Discovery and deepening

What had started out as a mere trip to “escort” Colombian women through Mindanao turned out to be a journey of discovery and deepening, an eye-opener to the challenges of peace, and an exercise in viewing reality through the eyes of the “other.”

An initial realization was that the eyes of the world are upon us. Beyond the usual stakeholders such as the government, the military, the MILF, the Bangsamoro and the civilian populace in Mindanao, it seems our neighbors and even far-away friends are similarly invested in the peaceful outcome of the negotiations.

Over lunch at the compound of the International Monitoring Team in Cotabato City, Cynthia Petrigh, who is French but was assigned to the IMT by the European Union, spoke of her work monitoring the implementation of the comprehensive agreement on respect for human rights and international humanitarian law. Her work is complicated, she said, by the fact that many of the victims are not even aware of violations of their rights, and are thus unable or unwilling to report to authorities. Thus part of her work is going around giving seminars and workshops on human rights.

Cynthia works closely with the Civilian Protection Component (CPC) of the TMT’s work, which has been entrusted mainly to four NGOs in Mindanao: Mindanao People’s Caucus, Nonviolent Peaceforce, MOGOP and MinHRAC. The IMT itself is composed of representatives of six countries: Malaysia, Brunei, Libya, Norway, Japan and the EU.

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Hosting us for dinner on our first day were Mike and Lulu Mastura, old friends and scintillating sources of Maguindanao lore and historical tidbits. Their daughter Mariam was part of the Philippine team that visited Colombia last August. Mike is an historian and former congressman, and now sits as a member of the MILF panel in the peace negotiations. Lulu meantime has established a women’s college and weaving project to address the women’s hunger for education and a source of income.

The next day, when we visited the Bangsamoro Research Center, Mike lit into a column in which I had written about the MILF’s demand for historical “vindication.” “We don’t need vindication,” he fumed, “we know our history and we have our own narrative.” What the Bangsamoro demands, he said, is respect for and recognition of their identity as a people with a proud history of having never been colonized, as well as for “self-determination,” which I took to mean being free to decide their own local policies without being subjected to the politics and dictates of “imperial Manila.”

Lulu herself suggests a formula. Fresh from a visit to Barcelona, capital of the Catalan state in Spain, she said that when you ask someone from Barcelona about nationality and citizenship, he or she will reply: “Nationality, Catalan; citizenship, Spanish.” “Why can’t the national government of the Philippines do the same?” she asks. What the Bangsamoro people want, adds Mike, is not “dismemberment” of the country (as if that were possible), but the recognition of a territory within Mindanao where Moro culture and religion hold sway, with control over their own resources and income. Of course, the dispute over territory, some of which belongs to Christians and to indigenous peoples, and including governance and resources, is still a thorny problem that needs threshing out.

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Still in Cotabato, we hold a breakfast dialogue with Bangsamoro women, and the air is filled with the heat of dissatisfaction and discord.

“Women’s voices are not being heard,” says Bai Abubakar Cabaybay, one of two women consultants of the MILF panel. “We ask the government to listen to Bangsamoro women, to know what it is we want.” But don’t Filipino Muslims already have representatives in Congress? I ask, and some of them are women?

“Muslims don’t belong to the majority in Congress,” replies Bai Abubakar. “Their voices are not heeded.” She observes with some irony: “They (government) don’t want us, but they don’t want us to be free.”

In fact, she added, “the national government is endangering people (in conflict areas) by offering solutions that we do not need. They just assume that it is what we need, all we ask is that they understand and respect us.”

But that has not stopped other Bangsamoro women from searching for solutions while peace is still being hammered out. For instance, there is an NGO working with widows and orphans on skills training for livelihood development, including entrepreneurship, food processing, marketing and packaging of goods. With help from the Japanese development agency JICA, they have already trained more than 300 Bangsamoro women.

A young Bangsamoro woman spoke of the “rampant violations (of human rights) during displacement, including rape and domestic violence. But, she noted, “the culture of silence is always there,” adding that in the face of the “shame and ridicule” that follows a disclosure of sexual violence, “the women choose to be silent.”

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One of the biggest problems they face, the women say, is “the impression that all Muslims are terrorists.” “How do we live an Islamic way of life without rousing suspicions that we are engaged in terrorism?” they asked.

Bai Abubakar, an educator, wondered why they are not allowed to say publicly that they will offer “Islamic education” in their schools, and instead have to couch it in terms like “values education.”

One culprit, they pointed out, are the media, especially Manila-based media that have a tendency to paint the Bangsamoro as “terrorists and bandits.” In the wake of the troubles in Basilan and Zamboanga Sibugay, this tendency has in fact even gotten worse. How do we erase the prejudices born of fear and ignorance?