She has fought for land and her life, and has survived.
By DEE AYROSO
Bulatlat.com
MANILA – Bai Aida Seisa is only 34, but she has survived two massacres in her life.
The first one was an attempted massacre in 1983, when she was only two years old, and it was her father’s quick thinking that saved her, her mother and two baby brothers. Her father, Amado Sandunan, was able to hurl them out of the window before the assassins sprayed bullets all over the house and killed him.
Seisa’s father was a Bagobo leader who fiercely opposed the logging operations of the Dalisay brothers company. The perpetrators to the attack were the company’s private guards, along with government troops and paramilitary group, the infamous Civilian Home Defense Force (CHDF), and several kin who were pro-logging.
The 47-year-old Sandunan was killed, but the resistance of the Bagobo lived on. Eventually, they forced the logging company out of their ancestral lands.
Like her father, Seisa now leads the Bagobo and other communities of Paquibato district, Davao City. This year, on June 14, her own home was strafed by soldiers of the 69th infantry battalion, during a family celebration. Seisa and her family survived, but three of her guests, a Lumád leader and two village mates, were killed.
The military insisted that it was “a legitimate encounter,” claiming that the casualties were New People’s Army (NPA) members – which was belied by village officials and other residents. It wasn’t the first attempt on Seisa’s life, who has been exposing human rights violations by the military.
Just as her father gave up his life defending the land, Seisa has willingly risked her own, to ensure that the next generation gets to live off their yutang kabilin, their ancestral lands, free and one with nature.
A born leader
“As early as age four, I was made aware that we should assert the rights of peasants and indigenous peoples to the land,” Seisa told Bulatlat. “I inherited my activism from my father.”
Hers was a generation that grew up in communities free from logging and extractive companies. Their elders launched a pangayaw, a tribal war against the Dalisay company, whose operations caused worsening soil erosion and frequent landslides. The tribes’ warriors, called bagani, used bangkaw (spears), bows and arrows to fight off the logging company, its private guards and the military.
By the 90s, logging has come to a full halt.
Seisa, now a bai, a female tribal leader, is the spokesperson of Paquibato District Peasant Association (Padipa), an organization that has solidified the stand of communities against the encroachment of mining and agribusiness companies in Lumád ancestral lands. She is also the vice chairperson of the regional Lumád women group, Sabukahan Tomo Kamalintan (Unity of Women, or Sabukahan-Southern Mindanao Region), and the secretary general of the regional Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP-SMR).
Growing up in a time of peace, Seisa became a youth catechist and leader of the Diocesan Youth Apostolate (DYA) of the Christ the King Church in Tagum city. She was trained to speak before gatherings, a skill she has fully developed, and now uses to speak about militarization and human rights violations on the communities which oppose the companies.
She took up education in college, but quit on her second year, opting instead to organize the communities. Her work brought her to different areas being threatened by private companies eager to get their hands on Mindanao’s resources. As she helped build unities among people, she became a target of the military, who branded her as the right hand man of NPA leader Leoncio Pitao, or “Kumander Parago,” both dreaded and highly respected in the country, depending on whose side you are on.
Seisa said she is not about to let her children suffer from mining and plantation companies. They are up against 79 mining applications, including the Allied MRC owned by Edwin Tan, and the Alberto Mining company of presidential uncle and former Marcos crony Danding Cojuangco. Agribusiness companies also target the area for rubber and palm oil plantations.
Videoke singing and a ‘legitimate encounter’
On June 10 up to 12, Seisa led a fact-finding mission to investigate military aerial bombings in the Sumogod community in Fatima village. Consequently, on June 12, the 69th IB filed charges of murder and frustrated murder against her, in connection to a military encounter with NPAs in Calinan District on May 6, which Seisa had nothing to do with.
Seisa recalled that on June 13, she had just come from Davao city, where she attended a peace forum, and later met with Davao Archbishop Fernando Capalla, to whom she appealed for help about the charges which the military filed against her.
She got home in the early evening, and started preparing a simple meal for a joint celebration: the birthdays of her two daughters and her husband, and their wedding anniversary. The birthdays were not until July, but they decided to celebrate, anyway, because her husband, Henry, will soon leave home, and be gone for two months, working in Maco, Compostela Valley.
Her house was just a meter away from the road, and when a white van passed by at around 9 p.m., nobody minded it. By this time, the house was noisy with merrymaking neighbours and guests from nearby communities, including Datu Ruben Enlog, chairperson of the Nagkahiusang Lumád sa Paquibato (United Lumád of Paquibato), Henry’s co-worker, Oligario Quimbo and family friend, Randy Carnasa. The latter two are both members of Padipa. There was food, videoke singing and drinking.
At around midnight, three motorcycles passed by. Then, from the kitchen came the first volley of gunfire. Everyone dropped to the ground as the firing went on for half an hour. Her 12-year-old daughter Rhea Shane, was in the upstairs bedroom, and Henry was able to dodge bullets and got her, but she was wounded in the arm.
Their two other daughters, Queenie and Jade came to fetch her mother-in-law, and were luckily, not in the house.
Carnasa was already hit in the arm, and he and Enlog kept shouting at the soldiers: “Stop shooting, we are civilians here, and we’re already wounded!” But the firing went on.
Eventually, Carnasa was again hit in his side, and he pleaded: “Mareng Aida, I can’t take it anymore, I’m going to die here. Get out now, so you can tell the truth about what happened.”
Henry dragged Seisa and their daughter out, leaving Enlog, Carnasa, Quimbo, and Seisa’s mother, Sita Sandunan inside the house. They took refuge in the forest, and even some two kilometers away, they could hear the gunfire, which kept on until about 4 a.m. Seisa said she kept crying the whole time, thinking about her mother. Later, they learned that she survived, barely dodging a bullet which hit and killed a mother duck which sat by her head as she lay on the ground.
Enlog, Carnasa and Quimbo, were dead. The soldiers presented them to the media as NPA rebels, who supposedly fired at them as they were serving a warrant for NPA leaders Leoncio Pitao and Nelson Anggoy.
Seisa’s mother Sita testified before an investigation of the Davao city council about her ordeal, and how soldiers led by a 1st Lieutenant Christopher Santos entered Seisa’s home, looking for NPA. The soldiers did not harm her, but they looted the house, taking the family’s cellphones and cash. Then they asked her to sign a document attesting that the three men killed were NPA, but she refused.
Santos also wrote down his cellphone number on a piece of paper which he gave to Sandunan, but she was so traumatized she threw it away.
Survivor
For six days Seisa, her husband and daughter stayed in the forest, feeding on fallen coconuts. They were eventually rescued by human rights workers, and brought to Davao city.
She wasted no time recovering, and was soon sitting before the city council, giving her account of the massacre.
The Davao city council had come out with a resolution asking the Commission on Human Rights to investigate the soldiers.
She lamented to Bulatlat how all her appliances, a TV and cookery set taken on loan, were destroyed. All her ducks and chickens were also killed. The soldiers also took P7,000 which the family earned from gathering cut wood, and the P2,800 cash assistance from the government’s 4Ps.
“Our home was destroyed,” Seisa said that they lost everything in the attack by three groups of soldiers. Their furniture, household items, even their clothes were shredded to bits in the shooting.
“The soldiers thought that if they massacre us, they can stop us from telling the truth about the oppression of the indigenous peoples,” Seisa told Bulatlat.com.
Seisa had survived an earlier attack this year, on April 4, when she and her husband were chased by motorcycle-riding men suspected to be state forces. She was injured as the motorcycle slid down the road. Their chasers left. At the hospital, she argued with a doctor who wanted her confined because of her injuries, but Seisa insisted on leaving, for fear that her attackers had tailed them.
Although shaken by the attack on her home and the killing of her friends, her strong sense of justice and tenacity to survive prevails. Seisa has filed charges against military officials before the Davao City public prosecutor.
The human rights group Karapatan had called the 69th IB as one of the “Palparan battalions,” which was redeployed from Central Luzon after being implicated in the spate of abductions and disappearances, including that of the two University of the Philippines students, Sherlyn Cadapan and Karen Empeño.
Since September, Seisa had been in Manila as part of the Manilakbayan 2015 advance team. She had been away from her husband and daughters for months. Her husband, Henry had decided not to return to his job, and is now the one taking care of their children.
She has firm resolve to continue the Lumád struggle for their ancestral domain and right to self determination, a fight which had gained much public support amid the continuing killings, evacuation and attacks on schools and communities.
Seisa stressed the need to use the land to produce food for the people, and not for profit. She lamented how some Lumád allow themselves to be used by corporations to grab ancestral territories, in return for money.
“Money becomes a hindrance to us, but we don’t need money. What we need is land, that is why we need to defend our lands for the next generation,” she said. 
