It would be fun to write this (long overdue) post in a very political sense… but I won’t.
A little over six years ago, I first set foot at Mindanao. It was the 2002 National Secondary Schools Press Conference held at General Santos City, where I was with the Cordillera delegation. After six long years, three poignant things were tattooed on my mind (yes, in a very Tamia sense) about Mindanao:
- As we were from the Cordilleras, the host delegation assumed that we do not eat a lot of fish. While we were raring for a bite of sinugba (roasted tuna cheeks), the school we were billeted in served us sinigang na baboy. It was quite intriguing that in Muslim Mindanao, you would get served pork.
- The motorcade to the city was very exciting and exhilarating; the people of GenSan are very gracious and accommodating, and would return your pa-showbiz waves with friendly, appreciative, welcoming gestures. Then someone greeted us in very fluent Ilocano. It was quite surprising that in Mindanao, you’re bound to see a neighborhood of people who trace their ancestry to a place so close to home: Narvacan, Ilocos Sur.
- A couple of weeks and a few trophies (not to mention the sight of the school Principal and the head teachers who bought themselves tickets to GenSan), Gaisano Mall was bombed. Gaisano was the place where I bought two of my Rammstein albums and my GenSan souvenir shirts. Had we stayed a week longer, we would have been victims of the attack.
I sometimes chuckle inwardly at the mere mention of the word “MILF” (for obvious reasons), but the conflict in Mindanao is something we should take seriously. On the one hand, the conflict in Mindanao is a demand for autonomy and self-determination. On the other hand, it’s an insurrection that steps on the very lines of sovereignity, Constitutionality, and the demand for peace in the Philippines’ center of conflict.
Yet I can’t help it… I just spent a total of five days in Mindanao. I can be a mouthpiece for peace, but I can never be a mouthpiece for Mindanao.
I sometimes wish that I could convince myself that other options for Mindanao exist. But so far, Mindanao has been feeding itself on options. Options that Mindanao exists not because it’s “Filipino,” but losing it to secession or to autonomy is inimical to the development of the rest of the Philippines. Mindanao is the country’s Shangri-La, its Florentino Ariza; it is the place that we welcome as part of our own, but we never really do.
Was a historical lapse in judgment to include Mindanao into the Philippines? Maybe: way before these 7,107 islands were incorporated into a thing we now call “The Philippines,” there were already statehoods in Mindanao. Was it a political error to make a Mindanao agenda? Maybe: many politicians speak for Mindanao, even if they’re only from Mindanao by virtue of a residence certificate. A genuine aspiration and dream for peace, as The President puts it, is coming from a house – in Luzon – called Malacanang Palace.
Yet isn’t that what’s really going on lately? All the talk and the analysis are coming from those at the center; the peripheries remain silent, perhaps even silenced. After all, someone else is making the decisions. People from some place else.
Maybe because everyone, as of late, has become a mouthpiece for Mindanao; that there is a certain admissible, permissible, accepted, enforced imperative that if Mindanao is silenced – or not heard out – then someone else must do the speaking for its people. Patriotic?
That, I think, is tragic.
Tags: Mindanao
i do not think it is a demand for autonomy or self determination. there exist a framework for that— however broken called, “ARMM”. There is no justifiable “insurrection.” MILF is a bandit group that does not represent all of Mindanao or even a majority of people there. No one is dragging Muslims in chains. No one is subjugating them. They are as free as any man in this country, no matter how imperfect that freedom is.
On March 4, 1885, Abraham Lincoln in his inaugural address said, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
maybe we need to go through the crucible— the fighting.
[...] have to disagree with Cocoy’s comment on an opinion piece I made for Filipino Voices, that war is the crucible by which our relationship with the Bangsamoro [...]