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.
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