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.
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.”
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.
