Category Archives: Myshel

You Had to Be There

 

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How many times after watching a story fall flat, recounting a joke or experience, have you shrugged and said, “Well, I guess you had to be there.”  Not every experience is verbally transferrable.

But the researchers task is to select and gather the relevant data, analyze and present in coherent form; “you had to be there” is not a legitimate research conclusion, and yet I think you actually do have to “be there” to really begin to understand a protracted conflict, to be immersed in the world created by it and the interpretations of those who are living in it.  It’s what makes fieldwork such a critical if imperfect foundation of any analysis; analysts and stakeholders who have never confronted the complex realities on the ground are in danger of exacerbating existing fault lines.  Many legislators, wealthy landowners, agribusiness, and extraction company planners, investors, and shareholders, for instance, all share the distinction of not “being there;” i.e. are typically far removed from the conflict role they are playing in Mindanao. Playing a role while not really “being there” is part of the problem.

Being there isn’t enough; fieldwork must be accompanied by informed analysis in order to maintain critical perspective.  As I have learned more about conflict resolution, peacebuilding, and development, I have become more familiar with the theories, languages, the dominant discourse and issues of core debate in the field.  That language is based in experiences of much greater depth, breadth, and length than my own, and it is a critical tool for doing effective analysis and impactful work (yes, innovation is valuable, but not ignorance). And yet  lately I find myself resistant to the ongoing process of translating my experience in Mindanao through those frames.   While I have a few different ways of summarizing the course in Mindanao and any number of stories to tell, for me there is still something incommunicable about the experience in zones of intractable conflict.

Some piece of this is that the usage of common terms can be distancing, as if “Mindanao” started as words and ideas and then became real to me… but now must be turned back in to the abstract.  “Real to me” is not simply informed by the proximity to the obvious manifestations and consequences of conflict, the permeating culture of violence, the poverty, the ongoing trauma.  Nor is it the saturating presence of the landscape, language, fragrance, or the personal experience of days without enough sleep, my bout with illness, struggles with the heat, challenges around food; “real” is most importantly, people who could look back at me, contest my assumptions, and challenge my gaze.

There is something about the human gaze that is still so mysterious, never more so than when we are an outsider, or when we are meeting one.  To arrive without all the trappings of your known world, to however briefly disengage that safety net of the thousand little things that tell you who you are and where you belong, and to genuinely meet that gaze is deeply moving, and I find it- despite all the writing and talking I have done and will do about Mindanao- to be deeply silencing.  Not a silence of denial, but of stillness, awareness of what cannot be captured and retold. 

I keep getting the feeling that I haven’t come home from Mindanao.   I am not a party to the conflict in Mindanao. I am not inside it. But I don’t think I will ever be completely outside of it again, either.

 

 

How Many More Graves Would We Have to Dig?

“If the peace process were derailed, how many more graves would we have to dig?”

President Benigno Aquino asked this question on a televised speech, asking for continued support of the Bangsamoro peace process following the January 25th Mamsapano raid in Maguindanao province The raid was led by the Special Actions Forces (SAF) of the Philippine police and resulted in a deadly clash with members of the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).  This action was undertaken by by the SAF to capture a Malaysian bombmaker known as Marwan who was on the FBI’s most-wanted list and whose death is now considered verified.  But so too were the deaths of 44 members of the SAF, 17 members of the MILF, and 7 local villagers, including a five year old girl.  Many wondered if the peace process would be a casualty as well;  following the Mamsapano incident, deliberations on the Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL) were immediately suspended.

It didn’t end there.  According to Philippine news sources and an OCHA report, clashes subsequently erupted between BIFF and MILF fighters over a “rido” or a intra-Moro clan conflict in Pagalungan and Pikit, and later it was reported that BIFF members burned down the homes of villagers said to be MNLF members.  These incidents were followed by an “all-out offensive” launched in late February by the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) against the BIFF .  A March 27th International Migration Organization (IOM) report gives the number of displaced people as being over 120,000.  The IOM conducted assessments of evacuation centers on March 12th and 13th and determined that food would run out in 20 days.

We heard so many stories of what life was like for people in these centers.  I read about three young Muslim women who had just evacuated to a center in Tulunan last month. We visited Tulunan, where the first “peace zones” were established, not through negotiation but desperation; in the late 80’s, the villagers in the municipality of Tulunan were watching their children die of illness and starvation in the evacuation center and so as a group they decided to return to their homes, whatever the consequence. “Primal courage,” they called it.  I spoke privately with an older man in the sitio of Bituan who remembered what it was like in the center at that time.  In our public meeting, many had stated that as a people they had healed and moved on, and believed in peace.  I asked this man if that was true for him, if he had found healing.  His drawn face looked haunted.  “No,” he said, looking away.  “No.”

Nearly everyone we spoke to in Mindanao was hopeful and believed that the BBL would mean peace.  Even Dr. Zachary Abuza, a longtime analyst of the region, described the BBL as “legislation whose implementation will end the 43 year-old Moro insurgency in southern Philippines.”  Very few would countenance the possibility that the peace process might again fail, and those that did only considered the alternative in hushed tones.   Deliberations are set to resume on April 20th, but recently, the chair of the House of Representatives’ Ad Hoc Committee on the BBL was optimistic about the passage with the exception of some of the provisions which have been deemed unconstitutional, as well the possibility for the expansion of the new Bangsamoro territory through a petition that, if signed by 10% of residents, would allow contiguous areas to vote on whether or not it should be included.  So we’ll see what an approved BBL looks like, and more importantly, we’ll see what the Midnanaoans think the approved BBL looks like.

Meanwhile I wonder about those we met in the villages of Maguindanao province, how those who were forced to flee may return to find their homes and fields destroyed, their precious animals lost, as they have so many times before. According to OCHA, 17,000 people have just returned to their homes in Pikit after the recent conflict; Pikit is where the “Space for Peace” in the “tri-people” sitio of Baruyan in the Nalapaan barangay was created in 2000.  When we visited Baruyan with Father Bert Layson, we were told that in previous conflicts the villagers could not trust each other, were divided among themselves according to who they believed was supporting which side (MNLF, MILF, AFP).  But intense community work supported by people like Father Bert and village leaders created a sense of a mutual collaboration for peace that unified them and allowed them to negotiate successfully for ceasefire and safety among many different armed combatant forces.  Once, they told us, when conflict flared they ran away separately, divided even in displacement as Christians, Muslims, and Lumads.  Their efforts as a Space for Peace could not end the larger conflict, but now they say when they must run, they no longer run in different directions: they run together.

Peace is Possible

When our group met with Father Bert at the Oblates of Mary Immaculate Foundation in Pikit, I asked if I could buy his book, “Fields of Hope,” which many of us did.  He was signing them for us at the end of our meeting, a role he was obviously not comfortable with, but that he performed in service to his cause and our expectations.  We exchanged a little about the conflict and its relationship to human conflcit in the wider world.  I told him, “Father, you’ve seen the same terrible losses, the same destructive behaviors, over and over again.  If you tell me peace is possible, I’ll believe it.”  “Really?” he asked me, quite sincerely, considering.  When I walked away from the table and peered inside my book to see what he had written inside it, it began, “Dear Myshel, Peace is possible!”

So do I believe it?  Even as I write this question, I don’t know how willing I really am to answer it.

I remember going to see the Richard Attenborough film “Gandhi “in the theatre with my Father, Prem.  He was born in India, in Bihar, in 1935, and came to the US in the 1950’s as a young medical intern, and was a great admirer of Mahatma Gandhi.  Seeing the film together felt like an important rite of passage; I never forgot what I felt both watching depictions of Gandhi’s first acts of civil disobedience as well as the massacre at Amritsar… At the end of the film, which ends with Gandhi’s death, Ben Kingsley, the actor who played him so beautifully, quotes the words: “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won.  There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they can seem invincible but in the end they always fall.  Think of it- always.”

But it wasn’t long before I began asking myself whether or not I couldn’t look at this statement in reverse.  Perhaps we could say that peace too will always fail in the end.  Although a given tyrant, murderer, warlord, dictator, may fall, yet another tyrant is still waiting somewhere in the wings of history.  Violence, imprisonment, torture, massacre, yes, these too shall pass, but this is not much comfort if you have had the poor fortune to be caught on the wrong side of that cycle.  Meanwhile, what of the destruction wreaked by modern weaponry? The slow march of poverty and poison behind abusive extraction and exploitation industries that leave behind sometimes irreversible environmental damage?  The tyrant may fall, but the forests, the mountains, the clean water are still gone, species become extinct.

Father Bert, I think, is acutely aware of these kinds of questions.  He has said that in Pikit there is “constant war and sporadic peace.”  The son of settler parents, poor tenant farmers who came to Mindanao seeking a better life, Father Bert became the Parish Priest of the Immaculate Concepcion Parish in Pikit in 1997 where today he continues to “wage peace” daily on the ground, carefully and responsively- not “apocalyptically.”   Outside of the context in which Gandhi was using it, I think it was the phrase “in the end” that I was struggling with.  Most of us suffer from at least a touch of apocalypticism, a narcissistic fantasy where our death is the death of the world, our end is “the end.”  But there is no final peace in nature, no neat narratives that tie up all the loose ends.  We we can not end conflict, and we should not be discouraged by this; conflict is in fact vital, it allows the catalysis of energies, the release of possibilities, disruptions in static systems. But we can work to limit violence, mitigate damage, and harness what is best in conflict itself to create the space for more profoundly harmonious alternatives, a living peace.

This is no small project, there is tremendous work to be done to minimize the incidence and the human and environmental impacts of violence at the global system level, analytically and structurally, but people suffer locally.  The peace building that a community spiritual leader like Father Bert is engaged in has heroic dimensions,  but is humble, personal, patient work, from his organization of inclusive relief services for Christian, Muslim, and Lumad alike (which was not without its critics), to culture of peace trainings and livelihood projects, he is working with and within his community to weave the delicate silken threads that connect human hopes with peaceful cultural and ultimately political transformations, watching the web tear, and beginning again. It is difficult to understand this process in an international development framework (i.e. what exactly are the metrics for changing the terms by which we hope?) but to me it is a lesson in what peace building, or what I would also call real human development, looks like in regions of conflict.

I don’t know if Father Bert relies entirely on the cosmology of his faith to make this work make sense for him, each time that he must start again, after the violence comes again, tomorrow.   But even if he does, I suspect the secret is still his humility and not simply faith but a wisdom about the way nature works.  In a speech last month to graduates in Davao, where he and Mike Alon from IMAN together received honorary degrees, Father Bert said, “You know what I love to do as a priest is to go to the remote barrios to say mass. During the month of June, when rains start to fall, you see the vast fields totally bare. It does not mean though that nothing is happening just because you don’t see anything on the ground. Actually, on that same month, the seeds have been planted and soon they will grow.”

Maybe there will come a peace that is in fact the end of war, of tyrants, of torture, in human history, maybe that kind of peace is actually possible, I obviously have no way of knowing that.  But the “way of truth of love” (and there are many), the way of peace that is always possible, in this moment and the next, is the peace that we personally commit ourselves to.

Father Bert finished his inscription in my book with the gentle injunction, “Let’s continue promoting peace to make this world a beautiful place to live in.”  This isn’t easy sentiment.  Beauty is a fierce goal, and a beautiful world, to me, is one that I assume a radical acceptance of.  Which leads me to Walt Whitman; songs and poems are the closest things I know to prayers, so I’ll end with this, for our friends in Mindanao tonight:

“I swear they are all beautiful;        

Every one that sleeps is beautiful—everything in the dim light is beautiful,   

The wildest and bloodiest is over, and all is peace.”

 

Banging the Gavel

One of the things we remarked on many times as a group (and we were a group of nearly all female students, only one male student participated in the course) was the challenge in speaking to and especially hearing from women in many of the villages, even though we had heard from many sources that women were always the ones coming to workshops, trying to learn about bringing peace to their communities (in spite of their own struggles with work, children, survival) they often waited quietly in the background.  But there were notable exceptions to that, different villages demonstrated markedly different gender cultures, and by the end of our trip we had met a number of inspiring female leaders like Lory Obal in Colombio, whose courage and humor I have thought of every day since we returned, or organizer and famously, ceasefire negotiator and agreement signatory, Irene Santiago.

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                                                                                                Photo by Corrine Smith 

Very few women in the world have experience as formal high level negotiators.  A UN study that surveyed 31 major peace processes between 1992-2011 found that only 9% of negotiators were women but only 4% were signatories.  Irene served as a member of the government panel negotiating with the MILF from 2001-2004.  When we met with her Davao, she told us a little of how she won her spot on the negotiating panel.  Irene, educated in Davao and later at Columbia University in New York, already had a formidable resume by 2001 that included founding her own NGO, serving as the Chief of the Asia-Pacific division of the UN Fund for Women, and organizing the largest women’s conference in the world which brought over 30,000 attendees to Beijing, and co-founding the Mindanao Commission on Women (MCW). When she began analyzing the negotiations, she immediately assessed the critical role of the ceasefire agreement between the Government of the Philippines and the MILF and made herself an expert in the area.  A male colleague who was serving on the government panel asked her to give him her advice and support, and she explained her response to him to us this way: “I am not helping you, I am not supporting you, I know as much as you do.  Make me a member of the panel and I will sit at the table in my own right.”

But Irene is a woman of strategy and knows that tactics- and respect for cultural context- matter.  When working with the MILF on including more women in the transition to a political party,  Irene tells us that while she has learned to sometimes even scare her way into the recognition she deserved (and I do relate to this, after asking ten times nicely to be heard and still being ignored, it does feel like sometimes the only option left is to make someone very uncomfortable) she was careful not to force the frame of “women’s rights” or “equality” which would have proved too divisive , based on their differing interpretations of what this language implies.  Instead she focused on opening space for inclusion, emphasizing the critical importance of the different life experience that women bring to the table.  This wan’t subterfuge or manipulation on her part, she certainly makes no secret of her goal of uplifting women’s voices, it’s been her life’s work, but she understands that she can’t support those goals the same way in every context and she meets the issues where she finds them.  “Start where people are,” she tells us.  “But don’t end it there.”

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I am thinking now of the lawyer who met us at the Bangsamoro Transition Commission (BTC) offices, and gave us some sense of the extraordinary process of crafting the BBL.  We posed for a photo at the end of our meeting with our host, Raissa Jajurie, who passed the bar in 1995 and specialized in human rights, and who was one of the four women members of the 15 members of the BTC, which convened in 2012.  The Commission included government and MILF representatives, and Raissa was the sole woman representing the MILF.  After sitting with us in their chambers and fielding our questions for an hour, we all gathered together and posed behind the chairman’s desk, for the historical effect of the BTC official seal in the background, and we asked her to sit at the desk.  She obliged and then smiling, lifted and hit the gavel on the block.  “I always wanted to do that,” she said.

 

 

US in the Philippines 2: To the Person Sitting in Darkness

The US would lose more soldiers in the war fought with Filipino rebels after the Treaty of Paris than in the war with the Spanish.  The Filipinos were well schooled in guerilla-style resistance in their years under the Spanish and were on their home ground, which could not be said for the US forces of the time, who resorted to increasingly brutal tactics in response. Candice Miller, in a New York Times book review of a book by Gregg Jones,”Honor in the Dust,” writes that confronted with constant surprise attacks “killing a few at a time,” American soldiers eventually “burned whole villages, executed suspected guerrillas and felt justified in using any interrogation technique at hand, including the water cure.”  Sadly this would not be the last time that water-based torture techniques, ironically an innovation of the Spanish inquisition, would controversially emerge in association with US interrogations.

These developments were not unknown to the US public.  In 1901, Twain wrote a famously furious essay, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” that played on the patronizing concept of bringing enlightenment to people “in darkness,” to save them from themselves, a sort of literary counterbalance to Kipling.  In it he comments on how the US ships should have sailed away after defeating the Spanish in the Philippines, that the “golden memory of that fair deed” would have been worth much more to the soul of the United States than land, money, or dominion. He muses then on what inhabitants of the Philippines must be thinking: “The Person Sitting in Darkness is almost sure to say: “There is something curious about this — curious and unaccountable. There must be two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land.”

Massachusetts Senator George Frisbee Hoar addressed this issue of torture directly in a 1902 address to the US Congress, saying “You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture. Your practical statesmanship which disdains to take George Washington and Abraham Lincoln or the soldiers of the Revolution or of the Civil War as models, has looked in some cases to Spain for your example. I believe—nay, I know—that in general our officers and soldiers are humane. But in some cases they have carried on your warfare with a mixture of American ingenuity and Castilian cruelty.”

US policy in the Philippines changed, however,  with Woodrow Wilson in 1913, emphasizing education and institution building, and the Jones Law or Philippine Autonomy Act was passed in 1916, although the real promise of Philippine independence did not consolidate until the Tydings-McDuffie Act in 1934 which launched the Commonwealth phase and set a date for independence: 1946.   But by then, of course,  the world itself would be changed.

In his 1902 speech, Senator Frisbee Hoar stated that had the US acted as liberator and not oppressor in the Philippines, the country would have earned the “undying gratitude of a great and free people and the undying glory which belongs to the name of liberator,”  but then goes on to cite what shortly would prove to be a historically ill-advised example, saying that the Philippine people “would have felt for you as Japan felt for you when she declared last summer that she owed everything to the United States of America.”  Honestly, I have no clue what he was referring to here.  US Commodore Matthew Perry’s arrival in Tokyo Bay in 1853 with large ships- and large cannons- “requesting” that the previously isolationist Japan open its ports to trade, which resulted in a treaty and subsequently a vast modernization project in Japan that eventually developed the nation in to a formidable power by the time it’s planes flew over Pearl Harbor.  I suppose somewhere along the way in better days, a diplomatic envoy must have thanked the US for its role in what would become Japanese prosperity.  

But it was under the famously brutal Japanese occupation of the Philippines in World War II that Americans and Filipinos fought and starved- as in the infamous Bataan Death March of 1942- and died together, and Filipino guerrillas fought with and facilitated US General MacArthur’s return in 1944, including a large force in Mindanao.  Still, in 1946, against the majority wishes of its inhabitants, Mindanao was incorporated into the new Philippine republic.

So what do we say to those today who are still “in darkness?”  Not a darkness of their own nature or culture, but of the long shadows of empires, wars, and other people’s “destinies?”  Which way is “enlightenment” today?

 

US in the Philippines 1: White Man’s Burden

“Take up the White Man’s burden—

And reap his old reward:

The blame of those ye better

The hate of those ye guard—

The cry of hosts ye humour

(Ah slowly) to the light:

“Why brought ye us from bondage,

“Our loved Egyptian night?”

-Rudyard Kipling

 

While I’ve heard the phrase “White Man’s Burden” in many contexts, I only recently learned that the full title of Rudyard Kipling infamous 1899 poem that brought the phrase into usage was actually “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands.”

I’m still surprised the US role in the Philippines was never discussed by anyone we met with in Mindanao, although the Spanish colonial period was.  The US was ostensibly liberating the Filipinos from Spanish rule during the Spanish American war but instead that war ended with the 1898 Treaty of Paris which ceded the Philippines to the US, apparently at the cost of 20 million dollars, and so Philippine rebels found themselves no longer under the rule of the Spanish but of the US. They were not the only ones who objected to this change in terms, many Americans, including many in government, objected as well. One of the most prominent critics was the celebrated American author, Mark Twain, who spoke eloquently against the annexation and occupation and joined the Anti-Imperialist League, which was formed in New England in response to the US role in the Philippines.

The resettlement policy that so drastically altered demographics and land ownership (and usage) that was described to us so often in Mindanao as a major cause of Moro and Lumad dispossession and the modern conflict was initiated by the Spanish Regalian doctrine was continued during the US occupation , as a policy of “Philippinization;”  Thomas McKenna writes “Muslims Rulers and Rebels” how in 1917, Governor Frank Carpenter stated that the “problem of civilization” in Mindanao and Sulu could be addressed by the government direction of Christians from the Visayas and Luzon to settle in the “Mohammedan and pagan regions.”   The colonization of Mindanao was undertaken as explicit policy by the new Philippine commonwealth after 1935, primarily as  a way to provide a new frontier for “impoverished (and increasingly embittered)” tenant farmers.

It is interesting to frame the US policy in the Philippines and its role in the resettlement policies in Mindanao not just by the precedent of the Spanish Regalian doctrine but by situating them in the context of US domestic history, specifically the “manifest destiny” policies invoked first in the annexation of Texas and later Oregon in 1845 (the Mexican-American War followed). The westward expansion of the national frontier and resettling the continent “from sea to shining sea” was quite devastating for the indigenous occupants of the land. This expansion included aggressive settlement, questionable land purchases, the imposition of new land ownership systems, and of course acquisitions by force in the wars against the indigenous Native American tribes, all of which would sound very familiar to the indigenous Moro and Lumad of Mindanao. By the time the US won its war against the Spanish and began a new war with the newly “liberated” inhabitants of the Philippines, the “Indian” wars had only recently come to an ignominious end; in December of 1890 Sitting Bull was killed and two weeks later came the massacre at Wounded Knee. By 1897, when President McKinley took office, all but five of the current states of the US had been ratified and by 1898 US warships arrived at Manila Bay.

 

Ramblings on Religion and Conflict IV: 1989

I’ve recently become very interested in trying to better understand the connection between war and empires and trade and religion, specifically religion as an economic system and set of trade alliances and principles. This is particularly relevant in Mindanao, where both Islam and Catholicism arrived as a consequence of trade. The specific details of how Islam arrived to Southeast Asia are still debated, but the general consensus is that it came with traders, not warriors, and in the case of Mindanao, mostly from other SE Asian islands and from India, often Sufis, creating trading networks largely replacing the collapsed Buddhist trading blocks that had existed there before. When the Spanish arrived in what is now the Philippines, they were seeking better access to and control of trade routes over sea to China and Japan.  Their encounter with the Muslims in Mindanao was seen in the context of the long years of Islamic trade domination in Spain, a context that had a large influence on the shaping of Spanish Catholicism as an empire building force. I thought of the old monopoly of the gold dinar when I heard that ISIS/DAESH announced plans to issue the gold dinar once more as part of its new self-proclaimed caliphate.

So it shouldn’t seem like an innovation to see religion assert itself as the answer to not only what we now consider to be spiritual questions, but to other core questions that religions as systems have historically addressed such what community order or regulation of relationships to each other and to the environment best ensures survival, security, and access to needed resources, where do “we” end and where do “they” begin, what are fair terms for exchange, how do we respond to external or internal threats, etc., issues we associate now with the realms of politics or economics. Answering these questions becomes complex in a place like Mindanao, in the context of hundreds of years of colonialism, and where there is a mix of tribal identities, unique languages, specific local customs, and key environmental and geographical features; for instance the Lumad (according to a 2000 census) represent only about 8.9% of Mindanao’s population, but there are approximately 30 ethno-linguistic groups within that minority. There is a significant variety among the Moro groups as well, who represent only around 18% of the population and include 13 Muslim ethno-linguistic groups.

Unsurprisingly, the two biggest modern candidates for unifying these identities to shape a coherent response to a number of stresses in Mindanao have been ethno-nationalism and religion, which continue to be inextricably entangled. When negotiated agreements between the government and the ethno-nationalist separatist/autonomy movement lead by the MNLF resulted in neither real self-determination nor an improvement in living conditions, religion has increasingly been relied on as a the most powerful medium for a unified response. The MILF has a much more explicitly Islamic agenda, although it’s primary goals are much the same as the ethno-nationalist goals of the MNLF.

Many in the west view any Muslim political group, armed or not, as Islamist, an incorrect assumption in Mindanao in most cases, although globalization brought not just transnational corporations but transnational “Arabized” Islam into Mindanao as well, itself something of a colonial force for the uniquely syncretic Islam that has traditionally been practiced there. In the 1990’s, there were some funding and training relationships with al-Qaeda, as well as some personal contacts with Osama bin Laden (in the case of the MILF these were quickly and explicitly disavowed following the 9/11 attacks in the US). But even the original demands of the notorious Abu Sayyaf were still local and echoed ethno-nationalist demands, despite a more markedly Islamist ideology.  Abu Sayyaf was founded by a man who had fought with the mujahedeen in Afghanistan.  This was in the 1980’s, somewhere around the time that the “valiant and courageous Afghan freedom fighters” were hosted in the Oval Office by President Ronald Reagan.

The late 1980’s were of course a major turning point.   Since the end of the Second World War, the great competing empires were the US and the Soviet Union or specifically, the religious war of the day being soviet communism vs western liberal capitalism; the famous American anti-communist Joseph McCarthy spoke passionately in the 1950’s about “the great difference between our western Christian world and the atheistic Communist world” and a “final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.”  But in 1989 the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan and the Berlin Wall came down. But meanwhile, with much less fanfare, Osama bin Laden, who had been involved in raising funds for the Afghani mujahedeen for many years, founded al-Qaeda. It also happened to be the year that Ferdinand Marcos, infamous dictator of the Philippines and the author of the time of martial law during which so many in Mindanao saw their homes, lands and lives go up in flames, died in Honolulu.

I have read that the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines, the NPA (New People’s Army), launched in 1969, three years before Marcos’ martial law was declared, is today responsible for a much higher incidence of violence in Mindanao than Muslim groups, and the military personnel we met with in Mindanao also emphasized the NPA in particular as their most formidable threat, and yet for better or worse, it is still the Moro Muslim groups, not the armed Maoists, that attract the most international attention and concern.

A lot has certainly changed since the end of the Cold War era.

..But then again, a lot has stayed the same.

Ramblings on Religion and Conflict III: Deus sive Natura

I wasn’t raised with any religious practice and it was almost never referenced and religious language or symbolism often has an alienating effect on me. But I started writing this from Paris where I went to play guitar in the premier of Glenn Branca’s new orchestral piece for 100 guitars at the Philharmonie de Paris on February 20th. Glenn’s music, for me, has something of the sacred in it and I often use language tinged with mystical (or oddly mathematical) flavor to describe what it feels like to play it. So maybe there is an analogue to religious “spirituality” in my relationship to aesthetic experiences, natural, poetic, or musical; Lorca’s duende, or what my immeasurably dear friend Sandy Pearlman might refer to as “frisson” in the second movement or Dies Iras section of the Berlioz Requiem.

I think that the foundation of the spiritual experiences probably lies in what Damasio has called “the genomic unconscious” more than in any single class of stimuli.  Certainly I am extracting “transcendent” experiences that are of considerable significance to me through art (although maybe these are best described as experiences of Spinoza-ish immanence, “Deus sive Natura”). One might argue here that these experiences aren’t linked to an organized belief system or identity group for which I am willing to kill or die which is true… but I’m not sure that it always was.  The experience of transcendence/spirituality and the vehicles that reproduce and legitimate that experience can become tightly interwoven; my years in a rock band can only be described as a mission with high existential stakes, and my commitment to it was of a genuine life or death nature. In fact as I have learned more about the dynamics, community value, induction, unique group morality structures, the reinforcement of extreme tendencies and symbolic behaviors that one finds in insurgent and even terror groups, the more I recognize my own experience in the “outlaw poet” and rock and roll communities.

But others will recognize these systems easily in their sports teams, or even their fan associations related to sports teams, in high finance, or political cause associations… or whatever. You may protest, “but we don’t commit violence” (although “militant” footballer clubs exist and finance can be linked to all kinds of violence) but the same is true of most religious associations as well.  Mary Clarke wrote that “What Hobbes failed to realize – and many still do today – is that humans evolved with a desire to belong, not to compete.  Biologically, we are obligatory social animals, wholly dependent on a supportive social structure; and it is in the absence of such a support system that destructive, ‘inhuman’ behaviors occur.”  But as Vivienne Jabri has noted, that sense of belonging is also a highly effective medium for the mobilization of violence.

Nationalism has probably surpassed religion in terms of organizing, deploying, and institutionalizing violence but religion remains the older, more familiar, and perhaps more agile political organization and continues to be highly successful in adapting to diverse cultures and creating some degree of unification and co-feeling across entrenched geographical and economic boundaries as well as the old tribal, clan, and caste systems that monotheisms might have emerged as a response to.  But while the monotheistic religions are probably most often associated with religiously based violence, they aren’t unique, recent Hindu and Buddhist militancy in India and Myanmar, respectively, can attest to this. In fact the most common predictors in acts of violence seem to me to first and foremost be gender and age, but who knows, we might be seeing a change even there as women in some regions slowly begin to see themselves not just as the inevitable victims of but as legitimate wielders of force.

More recently of course we’ve seen 20th century political Islam, or “Islamism,” effectively invoked not just as a vehicle of identity consolidation but as a redefining of the enemy (near and far), and it is maybe the most potent threat to the dominant economics of transnational capital and corporatism and western liberal values since the “demise” of communism, and promotes itself as a challenge to the legitimacy of the nation state itself (or at least the borders as drawn by colonial powers). But then the world’s great religions are “great” precisely because they challenged and then established their own monopolies of power, meaning monopoly of force and/or wealth: Empires.  Like waves, they rise, they fall, they are universally hated by those they drown, and exalted by those they carry.

Ramblings on Religion and Conflict II: They Actually Believe This Stuff

Despite famous examples such as Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, the idea that religion can be a force for the transformation of conflict and for peace is definitely out of fashion. Religion is blamed for all sorts of reprehensible behavior, but violence most especially. Easy enough critique to launch, really, since all the world’s religions contain irrational assertions, from impossible origin stories to absurd prohibitions that make little sense outside the contexts of their historical origins.  Fundamentalist interpretations of revered texts and traditions can freeze in place socially repressive culturally- contingent structures from the time and place they emerged from (especially where the roles of women are concerned, or most issues associated with sex) posited as ideals or divine law. Radical monotheism, I think, may have supported the emergence of modern totalitarianism; any kind of intellectual absolutism is potentially dehumanizing. But nowhere has the questioning and condemnation of religion become more common and more controversial than with political Islam or “Islamist” movements, especially those that do or have employed terrorist tactics.

Irrespective of local conflict context or actual demands, many critiques of Islam in Mindanao or elsewhere will assert that the armed violence or the terrorist tactics of any Muslim group is inextricably and causally linked to their religion and are inherent in the religion itself, never mind the research that demonstrates that many converts to Islamist movements typically lack strong religious backgrounds. Martyrdom, jihad, the promise of multiple virgins (inevitably this is the one I hear the most about from Islam’s western male progressive critics, who not infrequently have their own issues where women and sexual fantasy are concerned and don’t need divine cosmology for justification, their own egos suffice), all of these are regularly trotted out as explanation, followed by the marveling statement, “These guys really believe this stuff.” And maybe they really do. Maybe. But we’re talking about human beings. Human psychology. In my experience people do not always really believe what they profess to believe, consciously or unconsciously.

But even further, even when they actually do “really believe this stuff,” the link between belief and behavior is often tentative. Belief is typically the rationale given for the behavior, a critical structuring layer, but rarely the underlying motivation. Human beings are terrible hypocrites, we all are, and we are constantly doing things that are inconsistent with our stated belief systems and finding ways to adjust and reinterpret those systems to justify and explain the things we are actually doing. So even if religious justification is explicitly given as a primary reason for any range of behaviors, a simple causal one­-to­-one relationship analysis is less than inadequate and might actually be worse than meaningless­- fatally misleading. So in my view, a better source of analysis is to look deeply at why people in different contexts will be most compelled by different interpretations of a given creed, identity, or religion, why a violent interpretation will sound more “true” and will be “believed” to certain people at a given place and time.

Ramblings on Religion and Conflict I: It’s Not About Religion.

I’ve been thinking about religion and conflict a great deal since our return from Mindanao, where we were assured again and again that the conflict was not a religious conflict. And indeed I am convinced that is the case. And yet who was telling us this? Generally Catholics and Muslims, working through the mediums of their faiths as the basis for peacebuilding, more than one of whom told us they did not think they would be able to do the work they were doing without the support of their faith.

We finally asked our hosts at Catholic Relief Services (CRS) in our debrief with them before leaving Mindanao, if indeed this conflict is not a religious conflict, why then do so many of the peacebuilding solutions emphasize or are based in religion? Unfortunately we asked this question near the end of our visit and our CRS host had little time to respond, but what he did say was that it was about bringing spirituality into the process. For some this statement was an instant clarification, but as I left the office I realized I had no idea what that actually meant.

Can we separate spirituality out from religion, in the context of an otherwise entrenched religious creed? And what actually is spirituality, in and of itself? Perhaps it is related to mysticism. But mysticism is often about dissolving identities and merging with God, (or in modern versions, “the Universe”) and the associated feelings of oneness, infinite love, ecstasy or occasionally a kind of corrosive delicious dread, as described by Rudolf Otto’s term “numinous.” Mysticism, which speaks more to the interior and individual experience and relationship to the divine, is also a vehicle of rebellion against traditional religious authorities, which may be why mystical schools have generally been regarded as heretical.

But I think what is generally meant by “spirituality,” while similar, is probably something less radical. Human beings seem to have an inbuilt need for transcendence, for systematizing and integrating and legitimizing our activities and experiences, to give them meaning. If “religion” acts as a profoundly powerful organizing system, which among other organizational functions, taps into that human hunger for the experience, construction and/or imposition of meaning (and determines the contexts and hierarchies that structure or “deploy” meaning), maybe referring to faith-based action as “spirituality” is an attempt to extract the transcendent, universal aspect from the more divisive socio-political organizational aspects of religion, a delocalization that emphasizes connection over division, and compassion over competition, the more harmonious propensities of our innate primate ethics (referring to the work of Frans de Waal) writ large, across “tribes.” I saw so many examples of this “spiritual” side of religion in Mindanao. Arguably, while the conflict itself is not caused by religion, religion- or spirituality- does seem to be playing a meaningful role in finding the best solutions for peace; at least one writer, Robert Schreiter, C.PP.S., has even referred to a theology of peace building in Mindanao.