Waiting Game for North Cotabato Refugees

By Bong S. Sarmiento

PIKIT, North Cotabato — Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. –Robert Frost.

In this Muslim-dominated region that has seen four wars since the late 1990s, thousands of homes in isolated villages await the return of their owners. For the moment at least, though fighting has flared up to the north of the region in Lanao Del Norte, the guns of war have fallen silent here.

These are nervous times in the wake of last week’s hostilities in North Cotabato and now too a deteriorating security situation that has followed the estimated killing of up to 50 civilians and soldiers after the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) forces overran a series of towns and villages west of Iligan City on Monday.

The uncertain security situation in North Cotabato has kept a quarter of Pikit’s 90,000 population cramped in 29 evacuation centers scattered across town.

In the village of Baliki in the neighboring town of Midsayap, the only sign of life found on Sunday amid a burnt house – one of 113 counted — was a cat. Obviously abandoned –else forgotten — by its owners in their rush to escape the fighting – it followed this writer and three colleagues around the village as if begging for both food and company.

But while the cat had it hard in Baliki where there seemed precious little to scavenge – evacuees from the village are finding it just as hard where they are.

“Many sleep in the cold pavement using only cartons,” said Mila Grace Nabos, a 33-year old mother of three school-aged children, at the gymnasium of the Pikit Catholic parish where about 250 families are seeking refuge and refuse to go home almost a week after the fighting here stopped.

Nabos came from war-torn Barangay (village) Tapodoc in the neighboring town of Aleosan, which along with Midsayap was hit by serious fighting that saw the Armed Forces of the Philippines employ heavy artillery, helicopters and fighter planes in a bid to force back the MILF insurgents who moved into Cotabato and started burning villages in the wake of the stalled peace deal.

The fighting in both North Cotabato and now Lanao del Norte erupted after the Supreme Court issued a temporary restraining order on the scheduled signing of a Memorandum of Agreement between the Philippine government and the MILF that would have delivered the Muslim separatist rebels an enlarged homeland. Less than two weeks after it was due to be signed in Malaysia on August 5 in the presence of foreign dignitaries including the US Ambassador, the agreement is effectively dead after mounting public criticism and concern over the lack of public consultation. Critics cite the agreement’s ambiguities and the fact the agreement itself was kept secret until being leaked to the press and published just days before the scheduled signing.

“We’re still terrified to go home,” said Nabos, a few feet from where a baby slept in a hammock while its mother made do with a concrete floor covered by cardboard.

“Aside from continued food assistance, what we really need are sleeping mats, mosquito nets and blankets,” Nabos added, lamenting they were only able to bring two sets of shirts for their children as they hastily left their village with the unexpected entry of MILF forces there.