‘5,000 pesos a month can’t be a bribe for peace’

LETTERS

SOMEWHERE IN MOUNTAIN PROVINCE -- While everyone in the barrios is busy working their farm this season of heavy panagtutuned, Mountain Province Gov. Leonard Mayaen appears just as hard at work himself, making rounds to ask local guerrilas to lay down their arms and join the mainstream.

He calls this ‘livelihood program for rebel returnees’—another lackluster surrender campaign that challenges the four-decade-strong and surging New People’s Army.

We regret to inform the governor this: as with other surrender campaigns of past administrations, our growing number of optimistic and determined revolutionary guerillas will surely weather this one. To say he now has 23 ex-rebels under the program is actually both dubious and surprising.

That number is not from the Leonardo Pacsi Command, nor from our neighboring NPA fronts. On the contrary, we are counting new recruits. The six-million provincial fund allotted for this program will only be milked by fixers of false surrenderees and more corrupt civil and military officials.

Pushing for surrender is actually going against the current progress and spirit of the ongoing peace talks. And we should oppose and expose the militarist segments of the Aquino Regime who are hellbent on sabotaging the peace talks. Formal talks between the Aquino government (now designated as GPH) and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) have resumed just a month ago.

On the table is the Comprehensive Agreement on Social and Economic Reforms (CASER) or what the NDFP panel calls the meat of the four-point peace negotiations agenda. “By addressing the root causes, we lay the ground for resolving the armed conflict, ending the poverty of our people, and eventually achieving a just and lasting peace in our country,” Ka Randall Echanis, member of the NDFP Reciprocal Working Committee- Social and Economic Reforms, puts it simply.

Included in the CASER outline are concerns for indigenous and minority communities that Mayaen surely shares with us. Introducing articles on Economic Sovereignty and National Patrimony, the NDFP draft reads:

“The Philippine environment has been wantonly violated and degraded. This disaster impelled by the exploiters’ greed for profit has caused displacement of hundreds of thousands of our people from their habitation, among them the national and ethnic minorities from their ancestral lands.

The rapacious activities of foreign corporations and their local partners take no heed of the wellbeing of our people and their environment.”

For all public and natural resources, the draft asserts: “legitimate rights of settlers and national and ethnic minorities shall be fully respected.” (Article 2) It even maintains that mining must be regulated to ensure domestic processing “while at the same time guaranteeing environmental protection, social compensation for disturbance and damage caused as well as democratic consultation with, and the consent of, the people in the communities immediately and directly affected by such operations.” (Article 3) For certain, the present stage of the negotiations is very important.

Mountain Province has much knowledge to offer both sides so that we can expect a fruitful output. The province remains host to some of the poorest barrios occupied by national minorities. Our people suffer dwindling rice production and are threatened by disasters and climate change.

In Besao, Barlig and Sadanga and other areas, pests consume up to half of supposed rice harvest. In Paracelis and part of Natonin, super typhoon Juan totally damaged corn and banana plants and farmers grimace at the continued low prices of farm produce while that of agriculture inputs shoot up.

In response, the governor ought to work for the people’s livelihood, not just those of supposed returnees.

He must raise the issues here on to the negotiating table. Better, he could start acting on them, understanding that it is plainly beyond the capacity of the provincial government to comprehensively address the concerns of locals who join the underground movement. That is true unless the local government could end centuries of social chauvinism of the national minorities, the continuing encroachment of ancestral land by foreign and domestic economic aggression, and inadequate and utter government neglect of basic social services for the national minorities.

Surely, it will not be difficult for Mayaen to appreciate the profound reasons to rebel in the current system. So, instead of asking us to tolerate it, surrender and die the mainstream death, it would be best to work for a just peace of mind, body and tummy—at least for the people of Mountain Province.

Besides, 5,000 pesos a month can’t be a bribe for peace.

Civil responsibility of providing basic services should not be relegated as just an appendage to the AFP’s counter insurgency plan. Peace can not just be downgraded to simply giving loose change to a destitute kid but is a self satisfying condition of the majority of the people provided and sustained by a system that nurtures peace based on justice and democracy. For as long as the semi-colonial and semi-feudal system coupled by national oppression of the indigenous people persist in the Cordillera, the national minorities have all the valid and legitimate reason to rebel until final victory.

As for us in the guerilla zone, the governor has nothing to worry about. We are flourishing in the shade and before he knows it, the people of Mountain Province alongside other national minorities in the Cordillera and the rest of the oppressed people nationwide will be marching in the wide open to claim what is rightfully theirs. Those accountable would best be scampering.

Ka Magno Udyaw, Spokesperson
Leonardo Pacsi Command
New People’s Army
Mountain Province