Ancestral Domain as “Killing Fields”
Events have overtaken the good intentions of everyone. Arroyo’s abrupt scrapping of the already initialed Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) between the neocolonial state and the MILF last August 4 exploded into fierce bloodletting. Over 250,000 civilians became refugees, with several hundreds killed, chiefly due to the indiscriminate aerial and artillery bombardment of the AFP against two small MILF detachments. Why the sudden unilateral deceit and treachery?
After more than four years of peace negotiations facilitated by the Malaysian government and the US Embassy (through the US Institute of Peace), Arroyo’s officials initialed a peace pact that would end several decades of conflict between six million Moros (the 2008 CIA World Factbook counts only 4.5 million out of 96 million Filipinos) and successive administrations since Marcos. But local officials appealed to the Supreme Court to stop the final signing, thus precipitating the hostilities. MILF chair Al Haj Murad Ebrahim said that Arroyo failed to inform her constituencies (local officials, other indigenous groups, etc.). It turned out that the real motivation behind the agreement was a secret stratagem to change the Constitution and install a federalist system so that Arroyo and her clique can maintain power after 2010 when her term ends. Clever ploy, indeed, but easily exposed and deflated.
Apart from the possibility of charter change, one may ask: Was Arroyo really intent on pacifying the MILF, just as former president Fidel Ramos pacified the MNLF? One lesson that escaped both parties today is the neutralization if not dismantling of MNLF gains won through enormous sacrifices by way of Misuari’s acquiescence to the 1996 peace agreement, which provides a working model for the MOA. Kenneth Bauzon drives home a point not fully articulated by academic pundits: the 1996 agreement “is essentially a neoliberal formula designed to bring to an end the MNLF’s more than two decades of insurgency. At the same time, the agreement provided legal cover for the entry of capital–both domestic and foreign, and both commercial and philanthropic–to facilitate the integration of an otherwise untapped region, the ARMM, into the global neoliberal world economic order” (in Rethinking the BangsaMoro Crucible, ed. Bobby Tuazon, CENPEG 2008). This explains why US Special Forces have tenaciously and not so surreptitiously embedded themselves in the deeply compromised state apparatus. And why the US Embassy (via the US Institute of Peace and Islamic mediators) insinuated itself in the peace talks, hoping that the Moro “ancestral domain” would easily become grist to the predatory “free market” machinery, the global capitalist commodifying engine, now suffering serious breakdown in Wall Street and Washington.
Amid this stormy landscape enter the “humanitarian” do-gooders. In the AFP’s pursuit of two MILF commanders (Ameril Ombra Kato and Abdullah Macapaar, alias Commander Bravo), US Special Forces were sighted inside the 64th Infantry Battalion Camp in Datu Saudi Ampatuan, Maguindanao. Bai Ali Indayla of the Moro human rights group Kawagip testified that the soldiers were engaged in covert operations, such as the supervision of drones or spy planes (used in 2006 to track down the ASG leaders) and predator missile strikes. This was confirmed by Major Gen. Eugenio Cedo, then commander of the Western Mindanao Command (Philippine Daily Inquirer 9/10/2008). As usual, the US Embassy denied that the soldiers were involved in actual combat; they were only responding to the AFP request for aerial surveillance to determine conditions of the terrain and visibility, for “future civil-military projects,” to quote Rebecca Thompson, US Embassy Information Officer.
