Weathering multiple storms (1)

Cotabato City—In November 2022, the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs released a global assessment of the intersectionality of gender and climate in areas prone to both violent conflicts and extreme weather events associated with climate change. The report summarized findings from different parts of the world characterized by these two adverse phenomena.

The report, “Weathering Two Storms: Gender and Climate in Peace and Security” highlighted the reality of a world seriously challenged by droughts, erratic rainfall, and all extreme weather events associated with climate change due largely to global warming. More importantly, it also described how these “two storms” of gender inequality and disastrous climate change events have exacerbated existing inequalities and governance deficits among impoverished localities and even countries, many of which are in what is considered the “Global South,” a more contemporary version of the label, “Third World.”

But based on a recently completed qualitative study of selected localities in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao that I was privileged to lead, I think that there are more than just two figurative storms that have wreaked havoc on the lives of impoverished and marginalized communities here.

First, the region has been the arena of violent conflicts in the past and in the present. This has led to long and arduous peace negotiations, first between the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Government of the Philippines that led to the signing of the first “Final Peace Agreement” on Sept. 2, 1996, during the presidency of Fidel V. Ramos. This was followed immediately by a series of highly intense peace talks between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front that culminated in the signing of the historic Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (CAB signed in March 2014). The CAB is the framework for the establishment of the BARMM after the ratification of the Bangsamoro Organic Law in 2019.

Past violent conflicts were considered vertical—between the Philippine state and non-state revolutionaries like the MNLF and later, the MILF. Presently, however, the region and its adjoining areas are still threatened with intermittent and deadly violent encounters, this time involving armed groups belonging to powerful political families contesting local political positions (like last year’s barangay elections). Such conflicts are referred to as horizontal ones and are largely fought among rival political families or families harboring long-term grudges based on some family feuds, usually associated with disputed land tenure issues and competition for local resources. However, these communal feuds can escalate to semi-vertical ones, when parties involved in the fighting have access to local state resources, like being members of the Philippine security forces (both Philippine National Police and Philippine Army); and those on the other side also have access to resources generated by armed groups espousing extremist violence, like the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF). The Philippine government classifies the BIFF as a “terrorist, violent extremist group.”

Adding to these security threat groups are families with access to both local political power and financial wherewithal, widely perceived by locals as sourced from nefarious activities ranging from illegal drug trading to pilferage of government coffers—both regional and national.

These add additional sources of insecurity for communities ruled by powerful political families that have entrenched themselves in their respective turfs in the region. Whenever these families flex their political muscles, ordinary constituents in marginalized localities become hostage to the fiery exchanges that ensue whenever the armed groups of these families meet. One such recent violent incident happened on May 4, when a van was fired at in one prominent suburb (Barangay Rosary Heights 7) in Cotabato City, killing a barangay executive and his two-year-old daughter.

Beyond these intractable phenomena of violent political contestations are painful realities of social exclusion, as experienced by some indigenous communities, like the Teduray and Teduray-Lambangian in the two Maguindanao provinces (Del Norte and Del Sur).

Social exclusion is the phenomenon of sidelining members of a minority group within a locality governed by the ruling class among the predominant population. This happens when the way of life, traditions, and belief systems of this minority group are being disregarded in the planning and implementation of development programs or projects of a local government unit.

(More next week)

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