And now what?

As our work with the Challenges to Peacebuilding in Mindanao comes to a formal end, I have had time to reflect on all of the things that we saw, heard, and experienced in Mindanao. It has been a week since we completed our presentation to the larger MIIS community, and we have received very positive feedback. It feels good to be able to increase awareness of this conflict, the nature of our work in Mindanao requires us to do so.

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Children seeing foreigners for the first time

 

Mindanao is a beautiful island, with a lot of resources and potential for sustained development and peace. The timing of our trip to the region was truly incredible, with a visit from the Pope and the Bansamoro Basic Law progressing, it seemed like it was hopeful time for Mindanao. Just days after we left,, an incident occurred, where over 60 people were killed. The mamasapano incident re-opens a region’s trauma and further postpones the progression of the BBL, which undermines the optimism we saw while in Mindanao.

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Dr. Iyer with Father Bert

 

The takeaways are multiple. I have learned a lot about myself and what I need to work on if I want to work in the field. I have reflected and will continue to reflect on this trip to Mindanao, through writing assignments, creative projects, through conversations, and other work to give purpose to this experience

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Children’s Peace

We had the opportunity of visiting schools in Mindanao which had been declared “zones of peace”, where violence was not permitted. From my perspective, it seems like it should be a given that elementary schools should be void of violence of any kind, but this is the case for many schools across the world.

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At the Children’s Peace Learning Center, we had the opportunity to meet with Catholic nuns and see the pre-school they are operating in Cotabato City. The head nun, Sister Joe, reminded me of nearly every nun I have interacted with; headstrong, confident, and a little bit scary. She and the other nuns were determined to work for peace in a city which has seen its share of violence. The children, who were mixed faith, were taught both Muslim and Christian values and traditions. The nuns stated that, as part of their curriculum, they acknowledge the differences between the religions and are taught to accept them.

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Sister Joe

 

At this school, we met in smaller groups where we could talk to the nuns about what their lives were like outside of the school. One woman talked about how there are certain neighborhoods she avoids because she gets harassed. Many nuns in the Philippines cover their hair, making their religion obvious on the outside, which is something that they share with the Muslim women who wear hijab. So often in conflicts, perceptions about the “other” contribute to continued violence. After visiting schools around Mindanao, it seems that peace programs involving youth are the key to continued peace.

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Bibles, Qu’rans, and Altars

Religious symbols are everywhere in the Philippines. It is especially unique in Mindanao because there are multiple religious dynamics in play in this region.

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We were very lucky to have met so many actors that were influencing the landscape of the conflict in Mindanao. While many actors are NGO’s, Civil Society Organizations, and nonprofit organizations, a significant amount of the actors we met in Mindanao were rooted in religion.

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Most of our meetings took place in conference rooms,equipped with blowing fans, plastic chairs, and a banner with their organization’s emblem. As part of the scenery, most meeting places had religious symbolism of one type or another. We saw many Bibles and Qu’rans, placed carefully on tables and often right next to the other. We also saw many Indigenous People altars, which were found up high, either suspended from the ceiling or on a table. These were also incorporated with the Holy Books, but less apparent outside in restaurants, hotels, or other public spaces.

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An Indigenous Person’s Altar in Pamaas

 

Driving around Mindanao, we saw many Christian and Catholic Churches, which were absolutely packed every Sunday for mass. In the Muslim regions, we saw many mosques with tall minarets that echoed the call to prayer five times a day. It is clear to see that both religion and spirituality are very much alive in Mindanao.

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Shared Values

Many of the people we met with spoke about “shared values” which brought the Christians, Muslims,and Indigenous People together. From an outsiders perspective, it was easy to notice the cultural values which differed from my own. These values were presented to us in several ways.

 Generosity was an important value in all people that we interacted with. Each person welcomed us with a smile, a place to sit,a handshake, or even a fan or air conditioner to make us more comfortable. We were even provided snacks of fresh fruit from the nearby farms.

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In the schools, values such as purity, piety, prudence and honesty were taught alongside math and science. These values were incorporated throughout the curricula as part of the larger peace process and in the hopes of sustained peace in the region.

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People specifically mentioned the importance of values in the peace process, that come from sharing a community and history. Many times we heard about harmony, compassion, mercy, respect, and forgiveness, all of which are values that can contribute to a more peaceful community. I wonder if  appealed to the shared values, outside the context of religion, they could find a more effective conflict resolution method?

 

Group Dynamics

Since I have been back in California, and especially on campus in Monterey, people have approached me about how my trip was to the Philippines. Many people are curious about the food, culture, and the scenery. Occasionally people would ask about our work in Mindanao. Surprisingly, most people were interested in hearing about the dynamics of our group that went.

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I suppose it is an interesting dynamic. We were a group of twelve participants from two different colleges, one highly experienced professor, an interpreter, and a driver. The most notable aspect of our group is that we were predominantly women, with only one male participant. This was certainly an interesting dynamic for the people we were meeting with, as I’m sure that we were not the group they were expecting. I imagine it would be intimidating for some groups that we met to watch twelve strong women pile in.

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We spent over forty hours traveling in a van around Mindanao, which became an integral part of our trip. This was the place that we were able to immediately digest the day’s information . Our group used different coping mechanisms in the space of the van at different. Some played music and enjoyed quiet time. Others spent the time joking around. All of us spent the time to get to know each other and our backgrounds. All of us did our own kind of processing and healing, in our own way, in that van.

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On explaining “the Conflict” in Mindanao

Catholic Relief Services (CRS), our host organization during the course, operates based on a framework of analysis that recognizes the many facets of society in conflict.

The 5 “Eyes” of Conflict

  • Institutions: Systematic level – bias, prejudice, and structural conflict
  • Identities: Relational level – political conflict among different ethnic and religious groups
  • Income: Material level – stratification of wealth causing inequality and stagnated human development
  • International forces: external level – includes irresponsible development, international aid, multi-national organizations, foreign investment, foreign owned agribusiness, etc. exacerbate land conflict
  • Interactions: the interaction between all systems described above.

CRS is a cornerstone of the peacebuilding movement in Mindanao. When speaking about “the conflict” in academic or policy circles, or the international media, the nuance of what is happening is often lost. Glossy headlines perpetuate fear, mistrust, and marginalization of Mindanaoans from the rest of the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and the international community. After two weeks of fieldwork we learned that the conflict is branded as religious, but is outstandingly about land. Over generations of migration, displacement, violence and political turmoil, fighting groups are given a label by their ethnic or religious identity, instead of their cause. This classification of groups – their mission, traits, and traditions – has amplified over generations and through many violent clashes. Thus it is important to remember individuals’ and communities’ involvement in conflict across the 5 “Eyes” or levels of conflict, and avoid bias and prejudices.

For more on Catholic Relief Services’ approach to conflict and peace building, see their website.

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.

Presentation

The day of presentation! Excitement, fear, hunger! I was eating that day more than I usually do. I constantly was chewing something. I had six hours before the presentation, I was replaying the meeting with the woman whom I was playing. Interestingly the only thing that was so deep in memory was her look. She is one of the people who has this powerful, strong eagle look with a tinge of arrogance. She scared and attracted at the same time.

“Here is the stage in front of me! Oh no! I forgot my first sentence! OMG! Take a breath, Zarina, don’t panic.” I can’t explain what was that; I think it is simply fear of being on a stage and talking in front of people, especially on your third language. You care for article, tense and word order. That tiny moment of hesitation while I was coming closer in front of the audience I just remembered her again, I remembered her look, her face, her pauses, her unexpressed but definitely presented power. And I remembered how she was proud and hoped to die as “MNLF fighter.” Yes, I was rushing through this while doing five-six steps and when I stopped and brought the mike closer I blacked out. I did not remember how and what words were coming out, I just let her spirit fill in my lungs. After the presentation I heard good feedbacks. I was happy because people “got it”.

Rehearsal

I was sick for a few days before and during rehearsal. We agreed to meet at six pm, but I needed to take a pain killer so I was late for the rehearsal. I approached Irvine auditorium. When I opened the door I realized that it is approaching – tomorrow we are presenting. The way all the rehearsal went was organized exceptionally by Doctor Iyer; everyone had his or her role, everyone was involved in the presentation and in a way that best fits the needs and wishes of the presenter. However, I was feeling sorry for those who had to present their stories without having their notes. So there were those who told the stories and those who acted. Actors were playing roles of people meet in Mindanao. By the way, our group was not the only group presenting; we were presenting with a group conducting a fieldwork in Los Angeles. I tried a few roles but did not feel them so I was replaced by those who could better convey the characters. Finally I found my heroine, MNLF fighter, very strong and admiring woman joined MNLF fighters when she was 12 years old. I was excited about my role as well as I was scared about being on a stage. I mentioned that I was sick; when we started to act I felt very hot …I don’t know whether it was my fever or my excitement about the upcoming event.