Two ‘nationalities’ in development work

On Sept. 21, 1972, (almost 50 years today) President Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr. signed Proclamation No. 1081, placing the entire country under martial law. It is considered one of the darkest periods in Philippine history because of the numerous and massive human rights abuses recorded and documented over more than a decade of military rule.

At that time, I had just graduated from two undergraduate courses, one in political science and another in English, and had already started my teaching career in far-off Mangagoy, Surigao del Sur—a place my Boholano parents considered “unknown” or unfamiliar place. (My mother used to work in Davao City as a single parent then, but she has never heard of Mangagoy—she used to ask me, “Mangagoy where?” And, the nagging question of “Why work there?”

But little did I know my Mindanao journey also brought me to other “unfamiliar” places in Mindanao, in the heartland of the Bangsamoro—Cotabato.

It was the height of the martial law years when I started teaching at Notre Dame University in Cotabato City in 1977. I recalled that we needed to be careful with everything we said or did as teachers since there were many restrictions on our basic human right to freedom of speech. But it was a more challenging time for the members of the Moro rebel group then—the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) who were considered “enemies of the state.” Needless to say, it made me more scared of being associated with anyone of them. Marcos Sr. used the “insurgency of Muslim rebels” (the MNLF) as one of the reasons for declaring martial law five years back (1972). But Thomas M. McKenna, in his book “Muslim Rebels and Rulers: Everyday Politics and Armed Separatism in the Southern Philippines,” (University of California Press, 1998) disputes this. The imposition of martial law, according to McKenna, was the ”… proximate cause, not the consequence of an armed Muslim insurgency against the Philippine state, and it led to an unprecedented level of violence and disruption in Cotabato and all of Muslim Mindanao” (see page 159). In other words, the Muslim insurgency was not the trigger for martial law; it was the other way around. The MNLF was strengthened because of martial law.

Fast forward to Sept. 2, 1996. Almost two decades after Marcos Sr.’s martial law years, then President Fidel V. Ramos signed on behalf of the Philippine Government the Final Peace Agreement (FPA) with the MNLF. At that time, the country had already been undergoing democratic reforms that started with Corazon Aquino’s assumption of the presidency after the historic Edsa revolution in 1986.

That crucial year of the signing of the FPA (1996) was also the year when international donor agencies like the United Nations poured millions of US dollars to support the country in its efforts to forge lasting peace in Mindanao. But as we know now, the GRP-MNLF FPA did not put an end to the violence that many communities in Muslim Mindanao experienced on an almost daily basis.

I was part of a team then that supported both capacity-building initiatives and humanitarian assistance to these communities. These were not only in the heart of the then Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (now the BARMM) but also in areas where there were significant numbers of Moro (Bangsamoro) people who were victims and survivors of more than two decades of violent conflict. Looking back, everything we did then was always of two similar categories—they were to be done in a rush since they were classified as “urgent.” A colleague once remarked, “we have to learn to be two ‘nationalities’ in doing this kind of development work: we have to be “Russian,” (a pun on “rush ‘yan”—that has to be done in a rush; and Argentinian, again a play on the Filipino expression, “argent din yan”).

These two “nationalities” made us go here, there, and everywhere—but nowhere near our idealistic goals. We had to learn the hard way of navigating between being pragmatic and idealistic, given the complicated political terrain we all worked in, then and now.

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