BLOGSHOT: One more, for a year-ender, on the Maguindanao massacre

Let’s admit it, the MILF is a goner, thanks to the ravages of peace. It has no mettle in the face of the return to power of warlord politics.



I should think it was both spontaneous and also method (as in method to madness and madness to method). You never know who is client to whom. But for sure it is a parasitically reciprocal relationship between Maguindanao and Malacanang. I’m sure Malacanang knew all along about the ever increasing bodycount going on there on both sides of the clan war and we knew all along why the evacuees could not go back to their homes: it has little to do with the anti-terrorist military operations or the AFP-MILF battles. The warlords and business have so much to gain if people cleared out of there. And I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the evacuees in Maguindanao had “sold” their lands altogether to the ruling families there. I myself did find it incredulous at first, preposterous, the idea that many of the evacuees are more keen on sending their daughters abroad to work as domestic servants in the Middle East and live off that rather than go back to the warlords’ domain. The hope is, if their daughters’ indentured labor pay off enough, they will find a new place in another town or province to eke a living in. The reason why I don’t like all this drama over the plight of the evacuees in Maguindanao is that most of it is yes, Lila, bathos, sentimentalism. I sometimes suspect it is very diversionary, you know, like the soap operas at ABS-CBN, it keeps attention away from the maneuverings going on in high places, and also in low places (if we think of the little fiefdoms in Maguindanao as low places). This is also the reason why I’m not so fond of this lobbying thing aka advocacy work, all this paternalistic welfarist politics. Why take to task a government that is up there in power only for itself. It is such a waste of political energy. I mean, NGOs and Church organizations, especially those with good track record in grassroots organizing, should leave charity and mercy work to DSWD and to Jaycees and do some really solid self-organizing work. That which will make people see their condition and do something rather than stretch their hands out longer and longer for more and more dole-outs. I’m sure everyone is entitled to and would choose a little dignity than all that they have been getting all these years. It will be harder, so much harder than we wish, of course, but I’m sure there are sincere people out there and even in the international aid and humanitarian organizations, who would be willing to invest in more coherent community organizing projects, even in organized resistance work, if only to get this damned country out of the mire of backwaters politics it is wallowing in. Let’s admit it, the MILF is a goner, thanks to the ravages of peace. It has no mettle in the face of the return to power of warlord politics. I’m sure so many of them are in the employ, as part-time security maybe, of the ruling families and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those who fired the guns at the journalists were former or part-time rebels. The Ampatuans can even summon history to their side to justify such dastardly act if they like. Who knows what exhortations better than drugs they used before they sent their men to execute the order to kill? Remember Bud Daho, Remember Bud Bagsak, all those massacres committed by the kaffir Christians the infidels and their friends the Melikans against the Bangsamoro? Remember Palimbang Massacre? remember remember all those genocides committed against the Bangsamoro nation. This is the moment, this is our jihad, our moment of vengeance, of justice takbeer! I could go on and on. I could also imagine what the Ampatuans said about the Mangungudatus. Then as before the Melikans and those in power have local collaborators. If history is guiding us right, the Ampatuans should be rightful heir to that race of collaborators. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But what right have these upstart Mangudadatus to suddenly feel good and martyred for putting themselves in the service of the Melikan’s multi-million (Is it billions? I’m sorry, I don’t keep track.) good governance projects? Mow the rascals down.

“I wouldn’t be so stupid so as to escort a bejeweled bai on her way to file a COC for her datu husband!”, a Muslim friend who used to be with Moro human rights work, said to me. “And why are there so many of them escorting the Mangudadatu party, anyway?!? Is it the pay envelope? Or just the scoop?” Right. Bakit andami nga naman nila. Of course, it is provocative. Kung ako siguro Ampatuan, mapipikon rin ako. Di ba, Orak? You are somehow sorry kasi karamihan sa kanila mga pobreng bisaya, local reporters na tiyak kapipiranggot ang suweldo. I propose there was no pay envelop involved: It was a convoy of good-hearted good governance citizens for free and honest elections.

I myself never liked riding air-conditioned vans, a point of irritation for the NGO driver and fellow commuters I had to go with each time: the Glade freshener brings on my migraine, makes of me a vegetable upon arrival at destination point, but if that’s the way everybody gets a ride nowadays to get in and out of Moro country, would I have a choice of not riding to save my ass if I were there scavenging for news or some signs of hope?

Life is cheap. You are either predator or prey. From moment to moment of history’s unfolding. And spoils is all.

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.