The Government of the Republic of the Philippines has at last signed a Peace Pact with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).
Can – will – both sides deliver on the promised requirements for Peace soon enough?
Instead of focusing on the current event, the Gardener has chosen to go back a bit in time…to understand.
The biblical language of Peace
In biblical language, peace is much more than the simple absence of war: it represents the fullness of life (cf. Mal 2:5), the effect of God’s blessing on his people (Num 6:26).
Peace produces fruitfulness (Is 48:19), well-being (cf. Is 48:18), prosperity (cf. Is 54:13), absence of fear (cf. Lev 26:6) and profound joy (cf. Pr 12:20).
Jesus made peace the seal of his spiritual testament: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you” (Jn 14:27). And the ministry he entrusted to his disciples was always to begin with the proclamation of peace: “Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace be to this house! ‘ (Lk 10:5; cf. Rom 1:7). He had earlier proclaimed at the mountain: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God” (Mt 5:9).)
On the other hand, the failure of peace is war. In the words of recent Popes: war is “the failure of all true humanism”, and is “always a defeat for humanity.” Hence, Paul VI said it loudest at the United Nations on 4 October 1965, “never again some peoples against others, never again! … No more war, no more war!”
Not in a manger
It was not always like this. In the Philippines Christianity was not born like a babe in a manger, with angels on high singing the songs of peace. No, rather, it was literally cannon-born. Magellan fired his cannons for demonstration purposes, and 800 Filipinos wanted to be baptized. The Christian cross and the Spanish sword became indistinguishable in both form and functional aim to conquer new lands for the Catholic monarchs of Spain.
In the mid-sixteenth century, Catholic Spaniards and Muslims who had battled each other for nearly 800 years on the plains of Spain now came face-to-face again – in the Philippine islands. The Catholic Spaniards still hated Muslims for having ruled Spain too long, and the Muslims did not forget the massacre of more than three million of their co-religionists when the Christians recaptured Spain in 1492.
And so they fought again – here, in this archipelago, not for a day or two but for a few hundred years and more, or to be exact, for 320 long years – from 1578 to 1898. The best Spanish generals were pitted against the Moros and had to admit that these Muslims were far from easy pickings.
The Spaniards called their new-found foes “Moros”. This was not a new name. It was taken from the ancient Mauri or Mauritania, applied on the Berbers of North Africa to those who came and conquered Spain. So, the name was not limited to a group of people or distinct nationality but to religious adherents transcending geography, race and time. Thus, 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.
In the speculative realm, it is said that if the Catholic Spaniards did not come at the time they did, if they had been delayed by only 50 years, this archipelago would have three or four kingdoms today: one in Manila, one in Sulu, and two in Mindanao. Most of the people, as in nearby Brunei, Malaysia and Indonesia, would have become Muslims.
As it was, Luzon and the Visayas were not Islamized enough to withstand the Christian conquistador. But Sulu and Mindanao were different for they already had centralized governments patterned after the Arabian model and, later, on the Turkish example. At one time, a great Moro sultan like Maguindanao Sultan Dipatuan Muhammad Qudarat was strongly organized enough to collect tributes from Basilan, parts of the Visayas, and from as far as the Coast of Borneo. European powers and even the USA before her conquest of the Philippines dropped anchor at Sulu and Maguindanao ports, signed friendly treaties with the Moro rulers as they did with other sovereign states. This is all a matter of record.
What’s in a name?
The Moros were so-called as a result of animosity and warfare and their 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 half-way across the world, Moro referred to a people who were determined to own themselves. In sum, Filipino signified “vanquished” by colonialism and Moro meant “unconquered” and anti-colonial, generally speaking.
“But even before the coming of the Spaniards,” wrote Salah Jubair, “the Moro had already perfected the art of governance, a well-set code of laws, songs and poetry, such as the Darangan, Indarapatra,and Solaiman and the adat and customary laws. He already had trade and diplomatic relations with the other states of Southeast Asia, Arabia, India, Japan, and China. Sulu and Maguindanao were already emporia while America was still a wilderness.”
The Moros, however, fought less out of nationalism than out of loyalty to Islam that was under threat from advancing imperial Catholicism. As such fighters they firmly saw with the eyes of faith that “in the last day wounds of those who have been wounded in the Way of Allah will be evident, and will drip with blood, but their smell will be perfume of musk. 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.”
They never forgot what their Holy Qur’an said in Chapter 111, Verse 103, to those who fight in the Way of Allah: “Think not of those who are slain in God’s way as dead. Nay, they live finding their sustenance in the presence of their Lord; they rejoice in the bounty of God.” And so, down the decades and the centuries, there was no lack of volunteers of conscience with a strong will to fight – and to die –striving in the Way of Allah.
From the very beginning, the Moros were aware that defensive war was the beginning of defeat; so, they brought the war over into enemy territory in the Visayas and Luzon and netted tens of thousands of prisoners, jewelry, cannons and other valuable materials all year round – actions that designed the physical face of towns all over the archipelago where we now find remains of watch towers and balauartes and stone churches and forts and cottas and little else besides – concrete reminders of a long defensive history of nervousness and deep forebodings. Yes, for better or for worse, the Philippines looks the way it does because of the Moro wars.
In response, Spain passed a Royal Decree encouraging private individuals to organize mercenary expeditions against the Moros. The incentives were big: all enlistees were exempted from paying tribute and entitled to four-fifths of the booty. Criminals who enlisted were given unconditional pardon. The long list of Spanish invasions into Mindanao and Sulu showed the participation of thousands of Indios serving their colonial masters in wreaking havoc in Moroland. In the end, however, one could only say that Spain came and stayed a few hundred years but never really acquired Moroland either by conquest, purchase or any other means. In the words of O.D.Corpuz, “Spain never had control, government, or possession of the Moro territory.” Her sovereignty was never imposed except inside the confines of her garrisons and fortifications.
American calibration
The next colonizer, however, the American forces, fared differently. Superior in deceit, the Americans also had superior fire-power, and employed superior integrative tactics. They deceptively made “friends” with the Moros when they were still tied up with the Filipino-American War in the North. After the war, they immediately moved to extend American control and sovereignty over Moroland by all means and at all cost.
The massacres perpetrated by the Americans here top the savagery they exhibited in their genocidal wars against the Native American Indians. One time they followed a Scorched-Earth Policy. At another time it would be a Policy of Attraction. Sultans, Datus and other Chiefs would be flattered and praised, given doles and donations and masterfully utilized to neutralize resistance till they were finally won over to the American side. This learning animal called the American imperialist quickly understood how to calibrate physical massacres of the Moros, and there were unbelievably many as in their own massacres of the Indians at home, with benign, attractive policies of “national integration”.
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. Early on, various Public Land Acts were passed to dispossess the Moros of the landholdings they had occupied since time immemorial. And, of course, with the passage of unjust laws came an imperial insistence on everyone following the “rule of law.” For instance, registration acts ensured the Moros could be deprived of their lands because they never heard nor knew how to go about registering lands of their ancestors or lands everybody knew belonged to them but now, because unregistered, were deemed public lands.
Then laws were passed promoting the creation of agricultural colonies by Filipino migrants from the North in so-called public lands of Mindanao and Sulu. One law awarded each Filipino settler with a 16-hectare lot but the Moro was permitted to own only eight hectares.
The worst part came on November 7, 1936 under nationalists President Manuel L. Quezon and Senator Claro M.Recto. A law was promulgated, C.A. 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.
American companies were almost unhampered in their operations, even acquiring mineral rights, timber rights and agricultural lands to the thousands of hectares beyond constitutional limits. They were matched only by home-grown oligarchs who not only enriched themselves from the wealth of Mindanao but also contributed directly to the sufferings and deprivations of the local people.
Thus it happened that Moros who owned all the land in Mindanao and Sulu on the eve of colonization now owned less than 17 percent of it in remote and infertile mountain areas which lacked marketing and infrastructure facilities. Over 80 percent of them had now become landless tenants. [TO BE CONTINUED]