Moro Refugees: A Life Constantly Under Threat

By Carlos H. Conde

This article first appeared in the March 2, 2003, issue of Bulatlat.com, an alternative online newsmagazine.

PIKIT, North Cotabato – The soldiers came one hot day, a platoon of them. They herded the residents outside of their huts. “Get out! Get out, you bandits!” they shouted. The women wailed as the soldiers pushed the men to the ground, demanding to know who were the guerrillas among them.

“They took my brother, tied him up and pushed him to a hole the soldiers had dug. Then they buried him alive, with only his head protruding from the ground,” Akas Unsay, one of the villagers, said. The soldiers interrogated Unsay’s brother, accusing him of being a rebel. “And then they shot him in the forehead,” Unsay recounted. The soldiers also killed his 70-year-old father. “It was the most terrifying day of my life,” he said.

The year was 1973, a year after president Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law. Since then, Unsay and his family have evacuated their village called Barongis, about 12 miles from this town, six times. The latest was last Feb. 7, when new fighting between the government and the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) family erupted in villages near this town, 570 miles southeast of Manila.

“We consider this our second home,” Unsay, now 48, said, referring to the warehouse where he, his wife and six of nine children were brought since the first week of February. The warehouse is wide enough to accommodate a basketball court, but it could not accommodate the more than 850 evacuees, many of whom had pitched tents outside. Unsay and the others had stayed for almost a month in this same warehouse in 2000, when war broke out again. “See those holes?” Unsay said, pointing at the roof. “Bullets from helicopters did those.”

Since the war between the government and the rebels broke out again, at least 80,000 residents had been forced out of their homes and farms in Pikit and the nearby towns. Casualties in the battle, which started Feb. 10, have reached more than 200, according to the military. The government said it launched the offensive to flush out criminals hiding in areas controlled by the MILF.

To say that Unsay and his fellow villagers are used to a life of constant displacement is an understatement. “We are forced to lead this kind of life,” he said. He pointed out that even though they can afford to build concrete houses, many villagers built huts made of grass and bamboo because these “would be burned anyway.”

To the Rev. Bert Layson, the parish priest of Pikit who assists the refugees, Unsay and the other refugees have already “mastered the art of evacuation.” That is because, he said, “peace here is sporadic. Only war is constant.”

Indeed, Father Layson said, the refugees now cramped in the refugee centers in the town “are the same faces I have seen before.” The absurdity of this war, he added, “is that it victimizes the same people over and over again.”

The plight of Moros in Central Mindanao mirrors the shaky peace process that many had hoped would stop the war. Both the government and the Moro revolutionary movements have failed to agree on solutions. To the government, any peace settlement should follow the Constitution, which prohibits the dismemberment of the republic. To the revolutionaries, this Constitution crafted by the elite in Manila is precisely the problem.

This war is rooted in decades of resentment among Moros against “colonizers” — landlords, rich businessmen, settlers, both local and foreign. Although non-Moros had started to come to Mindanao after the turn of the century, settlers came in droves after World War II, occupying Moro lands, oftentimes through force and deception. This was an insult to the Moros, who had successfully defended their sultanates from Spain.

Soon, the Moros became the minority; they could only watch as the Christian communities prospered and as multinational corporations, many of them American-owned, took vast tracts of land that once belonged to them. Accompanying this was a campaign to suppress any expression of rebellion. As a matter of policy, Mindanao became a war zone. To this day, the largest deployment of military forces in the country has always been in Mindanao.

To the MILF, the problem can only be solved if this “historical injustice” is corrected. To them, the best alternative is a separate Islamic state, where Muslims are able to practice Islam as a way of life.