Page 3 - Empowerment and Protection - The Philippines

EVELOPMENT 3
industrial production. The island-filled mid- archipelago region of the Visayas is dominated
by agricultural production and trade, while the southern Mindanao region remains the frontier of the country, with resources and territories opened for exploitation and development as late as the 1950s. A government-sponsored resettlement programme that in part sought to open the south to resource development for the industrialising north brought a wave of settler migration.
Coupled with the government’s pacification efforts through resettlement, this contributed to much
of the insecurity in the Mindanao region which prevails today.
History of conflict, subjugation and insecurity
Before the arrival of European explorers in the 1500s, the Philippine islands already hosted an indigenous population that shared a common tribal ancestry, gathered under different groupings and clans. Intertribal wars and conflicts were
part of tribal life along with traditional peace
and brotherhood agreements celebrated with ceremonies, offerings, and celebrations. Islamic missionaries passing via the southern corridors
of Malaysia provided the toehold for the Islamic faith in the islands, and some Indigenous Peoples (IP) tribes converted. With the opening of the southern corridor, slavery became an economic opportunity for Islamised traders and their communities, spurring attacks on non-Islamised IPs for captives. Conversion to Islam was at times enforced on captive IPs, though more peaceful attempts at harmony and co-existence, based on acknowledgment of the ancestral links between Islamised and non-Islamised IPs, also remained in collective memory. This was the norm and way of
PhiliPPines
Background
the Philippines is a 7,100 island archipelago in southeast Asia with an estimated population of 100 million. Its population
is made up of diverse ethno-linguistic groupings of primarily Indo-Malay and sino origins. Its colonial past under spanish and American influences gave birth to the prevailing socio-cultural, political and economic dynamics today.
Historically serving as a trading hub between
Asia, Europe and later the Americas, the country
is divided into three geographical regions. The
northern and central Luzon region is home to
life for many of the island’s inhabitants until the first wave of European colonisers.
Beginning in the 1500s and continuing for over 300 years, the Spanish Catholic colonisers carried out multiple pacification campaigns on the Muslim “Moros” of Mindanao, then a pejorative term they used mainly for the Islamised tribes they found in the south, who they perceived as savages. After
the Spanish defeat in the Spanish-American War of 1898, U.S. forces assumed forced control of the islands, committing massacres and displacing the population in the south. These historical injustices form part of the Moro people’s long-simmering resentment toward the colonisers and eventually the Philippine government, which is perceived to continue similar policies.
From the 1970s through to the mid-1980s, martial law under President Ferdinand Marcos fuelled repression in the region. Desaparecidos, or those forcibly ‘disappeared,’ numbered in the thousands. Practices such as the introduction of a ‘low intensity conflict’ pacification strategy, which the Philippine military patterned after the U.S. military campaign in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, rendered rural villages ghost towns, turned communities and neighbors against each other and wrought havoc
on the area’s simple economies and socio-political systems.1 Local grievances were further fuelled by perennial conflicts between business conglomerates expanding their access and control over the region’s rich resources and the rural populations already living there.
Intensifying repression and human rights violations perpetrated under martial law gave rise to secessionist and separatist movements. To this day, these movements continue to pursue their causes
in armed struggle. Two of these armed movements, the Communist Party of the Philippine’s-led New People’s Army (NPA) and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), were established more than forty years ago. At its peak during the martial law years, the MNLF claimed a force of 45,000 armed men, while the NPA claimed a number close to half that.2
The two armed movements outlived the Marcos regime, but eventually splintered due to internal divisions. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front
(MILF), an offshoot from the MNLF, declared itself a fundamentalist Islamist movement fighting for ‘Bangsamoro’ (Moro Homeland) independence. The
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the capital, Manila, and is the site of the country’s