With the innumerable issues confronting Mindanao, and with everybody holding a placard or a conference invitation to bolster each of these, sometimes it can be quite confusing and exasperating which way to turn that you just would rather go home and read a book or cook. So when a friend drags you to a peace play, a forum, or some other cultural event of the day, and especially when there’s nothing there that amuses you, you just can’t help but feel like bolting: I should be doing something else!
Months back, I was asked to document a dialogue of sorts gathering a group of peace advocates bleeding with classic what-is-to-be-done earnestness. Peace and support for the Bangsamoro struggle, everybody was saying, though certainly you could sense that some were just as sick as you are with all this peace work and tri-people unity talk. Some even started betting on the dollar earnings they should be making had they chosen to work abroad. Peace work entails a lot of sacrifice, it’s about putting one’s life on the line, everyone agreed. So when one of the advocates from the Alliance of Progressive Labor stood up to talk labor issues, I was kind of surprised. Like: hey, isn’t he outta line.
He was saying that they at the APL believe that indeed we should stop the war. He was asking, but what is the way? What should be our strategy in winning peace in Mindanao? Good for us, he said, who are all here and know all the issues, but how about the others? Suppose not all of us understand deeply enough, the issues, suppose the majority don’t understand and hesitate to support MOA-AD or the Bangsamoro struggle, what do we do? And he was not talking about Piñol or Mar Roxas and the military or the business companies with vested economic interests in Liguasan Marsh and adjoining territories, he was talking about the laboring Christian majority: those workers in the plantations in these lands under contest. Please understand that they too just have their own bias, he said, and especially those of us from the national capital region do not understand the issues here and that our primary concern is for the labor sector.
I wished he said more. I wish he said his bias was for the industry sector, not for landed interests, which does not belong with labor, but to the feudal Moro lords, who are not without stakes in the export industry, or to the Christian politicos, who are not without feudal stakes in the local politics of this Land of Promise.
Remember how labor unionizing has become terribly hard around these days, he said, though his issues are more immediate, something to do with the pragmatics and logistics of labor organizing and the difficulty, or ridiculousness, of having to talk labor rights with armed islamist combatants like the MILF. Some of his confederates in the labor movement, he went on, are thinking na kapag Moro na ang nagdala, what will happen to the labor agenda in these lands? How do we ensure that our labor agenda is protected once it is the MILF now or whichever new ethnic-nationalist entity that is in charge of developing lands here in Mindanao?
There were quite a number of women in the conference and I was hoping one would get up, too, follow the argument and say, How about women’s rights, how about us? Suppose we do not put our stakes in these rido-infested feudal turfs? Suppose we just want work or just want to get away even if we have to work as domestic helps abroad? Or suppose we stay, how do we know that our rights will be protected too?
One Lumad woman did speak up for the tribe and asked, suppose we do not want to be part of the Bangsamoro Juridical Entity? Why does the MILF include the Lumads as part of the Bangsamoro people when we are not? To which one of the Moro participants replied “divisive”, which made me laugh in my seat. The specter of division had at one time or another made of feminism a scarecrow in many an ethnic and nationalist struggle. Here we go again!
But that’s one good thing about dialogues, at least some questions got fielded at all. Enough to make one hope that even as our lives’ daily emergencies now mainly consist of getting the bills paid and running to the store for a can of milk and getting held up with Hail Marys and Glory Bes at Felcris or Gaisano, from the rougher edges of the refineries that is our minds, all is not lost really, not yet, anyway, to the truisms and speeches of the day.
