A survivor talks of peace

When Espie Enriquez-Hupida heard news of the killings of at least 19 soldiers in a village called Al-Barka in Basilan, she felt a chill run down her spine. Three years ago, together with an NGO colleague, she was kidnapped by men identified as Abu Sayyaf and brought to a remote barangay that was the group’s stronghold. That was Al-Barka, a place, said Espie, that is “very close to my heart.”

In all, Espie was held for 45 days, while her friend was held for another 45 days.

Now, after “three years of freedom,” Espie says she and other women who have been kidnapped and released by the Abu Sayyaf and other “KFR” or kidnap-for-ransom groups want to return to Basilan and see what they can do to help the villagers they lived with, especially the women, the “wives” of the Abu Sayyaf fighters, who looked after them.

But the three years since her release, says Espie, have taught her so many more lessons and insights about the conflicts that beset the country, and the road to peace that all Filipinos must walk down and follow.

“Peace is more than an agenda,” said Espie while addressing a “Women’s Solidarity for Peace” forum organized by various peace groups and held at the Jovito Salonga Hall of the Bantayog ng mga Bayani. Peace demands, she said, answers to the question: “What is your agenda for yourself so that you can be transformed?”

Women can build a critical mass to push peace forward and utilize what she calls “that energy of peace.”

But before that can happen, adds Espie, “we need to give a story, a face to the women’s peace agenda.”

Her women friends in Al-Barka, recalls Espie, spoke of their frustrations with the men’s preoccupation with conflict and arms-bearing. “The men talk of nothing but war,” the women complained, but pay little attention to the impact of war on even their own lives and their families’.

“It is the women and children who plant cassava and other crops so everybody can eat,” says  Espie. “But when the men start fighting, they have to evacuate and abandon their crops, which means they have nothing to eat.”

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If only all the ransom money that the kidnappers receive is used to buy food, said Espie, “food would flood the area.” But food and nutrition are very low in the fighters’ priority. Instead, when the money arrives “there is an immediate bidding for arms.”

As a survivor, she says, “I don’t want to sow hatred. I don’t want to spread sorrow because of my story.”

But, she reminds us, “We cannot commit to peace in our comfort zones.” Instead, she adds, one would “need to let go of your own perspectives, to enter those of others.”

“Build a relationship” even with those who are perceived as our “enemies,” or the “other,” urges Espie. Because in the areas held by rebels or bandit groups, news and perceptions are distorted, twisted to conform to ideology or religion, and assumptions we in Metro Manila or even in the rest of Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao take for granted are not all applicable or relevant.

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Another speaker during the event, peace adviser Ging Deles, observed that despite the heated coverage of the Al-Barka and Zamboanga Sibugay incidents, leading to sharp criticism of P-Noy’s peace policy and the performance of the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process, “the debate has been a good opportunity to come to an understanding” of what we as a people want when we call for “all-out war,” or proclaim that we demand a “just and lasting peace.”

“Don’t fall into stereotypes,” Deles warned her audience. Not all women are for peace, she noted, and in fact it was under a woman president that the latest escalation of conflict took place. And not all men want to make war, she added. The presidents most committed to peace, she said, was one, a former military man (Ramos) and another, her present boss President Aquino. “It is so clear in his mind that war is not the option,” she observed.

Another stereotype that needs overhauling, she added, was that “it is the military that wants war, and civilians who want peace.” On the contrary, she said, it is military personnel, especially those on the ground, who most fervently wish for peace because it is they whose lives are on the line. Indeed, said Deles, “the most strident voices calling for war have been women, broadcasters especially.”

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The “Solidarity for Peace” also called for other women taking part to share their thoughts and feelings.

Froilyn Mendoza, speaking on behalf of indigenous women, said she felt “very jealous of women in other parts of the country” who have time and leisure to concern themselves with things like cooperatives, gender and development, and opportunities to be found in the Magna Carta of Women when women like her in Mindanao, “have to worry about our day-to-day survival, and how to survive the next conflict.”

Becky Lozada, who has worked in the last decade for the ratification of the Rome Statute (ratified by the Philippines last Nov. 1), expressed hope that government and civil society would work together more closely to monitor the observance of the rules set by the agreement on International Humanitarian Law.

Yasmin Busran Lao, speaking on the situation of women afflicted by the war in Mindanao, spoke of the need to raise the profile of women and children in the whole debate over peace and conflict. “We need to be more creative” to let these voices be heard, she observed.

As the afternoon winded down, the women present gathered in a circle, linked by scarves symbolizing hearts ablaze with love for peace, dancing and swaying to the sounds of a gong, all calling for peace, in ourselves and with our neighbors, in this country and the whole world.