Peace and Development in Mindanao Steve Rood Representative, The Asia Foundation Let me begin by transmitting Nawira Rasdi s apologies for not being able to be here. She s sorry she couldn t make it and I m honored to be chosen to stand in for her although I feel a little low tech. This is all I have no website, no powerpoint. I ll try to cover three things. First, some context. Second, some descriptive analysis of what s going on in Mindanao. And third, some issues. To begin with the context. The Philippines has its southern frontier in Mindanao. It s the part of the Philippines that is closest to Malaysia and Indonesia and some parts very close to those other countries rather than to Manila. It is the poorest region in the Philippines, that s point # 1. Sub-point #2, among those in Mindanao, the places in Muslim Mindanao and adjacent areas are the poorest among them. The Muslims are now geographically concentrated in Central and Western Mindanao. And those areas are the ones that are poorest and most conflict-affected. Now, we could spend a lot of time discussing what is the interaction between those three things poverty, religion and conflict but for right now we ll just say that that happens to be the case. The third point in context is that Mindanao, is, to my mind surprisingly wellendowed with civil society organizations. I distinctly remember as an academic from a provincial northern institution in the Philippines, in Baguio, going to the founding congress of CODE-NGO in 1991, and being astounded at how many people were there from Mindanao. I m not sure what the data were but it looked like half of the people in the room were from Mindanao, which I knew of course was the poorest and troubled area in the Philippines. So, there s a lot going on down there, and so the next part of my talk is the descriptive context.
First, Mindanao is, particularly in civil society, and NGO-speak, divided into three peoples. The settlers, Christians, now constitute roughly 75% of the people in Mindanao. So that s one group. Then we have the indigenous peoples collectively called Lumad and then the Muslims. So we have three peoples that is typically called tri-peoples organization. Among the Christians, among the settlers, among the mainstream society that s where the NGO civil society is best developed. And is actually very well developed. People from CODE-NGO will tell you that MinCode their Mindanao organization is a very strong autonomous institution. We at the Asia Foundation have done some very innovative work on the quantitative measurement on the impact of activities of NGO and so on down there. So it s fairly well developed. If you ll look at the other extreme, there are the Lumads, the indigenous people. The indigenous peoples of Mindanao unlike the indigenous people of Northern Philippines, are scattered, marginalized. They tend to have low education. The civil society is very poorly developed. There are almost NGO leaders who are Lumads, they tend to be what organizations do serve them tend to be made up of outsiders, typically church people who work with them. Somewhere in the middle are the Muslims have considerable growth of civil society, partly because they have been accessing education since the beginning of the American period. Partly because they have the cultural mechanisms for a large collective action by which I mean state formation before the colonial period had gone furtherest in Muslim Mindanao. The had sultanates. They have a way of identifying themselves island-wide or even nationwide.. based on their religion and so they have some cultural capital which they can go on for civil society. However, I d say another example, another characteristic of it and this one is not so evident to the casual observer is that Muslim civil society feels the responsibility towards the collectivity of Muslims. Sometimes they called that the
Uma or the Bangsamoro, the Moro nations. They have the name Moro because the Spaniards when they came here called them Moro after the Moors that they were fighting in Spain. So, the Bangsamoro nations or the Uma, these people in Muslim civil society tend to have that as a reference. That s one of their major ways of thinking about it. Although in interaction with donors and outsiders it doesn t often come up but if you deal with them long enough you ll find out that in fact that is in the back of their minds. A lot of the organizations though in Muslims Mindanao are new, fairly new. The Muslim Business Forum for instance is less than five years old. The ARMM (Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao) Business Council, is less than 2 years old. Many of the organizations, for instance, Nawira s organization was only founded in the mid-90 s in consonance with the peace process with Moro National Liberation Front. So they tend to be young organizations, need a lot of organization development internally and so on. So, in short the areas in Muslims Mindanao are somewhere between the very developed civil society, typically Filipino civil society of the mainstream settlers areas and the very undeveloped areas of the Lumads. So, let me talk about three issues. First, is multi-sectoral cooperation. Partly because there s a lot of consideration of Mindanao as a unit, there s a lot of trisectoral collaboration that goes on down in Mindanao. There is the Mindanao Business Council, it s the only regional council like that in the Philippines which takes Mindanao as a unit. There is, as I mentioned MinCode, which is very strong, fairly autonomous regional organization of development NGOs. There is a confederation of elected officials of Mindanao. And so all three of these tend to think of Mindanao as a unit. But then there is an ongoing, continuous organization called Krusod Mindanao which means strength Mindanao Mindanao strength, which brings together these three. So this organization Krusod Mindanao has regular quarterly or semi-annual meetings where they lobby to government, where they come together. So tri-sectoral collaboration is
fairly strong down there and ongoing. In point of fact the last meeting among business civil society and the Estrada administration was happening Friday and Saturday before the Estrada administration on Monday started to unravel, was happening in Mindanao. So that s the first characteristic. Second characteristic, I would say about civil society activity in Mindanao is there is a lot of interest for Mindanao. There are a lot of organizations whose missions are to help Mindanao. Just to mention a couple of those : Tabang Mindanao, or Help Mindanao which brings together some of the largest foundations in the Philippines like Ayala Foundation, the Metrobank Foundation. Some of the media organizations like ABS-CBN network, the largest broadcast network and the Inquirer the foremost newspaper in the country. The religious organizations and so on. Tabang Mindanao has in fact the fairly large surge of support whenever there is a crisis-- for the drought in 98, for the war of the Estrada administration in the year 2000, for the evacuees in this past year. In year 2000, Tabang Mindanao, spent an estimated $500,000 on relief and rehabilitation for those displaced by the war. Similarly, PBSP has a special Mindanao program. My point being while there is a paramount of this outsider interest in Mindanao, for Mindanao. Its not so much driven from below a lot of the initiatives tend to come from outside, that s part of the Manila centric attitude in the Philippines but also part of people in Manila who don t believe in that Manila-centric trying to overcome it. So a lot of the dynamic tends to be with some outside forces. I might mention the special role of the Catholic Church in working in Muslim Mindanao if you want to talk about that in question session, that s full of very interesting contradictions. The third and last thing I would like to talk about is the role of civil society in peace movement, peace and development in Mindanao. The civil society organizations, whether they be the business association, the cultural association, development NGOs and so on have been for Mindanao consistent voices for
peace in Mindanao. In the year 2000, the Estrada administration after a number of years of peace talks off and on with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and for a number of reasons, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front was attacked in the all out war by the Estrada administration much to the dismay of the civil society down there. And the civil society was quite taken aback that despite all of their mobilization, despite all their protestation and advocacy, the national government essentially paid no attention, whatsoever and did whatever they wanted to do in the narrow security sense. When the Arroyo administration came in, the civil society immediately, they were ready, presented her with certain agendas, presented her with certain ideas and some of that has been worked in the peace process. A very prominent civil society activist, Aileen Santiago, is on the government peace panel, for the discussion with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front under the cessation of hostilities, there are local monitoring teams which have civil society people on the local monitoring teams. So civil society in the current dispensation has more access. And yet again this past February civil society protestation and viewpoints were overridden when the military attacked the MILF s last major camp and caused once again 60,000 refugees. Now, whatever the pros and cons for the government s activities, it was certain that it was opposed by the civil society striving to make peace and development work in Mindanao. So if I had to make a conclusion of that final point. I would say that during the implementation of peace agreements, civil society is very important and makes a big difference. But in the determination of government security policy vis a vis the Muslim separatist, they make almost no difference whatsoever. So that s my brief speech on Mindanao hoping to give you some context and some issues to think about. Thank you.