BLOGSHOT: One on the IDP

There’s no fool-proof listing and validation system to protect aid agencies from those they seek to save and serve. Outsider’s help can only do so little, and come too late.


Almost ninety percent of the evacuees in Maguindanao and Cotabato have either returned to their places of origins or have resettled. Or so representatives from the local government units in these provinces say.

That should be good news because among other things, that means that they will be able to go back to tilling their lands, to say nothing about being able to cast their votes in the forthcoming national elections next month.

Does that also mean that there is no reason for emergency relief organizations to linger in conflict-affected areas and there is no reason for welfare groups in Mindanao to continue to exist?

That's rather so impertinent a joke. There is the better alternative, which is to evolve. In the first place, isn’t this big racket called the civil society movement a product of adaptation, of self-preservation aka evolution? Help is always good and welcome we have to keep it coming.

Because disasters never leave anyway, and that’s one wonder with backwoods politics. And in Maguindanao you can bet that it didn’t leave with Army men being redetailed to Apari and other far-flung islands in the north. My sense of it is, if the massacre of 58 people in Shariff Aguak underwrites anything aid-related, it’s the necessity of good governance projects in the ARMM. That should be enough to keep us busy in the peacedev circuit in the coming years, if conflict-related issues and climate-change related damages will not.


Days back, I was talking with Sammy, a Moro cadre I used to know. The last time I saw him he was in some peace caravan that sent thousands of that rebellious mass called Bangsamoro people on to the roadsides in support of the aborted MOA-AD between the Philippine government and the MILF. Now he looks a deflated bag of resentments, and not just against the traitor government which cannot do better than all it can, but against about everyone, including me.

He doesn’t like all this pacifism, he said, all this developmentalism, this welfarism. It misleads the Bangsamoro people, giving them wrong notions, such as that their salvation is in the hands of other people, or that people in government are there to give them the political solution they needed to solve their problems, or that relief agencies and kaffir-run development organizations will provide for them.

Nice take that. Except that we were the both of us part of that which we speak against, no matter how we leak on the sides.

Going around evacuation centers in the thick of armed hostilities between government forces and the MILF was depressing. Going around relocation centers on the heels of emergency response and relief work is even more depressing.

In Batulawan, Pikit, in Cotabato Province, you won’t see any remains of the evacuation sites as the roadside areas are now being plowed and prepared for planting. There is even no signage indicating that Oxfam’s disinfectant WaSH project (for Water Sanitation and Hygiene) was ever there except for the four latrines standing clear white and shining at a distance from the road, a pair at each place. The roofs and walls have been ripped down or taken away, probably to make a good wall or roofing, a way to get back at what had been done to houses that survived the bombing and burning.

Right after the July 2009 declarations of SOMO and SOMA (suspensions of military operations and military activities of government and MILF forces, respectively), barangay leaders monitoring the demographics in the evacuation centers claim that male population suddenly rose. By male population they mean those in the above 18 age range. At the height of the armed hostilities, they say, only the elderly men and the very young boys went with the women and the children to hand themselves over to relief workers, the implication being able-bodied men must have enlisted to the armed defense of the aborted MOA-AD, the agreement delineating Bangsamoro ancestral domain.

Aid and emergency relief workers also like to volunteer the information that when they were distributing medicines, they had the impression that at certain times, everyone was complaining about the same symptoms and that even old men and women who otherwise were not ill, would be telling them they had fevers and chills and cough and cold and all sorts of ailments that had nothing to do with aging bones and joints or worn out lungs, which they took to mean that the epidemic of fevers was elsewhere. Some days, they say, they had good sense enough to feel generous and let the evacuees collect all the bottles and boxes of medicines they could get from them even if they knew they were being conned, but most of the time, they just felt helpless, captive to their supposed beneficiaries’ demands.

Relief distribution is never easy, true, especially so when the aid workers were Christians who could not even understand any Muslim dialect and have so little sympathy for that war which made of some people “IDPs”. Well, later, thanks to affirmative action aka good governance, aid agencies made sure that they hire more Muslim professionals to mediate, interpret and manage or co-mage for them relief projects, but of course that did not stop the perceived cheating. When you only get to the evacuation centers during relief distribution conveyed by chromed vehicles and you don’t even spend the night there, you wouldn’t know the next thing about the labyrinth of blood relations and their interlocking directorate of needs and mutual assistance. There’s no fool-proof listing and validation system to protect aid agencies from those they seek to save and serve. Outsider’s help can only do so little, come too late, as those with more will always get twice or thrice as much than the neediest and the poorest IDP family.

Whenever I can, I never ask those with less than I have questions like So what do you need how may I help you. Two decades of aid work can only do so much harm to people so that the best and the worst of them must have smartened up enough to make them prepare a long list long for you to go over. From frying pan to mosquito nets to farm tools to houses and chicken heads and goat heads and draft animals and seed capital for livelihood. That much you owe them for they know that they are the politically and commercially viable IDPs, that f---ing coinage that drew many a bleeding heart and many a fly. Like this 27-year old Grade school dropout who owns a motorbike that ferries NGO peace builders with receipts to wield in and out of so-called interior villages. My, his family is collecting little houses in every relocation site! His mother has one in Datu Piang in Maguindanao, he himself has another house to his name in Rangaban in Midsayap, North Cotabato, and my guess is, his father (who is the smarter ass between the two of them) has also another house in Bakayawan in Pikit, North Cotabato, where the family originally hails from.

“Kawawa talaga ang mga IDPs Maam,” he keeps on repeating to me. I wish I could tell him I have no pity for IDPs like him and actually want to yank him off the driver’s seat and run away with his bike, if I didn’t know that their own idea of rebellion happened to have evolved to just that: to take as much as they could from the kaffirs playing peace makers in their accursed country, the same kaffirs who made good money and good salaried work out of their fucking IDP status.

Relief money, says a municipal disaster coordinating council officer, is sliced in half at the top, in the provincial level, divided again in the municipal level and down to the barangay level so that by the time it gets to the evacuees, so little is left to be distributed among them. One barangay captain who got so little that he had to make do with occupying a vacated ceasefire monitoring bunkhouse was so furious at all the anomalies that he proposed a stop to all relief work. I pity him. He seems helpless against all the cheating and stealing in all places, and his own barangay “intruded” with “false residents” and false shelter claimants who don’t stay in one place, busy as they are with chasing after where the newest Food for Work project is.

I am exaggerating, of course. Because these men aren’t really false victims. In fact, their houses had been burned down or dismantled, their roofs and wallings converted into Army quarters, the floor and boards made into firewood. They are legitimate IDPs, for sure, and if they keep on moving around staking shelter and land claims here and there, it’s probably because none of these are permanent rights. It’s a way to get around the mercy mission of aid agencies.

What they do is so much like the ancestral domain racket that some Lumad leaders have made good business of: recruiting their relatives now resettled in towns or working as wage earners in plantation economies or sugar factories in other provinces to pad the populations of ancestral domain claimants in their turfs by rewarding them with a portion of the ancestral domain claim territory, never mind if the claims will just be forever just that: bloody claims.

All this sucks, Sammy claims. It is misleading. It draws the Bangsamoro people away from the path of struggle.

Of course it misleads. And that’s the idea. To mislead and to misable.