In bondage

FINALLY, AT long last, it is out, hopefully, in the sun. In black and white. This deep, dark secret that everybody knows but nobody talks about, except in whispers.

Until Loretta Ann Rosales, chair of the Commission on Human Rights, talked about it to media recently (Inquirer, 4/2/11), hardly any government official even mentioned human rights abuses in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), as though such abuses happened only in Metro Manila, when in fact these are more rampant, more violent and more cruel in the provinces, wherever the warlords reign, and certainly more so, in the ARMM.

Speaking in Cotabato City early this month, Rosales said that abuses by powerful political clans in the ARMM were “keeping the region’s human rights record dismal.” But she did admit that many of the cases of human rights abuses were “undocumented.”

I thought so. Because had even a few of these instances of violence, brutality, injustice, oppression, deprivation of the life and liberty of the powerless and their pursuit of a peaceful, decent life been documented, Rosales would have found the adjective “dismal” dismally inadequate.

And even the statement of Brigadier General Ariel Bernardo, deputy commander of the Army’s Sixth Infantry Division, who was cited in the same story as saying that the military was not slowing down in its campaign to deprive these powerful political clans of their “sources of power—guns and goons,” would actually sound almost like a palliative against the immensity and complexity of this scourge of our times.

Because the effort, though laudable, has come woefully too late. This power derived from guns and goons has been so entrenched for so long, and so encompassing that it has become a collective state of mind, the kind that benumbs the constituency of those holding such power into resignation, even acceptance, that this is simply the order of things that they must live by, thankful only that they are allowed to live at all.

It is not only slavery, it is bondage—of the body, but more reprehensibly, of the mind and the spirit.

While it is easy enough to point to the Ampatuan clan and the Maguindanao massacre as its very incarnation and the consequence thereof, the devastating effect on the community where this order of things operates is far more pervasive and debilitating, so that it is no consequence that where powerful political clans and warlords rule, such provinces wallow in poverty and stagnation.

It is no coincidence that the country’s poorest provinces are in the ARMM.

And the province of Maguindanao under the rule of the Ampatuans is the most obvious—although not the only—example of this shamefully depressing contradiction, as featured in GNTV’s “Investigative Documentaries” hosted by Malou Mangahas.

After showing footage of the now familiar pink mansions of the Ampatuans standing side by side with the hovels of their constituents, Malou takes us through frame after frame of searing, blood-boiling images of dilapidated schools and classrooms in various stages of decay and disrepair, showing, as no words can, how the pillage will affect even the future, specifically the future of the children of this province who have been deprived of their basic right to education.

Not a single schoolhouse, not a single classroom, was built during the reign of the Ampatuans, Malou narrates in the documentary which was aired last Thursday, the same week that reports of a staggering P1 billion unaccounted for in ARMM funds, with P5 billion “misspent” during the incumbency of now detained former ARMM governor Zaldy Ampatuan, surfaced to add injury to shock.

This is what the “struggle” of the Moro National Liberation Front has amounted to.

The litany of grievances spanning centuries and enunciated in the narrative of freedom and self-determination, paid for with the blood of tens of thousands of innocent lives, was betrayed as nothing loftier than the greed for power and money, the greatest hoax yet to be inflicted on the Moro peoples, the Muslims of Mindanao.

But blame should not be laid entirely on their false prophets and fake leaders because this would not have come to pass without the collusion and even manipulation of national officials such as Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who made it possible for the Ampatuans to rise to the pinnacle of power and to rule with impunity.

No, it is not just a matter of depriving political clans of their “sources of power—guns and goons.” It is a matter of depriving them of the source of their guns and goons, which is our taxes, which is our money, the money that they steal from us to acquire their guns, without which they will have no goons.

Much more than this, it is a matter of depriving them of the power to steal, which means not electing them into office, which is easier said than done, which is why postponing the elections in the ARMM so as to begin instituting reforms in the electoral process in the region should be the most urgent bill that the Senate should tackle.

One more electoral term is too long a time. It has been long enough.

No nation can claim to be truly free while a part of it is still in bondage.

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