‘Cordillera wanting of sense of history’

By Ramon Dacawi 

Twenty six years after it was established  so it can develop into an autonomous region, the Cordillera today  remains in crisis, still wanting of a sense of history and unsure of where it is going.

“We are a people (and a region) in crisis,” noted Zenaida Hamada-Pawid, chair of the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples,   as speaker in last Monday’s program marking the anniversary of the  creation, in 1987,  of a temporary administrative region mandated to flesh out self-rule in the highlands of Northern Luzon.

While paying tribute to those who gave their lives in the region’s struggle for self-determination as exemplified by the Cordillerans’ opposition to the construction of the Chico Dam during the Marcos regime,

Pawid rued that these historical sacrifices appear to have been forgotten.

She said there is an urgent need  “to look back to where we came and be proud of who we were”, otherwise  “we (will continue to) refuse to look forward”.

The deeper sense of loss, she stressed, has been  the erosion of “the concept of cultural integrity, self-determination and self-sufficiency”,  values laid out and practised by past political leaders who, as students, were honed through the give-and-take tradition of electing officers of the BIBAK, the region’s centralized student organization.

The tradition then, she recalled, was that when a student leader coming from a certain province  would run for president of the Centralized BIBAK Association, he would take a colleague from another province as running mate.

This  BIBAK tradition enhancing the Cordillerans’ sense of community  has been broken, she said, replaced by a system of  “kanya-kanya” (to each his/her own).

She said time was when “you drop your political affiliation the moment you are elected”,  when “you are appointed (to positions of authority) because you deserve to be there”.

The erosion of the Cordillerans’ sense of community, she pointed out, may be exemplified by the fact that no indigenous peoples’ groups ever obtained the required number of votes entitling them representation in Congress under the party-list system of governance.

The 14 million indigenous peoples in the county, she said, look to the Cordillera and ask “bakit hanggang ngayon, wala kayong otonomiya?” (why until now you have not attained autonomy).

The establishment of autonomous regions in the Cordillera and in Muslim Mindanao is provided for in the 1987 Constitution. Self-rule was seen as key  to spur the the development of these two areas which remain among the country’s poorest even as their natural resources were exploited for national development.

As noted by Pawid in her message at the Cordillera Day program at the St. Louis University, “the Cordillera was never selfish. “We have given up our water, mountains and mineral wealth (for the country’s development),” she said, referring to the power-generating plants, forest and gold resources that are now being depleted.

Notwithstanding their substantial contributions to national development, among them the generation of electric power that spurred the growth of Metro-Manila, the Cordillera and other IP areas are hardly in the planning tables of government health, education and other development agencies.

While the establishment of an autonomous region  was seen as a key to the region’s progress, self-rule within the framework of two charters were rejected, with only Ifugao province voting in  favor in the first plebiscite and only Apayao province in the second exercise.

A third organic act as been drafted but discussions on its provisions were sidelined by the recent local elections.