Rumblings in an otherwise peaceful city (1)

General Santos City—My family and I have resided in this progressive, peaceful, and economically vibrant city starting in 1998, for several reasons. One was the city’s popularity as a hub of new businesses sprouting up, as a city that has shown significant milestones in the number of investments, especially in the fishing industry. This economic boom has made it a magnet for many in-migrants, as we found out in a previous study I led on in-migration in General Santos in 2015.

For one, the General Santos City Fish Port Complex is considered the country’s second-largest—following the humungous Navotas Fish Port. The complex is the hub of Region XII’s fishing industry that has supported the city’s bustling economy in terms of revenues from its prime seafood product—tuna, thus earning the moniker, the “tuna capital” of the Philippines. (The tuna here though is no longer coming mainly from our part of the sea, the tuna canning factories here source the tuna from as far as Papua New Guinea, and Southeast Asian neighbors like Indonesia).

It was also because the hubby and I were called upon to assume new assignments as academics, as we had been invited by a former schoolmate during our post-graduate years at the University of Hawai’i some four decades ago, as East-West Center (EWC) scholars. At that time, he had been chosen to be the chancellor of the Mindanao State University-General Santos City campus. While students at the UH-Manoa, Honolulu, we agreed that whoever becomes “chancellor” or head of a university in Mindanao will invite other Mindanao-based EWC alumni to help him or her. So when my schoolmate did become chancellor early in 1997, he immediately called us to help him—especially in running the budding MSU-Gensan research and development center.

But for us, the strongest pull factor driving us to make a strategic decision to migrate out of our former residence in Cotabato City was the prospect of living without hearing the sounds of gunfire or rumblings of land conflicts in the city’s adjacent areas in the former one Maguindanao province. Our two children were just in their elementary grades then, and we did not want their childhood years interrupted by the possibility of displacement due to armed conflict. Or so we thought.

Little did we know that just like any urbanizing regional metropolis, General Santos City also had its share of skirmishes, although not in the same magnitude or intensity as that of many conflict-affected localities in the autonomous region then.

One main source of armed violence here in this otherwise peaceful city is land conflict, as it is also the main driver of communal violence in many localities in the Bangsamoro autonomous region.

The name of the city itself is considered by many of its original inhabitants—the indigenous Blaan, as something that reflected the superiority of the new waves of migrants led by a military general—Gen. Paulino Santos Sr. General Santos was tasked by then President Manuel L. Quezon to organize a settlement community of migrants to pave the way for the “economic progress” of this erstwhile backburner community.

General Santos City’s past has been invoked in the present, as descendants of the very first occupants of this place—the Blaans have since been driven up to the mountains in nearby Sarangani province, and have largely been excluded in local governance decision-making. They have been marginalized, along with the pioneering migrants of Magindanawn from Central Mindanao and Cotabato provinces who were driven to find refuge here after they were caught in the wars involving Datu Utto of Maguindanao at the height of the Sultanate of Maguindanao in the early 1900s.

This city used to be called Dadiangas, after a tree species, Ziziphus spina-christi, more popularly known as Christ thorn jujube, a species of thorny tree that used to sprout anywhere in this dry and arid coastal city now called General Santos.

An author from the Asian Institute of Management, Manuel de Vera, has written that indigenous peoples in General Santos City are continually struggling to contest land tenure arrangements that have largely marginalized them in this bustling city. In his paper, “Unpacking the settler-colonial city: Political settlements and land tenure in General Santos City, Philippines, De Vera noted that “[L]and acquisition and land ownership are recurring sources of tension, violence and dispossession in contexts of settler colonialism … the development challenge of General Santos City in the Philippines in dealing with land conflicts arising from land tenurial instruments for enterprise development and competing land claims as a consequence of weak land governance systems.”

(To be concluded)

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