Peace at last in Mindanao! (Maybe)

Michael Mastura, perhaps the keenest Moro mind today, dropped by the shop the other day after the signing of the frame of agreement in Malacañang between the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front of which he is its major hardline ideologue. He was on his way to the airport to meet his wife, the former Lourdes Veloso of Leyte, who, like him, is also a teacher.

I had not seen Mike for sometime and was surprised that his hair is now all white; he had time for a quick lunch and we reminisced about how it was in the Fifties when, as a staff member of the old Manila Times, almost every year I was in Mindanao all the way down the Tawi-Tawi group of islands on to the Turtle Islands, Sandakan and Jesselton in North Borneo which was then managed by the British North Borneo Company.

More than 50 years ago, I realized that the problem with our Moro brothers does not have a military solution. I don’t want to call them Muslim because that would give the conflict a religious connotation when it’s more about land than religion, the challenge of modernity. The conflict was aggravated when it was given this religious color by both sides. I rue the day when Marcos militarized it.

In the ‘50s, I was in Jolo for a month covering the military campaign against a disgruntled Hadji Kamlon who had but a hundred Tausug followers. He was never captured — he had to surrender after a peace agreement with the government was forged. I was with Colonel Mamarinta Lao who headed the Constabulary in tracking down Hadji Kamlon. I was also a house guest of Sultan Ismail Jamalul Kiram in his house in Maimbung Jolo. I went around Lake Lanao, was also a house guest of Datu Samad Mangelen of Buluan when I went crocodile hunting in the Liguasan Marsh. I saw Cotabato being opened up for settlers and Datu Samad told me he liked the Ilokanos best because they were hardworking and did not give him problems. I went around Mindanao and Sulu, absolutely sure of my safety.

But we were just 25 million then with no population pressure, no hunger.

For the Agreement to succeed, the Moros — particularly their leaders, should also probe into themselves. Educated Moros know they cannot dismember this republic; the core leadership of the Moro rebel movement knows this, too. As I told Mike Mastura again, we will hang separately or together.

Many Moros may not consider themselves Filipinos but they behave like most Filipinos in their disdain for manual labor, in their clannishness, in their love for titles and baubles of material status, their loquacity and sky-high yabang.

Even before the framework agreement could be acted upon by Congress, already some Moro “crabs,” as STAR columnist Billy Esposo describes them, have started threatening it with violence. Of these, Nur Misuari is the loudest. He was given that chance as governor of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM); he blew it with his grandiose schemes, his incompetence. Some Moro politicians who have lived all their lives in Manila and not in Mindanao or in their own regions are also opposing it primarily because they have had no participation in this epoch-making event. Why should they when they have long lost their roots in their own homeland?

The reality of Moro society should also sober the tremendously optimistic view that the Moros themselves must contribute to the development of their own regions, particularly where they are dominant, where all the major public positions are held by them. They should be entrepreneurs, builders, economic tyros.

When I first traveled in Jolo in the ‘50s, what struck me was the green fertility of the island; and yet, much of it was jungle. I soon found out the reason why. The Tausugs are lazy, compared to us Ilokanos, Cebuanos and Batanguenos where our land is infertile but made productive by our industry.

Those areas in Mindanao which are developed as compared to the areas where the Moros are dominant is not a matter of religious distinction. The Moros must understand this. I have watched towns like Tacurong and Marbel burgeon from the forests of the ‘50s. It is not because they were Christians. They developed because they were inhabited by immigrants who could have been Muslims, Buddhists or Hindus. Cut off from the traditional support and clan systems, they have to work very hard in the new land to be independent and prosperous.

We can see these in the Moros themselves who have left Mindanao for towns in Luzon and the Visayas, in Manila where so many of them have settled.

A military response to the Moro problem would have resolved it a long time ago if the Armed Forces were unleashed in an all-out war against them. Like the Tamil rebellion in Sri Lanka that estered for over two decades; it was finally defeated by an all-out offensive by the Sri Lankan Army. But as the Economist pointed out last week, it would have resulted in the death of thousands and left behind a festering wound that would take generations to heal.

Or as one cynical Filipino politician pointed out sometime back during the martial law years, all the government had to do was set up a wall around the Moro territories, and then they would kill one another in their traditional clan wars.

President Aquino has fulfilled what his mother had tried to do. His visit to Japan the other year to meet with the MILF leaders was criticized by some as a surrender of the Republic. And those critics may well be right, but as events have shown, that initiative has paid off and that horrible mistake which President Gloria Arroyo made in cozying up to the Ampatuans also showed how hunger for power in itself could destroy not just a politician but, in a larger sense, the nation.

It is very difficult for us to recognize this, but perhaps one of our greatest problems is our heavy hangover with America. The Americans have built in us a desire to pattern our institutions after theirs, to be cast in their image when we are so different from them in history, in social structure, in political development.

We should build our institutions consonant with our native attributes, recognize we are so many ethnic groups and regions that are hobbled by our faults and fired by our virtues. Authority should devolve from a strongly centralized government to the regions and let the regional leaders be responsible for their mistakes — and yes, glory, too, in their successes.

It is with this thought that the autonomy of the Moros should be recognized.

For this achievement, Filipinos owe the President gratitude and endless hosannas.

But back to Michael Mastura. I had hoped way, way back that after his term as congressman, he would join the Supreme Court. He deserved this.

I had long fulminated against the datu system which had barred the ascension of bright young Moros. According to Mastura, as more and more educated Moros assume positions of authority, the datu system is being eroded. As I told him, they should seek more positions in government so that they would have more voice in government itself. Why is there no party that includes Mastura or any Moro leader as senatorial candidate in the election next year? Mike said the Senate is out of the question; he does not have the millions to spend for such an elective position.

All this being said, let us not forget that our Moros are not the real minority.

While we must rejoice at the prospects of lasting peace in Mindanao, let us not forget that the term “minority” is meant to describe those inhabitants of a nation who have the least access to justice.

First, the Moros will always remain a minority for a long, long time, like the Irish in Northern Ireland in Britain, the Catalans and the Basques in Spain, the Uighurs and Tibetans in China. And as minorities, they will continue to be noisy and whining until, perhaps, by some great cultural and intellectual change, they assume real power, like Obama — a Negro in the United States. Who would ever think, back in the 1950s, when I first visited America, that a Negro would become President? Perhaps it will be the same way with us when a Moro becomes president of this Republic.

Even the Chinese, though no more than one percent of the population, cannot be called a minority if we define minority in terms of economic power — they control almost 70 percent of the economic wealth of this country.

Our real minority is made up of our oppressed ethnics: the Mangyans whose lands were stolen from them, the Dumagats of the Sierra Madre who are deprived not only of medical care but of food — and yes, the millions of hungry Filipinos in the slums of our cities and in our rural areas who now eat only once a day. These are the minorities and will remain so for a long, long time until they wake up and realize that, in their hunger, they command.