BLOGSHOT: CHRISTIAN SETTLER, NOT MORO

No one has ever asked me, how I feel as a woman living in Mindanao, land of promise and land of contesting and contestable land and territorial claims, being presumably chauvinist and privileged, which very likely I am, but I will take liberty anyway in asking and answering my own questions.

It got me, when I saw at Facebook that so many of my friends recently joined Bangsamoro and it felt like, This girl, does she know what Bangsamoro country is? That modern chic of an artist, doesn’t she have some shame in her? She has strong atheistic tendencies, a prejudiced shithead, and has certain notions about the tribes and the mujahideens, how could she???

I know it is I who ought to be ashamed for saying this. Being what I am, conscientious objector, NGO egghead and loyal compatriot of Mindanao Republic, that in the last three decades have been gathering its citizens around the so-called tri-people unity banner, I more than any of them, ought to be supporting Bangsamoro nationhood as duty and conscience demand of me. It is the best expression of recognition and respect for their struggle for self-determination, as they say in the church and NGO circuit, it is the best manifestation of Christian solidarity with our brothers and sisters in the aforming Bangsamoro Republik.

But I don’t even feel loyal to the Philippine Republic. I didn’t really truly thoroughly feel this country was ever mine or owns me as its own beloved daughter, how much more the emerging nation Bangsamoro Republik or the Lumad Republik, for that matter.

Not being overly dramatic about my national or pseudo-national identity, dear reader. I have gone through all that since the day I was born, you know, singing Bayang Magiliw and reciting Panatang Makabayan, and there must have been a time in my life when I would have willingly died for what I then thought was country and liberty, but  right now I just feel like your cynic fag of a dyke and would rather listen to Edith Piaf’s Non, je ne regrette rien, je ne regretted rien, or Cheryl Crowe’s rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah than wax nationalistic – it be democratic or Islamic, pardon me.

I did have my moments, though, when I did think of it: How or where am I to stand as a woman, Christian settler, liberal, nationalist, feminist, lesbian, and whathaveyou. It began way back in the 1980s when we were in this Moro NGO engaged in human rights work and self-determination advocacy and some of our Moro friends and colleagues would accuse us of being Christians and as such should not be there intercepting solidarity and funding that should be going directly to Bangsamoro and Muslim organizations, and by God I would say they were partly right, except that. Except that while we were in that organization we had this pledge that we would work there for what we then called PDOES (the poor, the deprived, the oppressed, the exploited and struggling), which at the time happened to be Moro, Christian and Indigenous people.  That was the first time when I really felt acutely the conflict, the tension, or in our wonderful vocabulary then, the contradiction. And some of my Moro and Christian colleagues would explain to me that this contradiction is ethno-religious, although the ones that I believed most and served me most was those who said that no, it’s class-based.

I believe that I have grown overly conscious since then and have had many spurs of rebellions against both these Christian- and Moro-informed configurations of the conflict and had at one time or another demanded that it’s about time we make a stand, too, what we think about all this Bangsamoro self-determination campaign we so much uphold and support, because then as now, we Christian crusaders were a little unwilling to say our piece. To say that one is a Christian and be proud of it, too, beside all the sins of the Inquisition, was to be on the wrong side of history, to be politically wrong, in the terms of the day. So when the Moro nationalists (represented then by the Moro National Liberation Front and later by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, even by the now defunct Moro Revolutionary Organization) issued manifestoes that said Christians can be part of the struggling and emerging Bangsamoro Republic too by taking on the “Christian Moro” citizenhood, we stood by that. Or at least did not speak up against it. To do so was tantamount to betraying and undermining the much besieged and the greatly outnumbered terribly disadvantaged and already much divided Moro struggle. 

I mean, we don’t have to be too etymological about it, only a sense of history or a little of it will do. Didn’t they say they are Moros because their brave forefathers resisted the Spanish colonizers and we are Christians because our forefathers were wimps and cowards who vowed to the sword and the cross of the frigging friars and were conscripts to the anti-Moro wars, too? Now if later we rebelled against this historical participation and against these hundred years of Catholicism and chose liberation theology or tri-people unity and other such more popular and more politically attuned religions, does that immediately make us eligible for Bangsamoro citizenship?

I know of friends whose grandfathers and uncles were pioneers and they have stories of hard work behind them enough for you to believe that the now productive lands really belong to no one else but them. And if you so much as broached the notion that these lands could have been ancestral lands of Lumads or Moros, they would jump to the nearest Ilaga detachment, if there existed one, to enlist. But most of the families in my hometown are poor peasants like us who might have been the last in the line to have inherited a parcel to what was once a five- or seven-hectare resettlement grant. And these very same families are the very ones who are constant victims of guyod karbaw (carabao rustling) which they blame on the Moros at the other side of the river. Try hard as I might, there is no way of selling to them the idea of granting autonomy or Bangsamoro Juridical Entity to brother Muslims living in Midsayap, Carmen, or Alamada. They would rather be recruits to the politicos to whom they are heavily indebted. Sad. But if the Moros have benevolent warlords, we Settlers have our own ideas about benevolent landlords, too.

But to go back to the Bangsamoro question: It is hard enough to admit to Ilaga landgrabber status, but to deny one’s own history which defines one’s identity? And aren’t we all migrants across different times in history? Leave the 1940s and 1950s, fast forward to the 1990s and on to the present decade. The Sama Dilaut and the Sama Muslims in Tawi-Tawi, are losing hold of their traditional island and water territories as Tausug families move in, to escape the munduh (the “bad elements”) and the endless violence in Sulu, as well as to take to agar-agar farming after the copra industry first went down in the islands in the 1980s. Smaller scales, of course, because they do not have the backing of the state. But in many other provinces similar movements of people happen all the time, whether backed or not backed by government edicts.

Am I asserting the supremacy of migrant status over native status? I don’t know what I am asserting. I think I am just piqued at all this bloody drama; piqued at all this romancing of the past; piqued, most of all, at being guilt-tripped for being born into a Catholic Christian Settler oppressor identity.

BLOGSHOT Maguindanao Massacre: Can a bad thing turn good?

I am not talking about putting Maguindanao Province under Martial Law, capitalizing once more on anti-Muslim sentiments; I am talking about the discussions it sparked. It feels like, What happened was so strong, now will people rethink it through?

Reading Pancho Lara’s article in PDI about what he calls new-type of political entrepreneurs in the Muslim Region, I was rather agitated. I know Pancho from way back, not personally, through my mentors in the mode of production of Mindanao research survey, and though it could have been the tailend of the intellectual ferment of the 1980s I was catching, they were those people you would feel good to be around with, in those times anyway, as they talked about surplus extraction and rentier capitalism and revolutionizing production and such political economy stuff I would otherwise not bother to intellectually access, if I didn’t have to.

The debate then, I remember, was whether Philippine economy was semi-feudal or semi-capitalist. If semi-feudal, then armed struggle, if going capitalist, the hell with Maoists let them rot. We in the surround-the-cities-from-the-countryside contingent had this 60- or 70-plus pages of questionnaire with which to interrogate witless the peasants in the islands and mountain parts of Mindanao to extract the information that will show us the way. Those we called the socdems or the yellows for their abhorrence of armed struggle were conducting their own mode of production study, too, and two of their researchers called by at our staffhouse bearing their own bundles of questionnaires. May F, my mentor in Class Analysis, had a look at their research design and I remember her gushing. “Their sets of questions are so biased! They lead to answers indicating that we’re semi-capitalist, not semi-feudal!,” she exclaimed. “But of course! Of course! They don’t want armed struggle, so, of course!” To which I could only dumbly or vigorously nod my head, because at the time I really had no idea that that or this proposition or particular reading of history and political economy called for an army to back it up.

Anyway, I recall those scenes now as I read Pancho’s paper and those others that say that there is nothing unique in Maguindanao or the ARMM politics for that matter. Warlordism is all over the country, and if you use your multiplication table or just add up those individual killings across a time frame, the net figure would be the same. The impact and the horror of the Maguindanao Massacre is so only because it happened in one day, 57 bodies in one fell swoop, thank you, warlord politics.

I don’t know, who cares.

I would rather still direct the discussions back to the mode of production and social formation in Maguindanao, as I am getting sick of all these anecdotal reporting that invariably end in platitudes for peace and sackbags being passed in Church and collection boxes installed in malls and dining places. I'm even sicker of all these radio commentators calling to arms rallying for the extermination of the Moro tribes. That’s the kind of solution you get to hear when you leave political analysis to priests and bishops and movie stars and politicians. If they’re Sean Penn, maybe I could depend on them for strategy, but by God, Robin Padilla, Sharon Cuneta, Kris Aquino, Korina Sanchez, and Boy Abunda? What do they know???

So I will say here that one good thing about the Maguindanao Massacre is the mode-of-production-and-strategy-of-struggle question that it raises and puts forth onfield. No. I will not even bother to plague you about your individual responsibility and culpability. So what if you have contributed to it. If you feel you are party to the crime, directly or indirectly, because you’ve got an office with a convoy of vans and the evacuees have got none, that’s your problem, I don’t care. If you’re a USAID agent peddling safe motherhood or an EU peace and development officer distributing livelihood and know by now that none of this your women empowerment and poverty alleviation racket worked or will ever work except in putting a lid on the men’s rebellion by looking after women when their men cannot anymore, then good for you.
In every moment in history we position ourselves either here or there, and when soldiers fire, we fall either that way or this, and nothing more is to be said. Who cares about wittingly or unwittingly. Did you watch Miss Saigon? Oh, not Lea Salonga, please. John there said: Oh Chris! It’s Christmastime! Chris said, Oh you, Idiot. It’s not you, but war that is true.

I said, The Maguindanao Massacre is an improvement on the last debate on the mode of production. Now we have to think, and think seriously, of the political economy of the Muslim regions, too. For aren't we political stakeholders, too, for whatever that takes shape and will take shape there? Like it or not, we have to deal with the Moro warlords and the agricultural companies that call on them; the Moro tenants, the small farmholders, and the banana workers, compete with us, for land or job or renumeration. The ustadjes and the alims even think of our Christian souls as occupation forces, too, just as new-type Lumad chiefains do, that’s why they hate feminists and properly teach their women to feel the same. The disemployed rebels and part-time security of this logging company or that contraband activity might just take a notion of shooting at us, if we made a wrong move or said the wrong word. The Moro professionals, the aid workers, the peace agents, the INGO collaborators that welcome us in their homes and offices and support our good governance agenda may be our friends, but they cannot always protect us from their kin, under certain circumstances, especially so when they themselves are perceived by their compatriots and brothers as young upstarts, or as betrayers to the race who chose to ally interests with the Bisayas and majority Christian and our foreign bosses.

We must stop thinking of the Muslim provinces as the lower regions we could seasonally descend to for news or cultural events. Mindanao is us, too, we live it, its history unraveling, its conflicts and violences, its dirty politics; we are not visitors or guests of honor here, regardless of what the MILF, the Lumad chieftains, and non-historians say. We have a claim to make, too, and Mike Mastura is right when he tells peace panelists and Moro right-to-self-determination advocates: If you don't support us, say it now, and why. That we may talk about it here, that we may not feel betrayed later.

And for God’s sake, Sisters, and dear Brothers, let’s stop behaving like Good Samaritans out to hand ancestral domains to the benighted tribes when they demand it just because we can go abroad anytime, they can have all the eroded hills they like; or just because we’ve got bigger stakes in other cities or continents where the fucking mode of production and social formation is way advanced than all this medieval politics we have to put up with here.