|
IMAGINE
living and working through the equivalent of eight years
at sea, before you can save enough to build a humble
home for your wife and two young children. And then,
just half a year after having that house finally built,
imagine facing the worst possible dilemma: telling your
family to abandon the new home and seek safety, for an
indefinite period, from marauders, thus leaving your
home to the mercy of looters and arsonists; or letting
your family stay put, nervously wondering each day up to
when the line of defense—government troops and an
assortment of village militias—would hold.
Those
are exactly the desperate choices facing Conrado Llanes
(not his real name), a seaman in his 30s, as he sends
and receives daily updates, by SMS, from his wife, while
sailing halfway around the world. His family is in
Midsayap, North Cotabato, ground zero for the skirmishes
that have erupted since July, when so-called renegade
Moro rebels illegally occupied villages in their
province and parts of Lanao del Norte and Sarangani.
According to Conrado’s relatives, his predicament is
typical of that faced by numerous other overseas
Filipino workers who, through the years, have braved
adversity and alienation to eke out a living abroad, so
their families back in Mindanao can have decent lives.
The
administration, like its predecessors, has repeatedly
paid tribute to migrant workers, calling them “new
heroes” for continually shoring up the economy for four
decades. And yet, because of the mega-fiasco that has
attended the still-suspended memorandum of agreement
with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, it has put their
and their families’ lives and fortunes in extreme peril.
It’s not
just the rogue commanders like Umbra Kato and Bravo who
should be blamed for the raids on civilian
communities—which, by the way, have both Muslim and
Christian families, so religion is not the issue here. A
government that has increasingly been seen to have set
up supposed peace negotiations in a manner that invites
more war than peace is to blame, as well. As stated in
this space in past editorials, the memorandum of
agreement creating a controversial Bangsamoro Juridical
Entity, besides having been conceived and processed in a
sneaky manner, had all the hallmarks of “trouble” from
the start. While professing to correct historical
wrongs, it actually glossed over so many realities about
this country, thus setting up its people—be they Muslim,
Christian or Lumad—ripe for conflict.
Even
now, as some civilian volunteers for peace have warned
Manila, some elements of the government are pouring
gasoline on the fire, in a manner of speaking, by
providing thousands of high-powered arms to civilians so
they can “protect themselves against Muslim raiders.”
This is the height of irresponsibility, coming from
people who had no problem deciding to give away a part
of sovereign territory behind the backs of those who
have lived and worked in them for ages.
The
ongoing conflict in Mindanao will, from all indications,
take much longer to resolve, not least because the
government is attacking the problem from yet another
wrong approach: by inviting even greater foreign
intervention, notwithstanding the thinly disguised
agenda of certain countries with vested economic
interests who midwifed the memorandum of agreement on
ancestral domain from the start.
Meanwhile, ordinary, hard-working folks like Conrado—including
many Muslim women who toil as maids in the Middle
East—will remain caught in the middle of the war, pawns
in a game where their leaders so recklessly threw the
dice. Imagine living their equivalent of eight years at
sea—don’t you wish that kind of watery exile, or a
hundredfold of that, could be imposed as sentence on
those who brought the country to this crisis? |
