air wars would now take pen and ink and sign a piece of paper that would put an end to all that violence and cruelty and death in favor of peace, prosperity and greater life.
Administration of President BS Aquino
The current administration has been pursuing a series of peace talks for the cessation of hostilities. President Aquino and MILF Chair Al Haj Murad Ibrahim had a longish meeting in Tokyo, Japan, which was lauded on both sides.
Nonetheless the armed conflict and the bombings have not stopped at all. But, quite fortunately, neither has the peace talking. Both parties have now announced that they have agreed to recognize the Bangsamoro identity and the legitimate grievance of the Bangsamoro and both of them will work for the creation of a new autonomous political entity in place of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. So, it’s back to where they left off in the previous administration but with a different vocabulary.
For instance, instead of the earlier BJE or Bangsamoro Juridical Entity they now mouth a new word, namely, “the sub state.” Of course they don’t have the final peace draft yet. The devil is in the detail.
To paraphrase Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru of India, they are running twenty times faster just to stay in place.
FINIS.
Charles Avila – The Gardener
The Gardener’s Tales