A New Era Dawns in the (Southern) Philippines

Below is my latest blog for The New Internationalist:

On October 15, under the scorching heat of the noonday sun, thousands of Muslim men and women gathered outside Malacanang, the presidential palace, to bear witness to the signing of a historic peace pact between the Philippine government and Muslim rebels.

The Muslim crowd had gathered the night before to start the so-called vigil for peace. They didn’t mind waiting for hours on end. It was a small price to pay to see a day they hoped for but didn’t think would ever happen in this lifetime.

The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) rebel group had been waging a four-decade insurgency before deciding to take the road to peace.

On October 15, at three in the afternoon, the Philippine government and the 11,000-strong MILF signed a preliminary peace pact aimed at ending decades of conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced countless men, women and children.

It is the beginning of an era in the Muslim-dominated Southern Philippines, a region so rich in resources that it can feed the whole country but is ironically so mired in deep poverty because of decades of fighting. Reports say that 150,000 people lost their lives in the 1970s because of the government's all-out war against rebels.

The agreement marks the first step toward a final pact that grants Muslims in Mindanao that autonomy they have long been fighting for. In exchange, the rebels agreed to lay down their arms and end the violence that not only crippled development in the region but also made the island so poor.

Both parties recognized that extending the proverbial olive branch is just the first step in achieving lasting peace. Hard work and difficult challenges lie ahead, officials from both camps said.

But as in anything good and significant, taking the first step is an important and bold move.

The final peace agreement hopes to be sealed before the end of President Benigno Aquino III’s six-year administration in 2016.

The initial peace pact signed on Monday is a product of 15 years of intense negotiations and debates facilitated by Malaysia who shares a border with the Southern Philippines.

President Aquino, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and MILF rebel chairman Al Haj Murad Ebrahim witnessed Monday’s signing, along with hundreds of people who have been waiting for the landmark deal.

In a speech before the signing, Ebrahim said he didn’t think he’d ever set foot on Malacanang.

“I must confess that this is the first time in my life to step on the grounds of Malacanang. It is in the context that I come in peace,” said Ebrahim who was given a red-carpet welcome.

Malaysian Prime Minister Razak shared the story of an evacuee who nearly lost hopes for peace.

“I was not even married when this conflict began. Then we had children. We had to evacuate again. Now we have three grandchildren and nothing has changed,” Razak quoted the evacuee as saying.

“Now, something has changed,” Razak said in his speech.

President Aquino said the peace agreement now gives the people the right to peaceful coexistence.

It is an agreement, he said, that would now give every child in Mindanao or elsewhere in the Philippines, "the opportunity to shape his own destiny."

Ebrahim handed President Aquino a miniature version of a traditional Muslim gong.

“This is the sound of peace,” he said as he banged on the gong.

It is my hope that the sound of peace echoes not just in the jam-packed hall of Malacanang but also in the minds of each and everyone involved in the whole process; in the hearts of the tens of thousands who have lived in conflict, toward their homes in far-flung villages in Mindanao; in barren hills-turned-mass graves for the dead; in the island’s strife-torn schools and homes; and in abandoned hospitals there.

May the sound never be drowned again by the deafening exchange of bullets or homemade bombs or by wails of families burying their dead but only by the laughter of children playing endlessly under the sun, or a glistening crescent moon. 

Photo: A young Moro rebel standing in front of a sign board at an MILF outpost. By Mark Navales under a CC Licence.

Filipino IDPs: Struggling to Rebuild Their Lives

Below is a story I wrote in 2010 as an entry to the Think 3 global blogging competition organized by the European Journalism Centre. I remember this now as the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front signed today a historic peace agreement that hopes to end decades of conflict in Mindanao. I remember Jun, his wife Angel and Aida and her children whom I met two years ago. They are just among the thousands caught in the middle of the conflict.

I hope that with the agreement, they will finally be able to rebuild their lives. That there will be no more lost generations. Just peace. And homes that have been rebuilt.

Filipino IDPs: Struggling to rebuild their lives

Published 15th May 2010 - 12 comments - 5443 views - ShareThis

(text and photos by the author)

DATU PIANG, Philippines – Jun comes out from the darkness with a charcoaled kettle on one hand. He squints, eyes blinded by the glare of the yellow sun. His four-year-old-daughter peeps outside to look for her daddy.  Strands of curly brown hair cover her big round eyes. Jun makes a few steps to an open fire to boil some drinking water. 

People start coming out of this huge enclave beneath Datu Gumbay Piang Central Elementary School, a dilapidated two-storey wooden building.

This space is temporary shelter to dozens of internally displaced persons (IDPs) here in the province of Maguindanao in the Southern Philippine island of Mindanao.  Caught in the middle of decades-long conflict between government troops and rebels, the IDPs had to leave their homes in far-flung villages.

When they moved to the school compound, they slept inside makeshift tents set up on the vacant front-yard but authorities transferred them to the huge area underneath the school in preparation for the national elections held last May 10. In the Philippines, the voting and counting of ballots are done in public and private schools around the country. 

This underworld is a shadowed space.  Small amounts of light seep through the slabs of wooden panels that serve as walls. Some makeshift doors are too small. To get inside, you have to bend through these manholes, like in the movie Alice in Wonderland. 

There are no tables and beds, everything improvised from broken classroom chairs and tables. They sleep on tattered mats laid on the dry earth, sharing the space with scrap and junked materials the school no longer needs. 

The stench of mud, trash and spoiled food pervades in the air. There is no toilet, just patches of dug holes on the ground. No clean water, no electricity. 

Jun, his wife Angel and their three children are among the IDPs who fled from the interior villages. 

According to the United Nations World Food Programme, in a March 14, 2010 article published by Mindanews, a Mindanao-based online news cooperative and information center, there are 320,000 people who remain displaced in Maguindanao and neighboring areas as of September last year. 

Two years have passed but the thunderous sounds of guns and flying howitzers still echo in their ears.  The pain of leaving their homes still haunts them. They remember it like a loved one's death anniversary. 

“It happened on August 17, 2008,” says Angel. 

Each passing day, they struggle to rebuild their lives.

Angel now works with Medecins Sans Frontieres, an international medical and humanitarian aid organization working mostly in conflict areas including the Philippines.

She helps distribute medicines during mission work. She earns P300 for a day of work. 

“That’s a big help for my family,” she says.

On most days, Jun waits for Angel to come home while looking after the children. A regular job is hard to come by for him because he did not finish elementary school. 

But on lucky days, he says, non-government organizations offer them “food for work.” He points to a distant concrete house he helped build some months ago in return for some cash for his family’s survival.

There are other IDPs here, the spaces divided for each family by whatever clothing and wooden panels they can find.

In another area are Aida and her children. Today, she is busy weaving fans out of the native silay or palm leaves. The whole space she occupies is covered by heaps of colored leaves, some untouched, some unfinished. 

She is preparing to complete a dozen of these fans to sell to the market for P110. It’s a long process. The leaves are laid out on the sun for days. These are then dabbed with different colors to create designs straight of her dreams.  

The dyed fans are then left under the heat for another long process of drying. 

From the sun-dried leaves, there emerges--like magic--a kaleidoscope of yellow, purple and green colored fans.

This helps Aida and her kids survive on most days. 

When there is nothing to sell, she puts her children to sleep with their stomachs grumbling and empty.

But for the IDPs here, giving up isn’t an option. 

Slowly, one by one, piece by piece, difficult as it may be, they struggle to rebuild their lives harshly disrupted by war, as tedious and as careful as the way they weave those little intricately-colored fans for a few pesos a day.