Pause and ponder. Take hold of the time-capsule. Leaf through the pages of history before being judgmental.
Visualize that once upon a recent time, there were the fertile but empty vast of untouched gifts of Nature, known as the valleys of Koronadal and Allah, which comprised the whole of Cotabato. The place was sparsely populated although in the upland forested areas, there were several tribes like the peace-loving Bilaan, and some few nomadic clans engaged in slash-and-burns endeavors.
Our fathers came to these fertile valleys not to grab any piece of land but by the settlement program of the charismatic Commonwealth President Manuel Luis Quezon, a genuine visionary who dreamed of the land of Promise to be fulfilled by those who possessed the honesty of purpose to make the land bloom aplenty.
So what ancestral domain are they talking about? When the valleys became the oasis of peace, contentment, and overflowed with goodly themes honesty toiled by the exodus from Panay and Negros land tillers, the wind of wickedness swept the fruitful land and the cluster of dynastic fiefdoms took interests on how to dispossess the generations of small-farm owners, who are now considered as land-grabbers.
Briefly put, a systematic kind of terror was at first surreptitiously done by marauders raiding remote farm villages by harvesting the ripened crops, let alone the stealing of cattle and burning of houses and killing the helpless farmers and even the young ones were not spared, all in the name of Allah!
Ugly politics added the dimensions of hostilities between the Visayan farm owners and the so-called heirs and minions of the so-called owners of the ancestral domain.
The Ilonggo farm owners gave honor to the places from whence their parents came from, named the communities they built, thus we have Aleosan in North Cotabato which stands for Alimodian, Leon and San Miguel, all in Iloilo province. We have also Bacolod in Lanao del Norte to indicate that the founding fathers came from Negros Occidental. For instance, we have former Governor Nestor Gumana of Sultan Kudarat province who came from Saravia (now E.B. Magalona), the late Congressman Hilarion de Pedro of south Cotabato came from Victorias and many others from Panay and Negros Occidental.
The murderous rampage of the MILF last August 8 in Lanao del Norte was a repeat performance of what the terrorist Muslim contingent did when Lanao was divided into Del Norte and del Sur in May 1972. It was reminiscent when India was separated from the Muslim-dominated West and East Pakistan.
The "war of the cities" between Iligan and Marawi was written up as "a shattering showdown between Islam and Christianity". Sporadic warfare in Lanao province and Cotabato followed which brought to the scene the infamous commander Toothpick, a.k.a. Feliciano Luces of the Ilaga battling against the Muslim Black Shirts and Barracudas.
Now, we, the Ilonggo, are damned and denigrated as blood thirsty maniacs.
We are condemned for arming ourselves to protect our rights and no less than the church leaders and other Christian institutions and spinners of unproven tales have joined the chorus to demonize our own self-defense force.
Take note that the police and armed forces cannot cover all the places, particularly the remote ones from the marauding terrorists who would kill even the women and children because they are all heathens and family members of "land grabbers", thus calling the Ilaga as the "Ilonggo Land Grabbers Association."
We want to stress that we do not entertain any religious prejudices nor do we indulge in criminal activities.
There could be some few ruffians among us but we do find their "soul brothers" in other tribes.
The current turbulence in Mindanao, Sulu, and Basilan is one of "self-discovery" all fueled by the greed for power but not of self determination of a minority claiming to have been deprived of their ancestral domain.
We are inviting critics as well as socio-political theorists and analysts to live with us and make the assessment before condemning the Ilonggos and others who have settled in Mindanao who contributed immense socio-economic growth like General Scrubs City, Tacurong, Marbel and other progressive communities.
Don't we have the right to self-defense? Why pick on us or the issue of human rights?
Please stop classifying the residents of Mindanao. We are all Filipinos.
