Thursday, May 15, 2008 Editorial: Tackling the issue at hand
THE City Council intends to hold public hearings on the death of Datu Dominador Diarog. That's good. At least there's an effort to give voice to the motley group of relatives who are all living in fear of their lives. After all, if you live in those boondocks and your kin's nipa hut is strafed with bullets while the family sleeps, you will be shivering in fear as well.
We just hope, however, that the public hearing will not lose sight of the real issues on hand: the indigenous people's ancestral domain and their right to self-determination.
A tribal leader now lies six feet under, dead from an unknown enemy's bullets. His children survived, but now carry the scars of a violent death, and his kin fear going back to their hinterland village, leaving behind a settlers' community who'd gladly settle in.
It's a situation that brings back long-forgotten readings of how natives lost their lands and how they were eased out from the benefits their ancestral domain could have given them.
Granted they lack education, which is mainly our fault and not theirs, but that does not mean they cannot be enjoined to participate in efforts for the betterment of their communities by becoming real stewards of their lands.
They lack education, not brain nor brawn. It may take time, but we owe them that, because we callously swept them into the edges of our existence and allowed others to take advantage of their ignorance.
Good-intentioned people who want to reforest should not brush these people off as the desecrators of the forest and grab their lands from them "for the good of all."
The lumads became desecrators of forest because we drove them to be those. We removed their forests by the truckloads, and left them with tiny patches trees that no longer sustain the life they knew. It was in those forests where they got their food, their medicines, and their livelihood. We desecrated their forests, and now they are forced to make do with what was left for them -- soil that is barely fertile because of erosion and indigenous farming knowledge that couldn't work without a healthy ecosystem.
On top of that, they have to spend when they get sick, or worse, become mendicants for medicines and free government services; they cannot even cure their cough when this did not bother their ancestors before the loggers came.
They are the stewards of their land. We must all understand, recognize and respect this. Whatever our intentions are in those mountains, we have to make them part of it. Otherwise, there will be more Datu Diarogs, and there will be more greedy oppressors or even well-intentioned but unguided individuals craving for those vast lands, plotting in the deep darkness of the mountain villages knowing they will never be caught should they decide to snuff a life or two because they can always point to the rebels, the military, and everyone else.
When darkness falls in those mountains, you can hardly see anyone and anyone can be suspect, including the government and friends and all those who have stepped on that land.
