MANILAKBAYAN

Last year, we were able to organize a simple soup kitchen/poetry night for our brothers in Mindanao, who marched from the hinterlands of the south to Manila, with the strong will to register their sentiment --- pull out military troops in their school grounds. 

I remember telling myself when I was there with them, listening to their stories (even if i can barely understand them), that what they did was really an act of courage. It is not easy to stand against a big corrupt system, especially when you are a Lumad( a collective term for the indigenous people in Mindanao, more like the Aetas of Central Luzon and Igorots of the North). I told myself that this act of courage, this act of standing against the big corrupt system will surely have its repercussions once they get back to their ancestral lands. 

The only weapon that they had was their knowledge of the IPRA Law, which states that all Indigenous Peoples of the Philippines has their right to their ancestral lands, to practice their culture, and to thrive in ways that their ancestors taught them how to, but they said that whenever they invoke IPRA and any other laws that was implemented to defend them, they were accused of being members of the NPA, of being rebels that fight against the government. Say that the NPAs of Mindanao taught them what IPRA Law is, but was it the government who passed this law? The question here is not where or how they acquired the knowledge, the real question is why this IPRA Law cannot protect them from militarization and other abuses.

I was correct in fact when I told myself that there will be grave repercussions of them standing up, acting against the big corrupt system. On the first of September this year, two of their brothers were slain by paramilitary groups, not to mention numbers of abuses and harassment that came along with it. 

Now, they will again march from the hinterlands of the South, to once more call the attention, or maybe they need more than that, for the state to act and resolve this socio-political phenomena. 

To quote a man from the land of curry, “A civilization will be measured by how it treats its weakest members.”