The monograph titled, “The Past is always Present: The Moros of Mindanao and the Quest for Peace” by Dr. Astrid Tuminez of the Southeast Asia Research Centre (SEARC) of the City University of Hongkong provides a very good reading for those who wish to know the root cause of the conflict that underpins the Bangsamoro Question. The presentation contains a wealth of information, such as data on Filipino settler migration, early Moro population, Philippine laws enacted for the purpose of colonizing Moroland, etc. In all, it presents an ostensibly objective picture of the Bangsamoro Question from the perspective of a “neutral” academic, who, towards the end of her monograph, suggests several approaches and solutions to resolve the conflict that has been a permanent fixture in the landscape of Mindanao and Sulu for almost five centuries. These approaches and solutions appear good on paper, and indeed they are valid and sound proposals on the surface. The statistics are factually accurate and are useful to those who want to see a picture of what happened to the Moros in the past so as to be able to understand the dynamics of the present. But there is a more elaborate strategic agenda that unfortunately puts a smudge on the motive and goodwill of the author. For as one carefully reads through her monograph, the concluding statements reveal one thing: that a resolution of the Bangsamoro Question in accordance with what the author proposes –and these are good proposals - would serve better the US war against Islamic “terrorists” and “fundamentalists” that the author believes are embedded in Moroland. In this context, one wonders whether the author merely uses her good proposals as a smokescreen for the larger US Agenda and not out of altruism and the desire to see justice prevail for the Moros. It should be noted that when this monograph was written, George W. Bush and the US neo-cons were still in power in Washington, DC. And the author was with the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) at around that time. In any case, the monograph was written in 2008 at the height of the Kuala Lumpur negotiations between the MILF and GPH peace panels on the Ancestral Domain issue, which is the third of the three concerns that had to be addressed by the negotiating parties under the Tripoli Agreement on Peace of 2001. It came out just before the aborted signing of the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD) in August 2008 and the consequent brief but nonetheless vicious war that erupted on the ground right after the Philippine government under the watch of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo backed out of the agreement. Noticeably, there are flaws in the historical narrative portion of the monograph. Maybe this is out of inadvertence or the urge to abbreviate the narrative. These flaws, nonetheless, affect the accuracy of the historical narration though they do not necessarily impinge on and derogate from the data and facts presented in the monograph. For example, the monograph sets the beginning of Moro minoritization at the time of Spanish colonialism. The way this is presented in the monograph makes it appear that the Moros were already a part of the Hispanic colony called “Las Islas Felipinas.” This is historically inaccurate because while it is true that there were few Spanish enclaves (military settlements with indio civilian components that included native converts to Christianity) in the coastal periphery of Moro-controlled territories, the Moros were, by and large, still independent and their sultanate states - though in a state of war against Spanish colonialism - very much functioned and exercised sovereignty over the territories and peoples under their respective jurisdictions. The nearest thing to Filipino migration, if one can call it that, was the presence of indios from Luzon and Visayas in the sultanate territories, and these were the captives of the Moro warriors whose retaliatory raids against Spanish territories in the Philippine colony resulted in the capture of Christian indios (Spanish subjects) whom these Moro warriors brought back to Mindanao and Sulu. Parenthetically, the Spanish colonizers had no knack for resettling their colonies unlike the Anglo-Saxons who migrated in droves to North America and established permanent settlements that eventually expanded and minoritized the North American indigenous peoples (“American Indians”). The Spaniards were obsessed only with governing and ruling their colonies, exploiting the native inhabitants, converting them to Catholicism, and robbing their lands of their natural resources. Historical records show that only about five thousand Spaniards stayed in the Philippines. Manpower for their colonialist ventures (such as the Spanish wars against the Moros) was provided by their indio subjects, and even the middle bureaucracy of the colonial government was manned by Spanish creoles and mestizos many of whom came from Mexico, then still a major Spanish colony in the New World. Filipino migration to the Bangsamoro deliberately designed to minoritize the Moros had actually begun during the American occupation of Moroland in the aftermath of the military defeat of the Moros in the hands of the more technologically superior American imperialist forces. Specifically, it was US General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, the Military Governor of the Moro Province, who induced the systematic migration of Filipinos to Mindanao. Later on, Manuel L. Quezon, president of the Philippine Commonwealth, made it a national policy to colonize Mindanao and Sulu through organized state-sponsored massive migration of Filipinos in order to change the demographic configuration in favour of the Filipinos. It is also worth mentioning that the author – again, inadvertently perhaps – failed to cite the four confederated Ranao sultanates but only the Sulu and Maguindanao sultanates in her historical narrative. This negligence – if indeed it is – sticks out like a sore thumb. This inadvertent error, in a significant sense, isolated the Ranao sultanates from the historical dynamics that took place during the Spanish-Moro Wars and the American military occupation of Moroland. That it was the Moros of the Lake sultanates (Ranao) who were at the side of their brethren in Maguindanao and Sulu in their fight against the Spaniards, contributing both manpower and resources, was conspicuously absent from this narrative. The author perhaps had little knowledge of the fact (and if she had, she ignored it) that it was the Moros of the Lake that took on the brunt of resisting US occupation though Sulu and Maguindanao also prominently had their big share in this resistance. The longest resistance against the Americans was that posed by Ampauan-a-Gaus in Ranao. It lasted for fourteen years. Perhaps, again, the author is not also familiar with the fact that the famous US general, Black Jack Pershing, earned his stars in the so-called US Pacification Campaign in Lake Lanao. Despite these historical flaws and the underlying motive of the author, the monograph is still good reading. A quotation from Silvestre Afable, Jr, former chair of the GPH Peace Negotiating Panel, is one of the most informative portions of the monograph in that this statement of Afable relevant to the Bangsamoro Question is reported to be among the reasons why he was replaced in the government panel negotiating with the MILF during Arroyo’s watch. The quoted statement runs thus: “The most formidable task of the Philippine Government is to temper the legal and political reflexes that deny the existence of ‘shared sovereignties’ or ‘nations within nations’ which have been long accepted in the realm of conflict resolution. These reflexes are conditioned both by power manipulation by vested interests, and by the anachronism of a ‘national security state’ as opposed to a ‘human security state’ that is today’s standard of a modern nation.” To add to this, another revealing assertion in the monograph that provides the catch-basin for all the reasons that prolong the conflict should be well noted by the reader: “The conflict in Mindanao is rooted in history, particularly the Moro experience of colonial rule and minoritization. Efforts in the past three decades to end Moro rebellion have failed because they did not address the deep and legitimate Moro grievances.” By. Robert Maulana Marohombsar Alonto
Posted on: Tue, 11 Jun 2013 21:25:26 +0000
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