IT IS heartening to see that more and more people are coming to an awareness about the plight of our lumad brothers and sisters here in Mindanao. But it is equally heartbreaking to note that it took the sacrifice of 53 lumad lives, countless evacuations and displacements, and thousands of lives disrupted in the past six years under PNoy's term to finally bring home the urgency and gravity of the situation into public consciousness.
While the fleeting attention of the public is still directed at the victims of the most recent harrowing incident in Lianga, Surigao del Sur, where a whole community of thousands still mourn the massacre of their teacher and leaders, let us not forget that they are the most recent casualties in a systemic and protracted attack against the indigenous people of Mindanao standing up against mining and other forms of development aggression.
Over at Kitaotao, Bukidnon, a whole community was hamletted and scores of its lumad leaders arrested last August 27, 2015 in what was presented by the military to be an anti-insurgency drive. In Mendis, Pangantucan, a 15-year-old boy witnessed the execution of his aging father and relatives last month in what reports attributed to the military depict to have been a military encounter against the NPA. Now the Manobo community is in the grip of terror as soldiers have stationed themselves around their barangay in a bid to scare witnesses and cover up the massacre.
Also within the year, we have also heard about the Haran fiasco in Davao City where the bakwits were forcibly "rescued" by a congresswoman and the military against "traffickers." Turns out that that these same forces were the cause of the community's evacuation after they occupied and militarized lumad communities in Davao del Norte. Let us not forget the Banwaon bakwits of San Luis, Agusan del Sur, who also had to flee their communities for months for the same reasons as the Haran evacuees.
The problem did not just begin this year but the organized attempt to drive the lumads out of their ancestral lands is a tale as old as time - one whose narrative roots date back to the scramble for Mindanao's abundant resources first, under the colonial rulers and then the local elite, eager to exploit land and minerals for super profits.
The common denominator in all these cases involving lumad communities all over Mindanao is that they have all taken a strong stand against what they perceive to be external threats that place their culture and their way of life in peril. And many decades of being victims have taught them the important lesson that if they do not unite together to face these challenges head on, they will be on their way to extinction; their ancestral land appropriated for super profits by politicians and businessmen.
Far from the illiterate, timid, and unorganized natives that the powers-that-be prefer the lumad to be, they have since evolved to be self-aware and fighting communities that have embraced the importance of education and collective action. This is the reason why their leaders and their schools have come under violent attack. Before a united community that rally around their independently-established schools and uncompromising leaders who are willing to serve and die to protect their community's interest, sinister forces have targeted these as the object of their concerted campaign of neutralization in a bid to weaken their defense of mineral-rich ancestral lands.
So when we stand by the lumads and share the hashtag #StopKillingLumads, we must recognize that this has been a struggle long fought and paid for by blood by generations of lumads over the decades against a State that do not protect their interests. We are not coming to the aid of a timid and shy people desperate for our support but rather we acknowledge the historical injustice they have undergone and respect their struggle to seek redress under their own terms.
The demand is not integration into the mainstream social order where many of our indigenous roots as Filipinos have been compromised to submit to a dominant system that benefits only a few. The call to stop the killing of lumads is also necessarily a stand against anti-people economic policies such as mining and a rejection of state violence that ram these into indigenous ancestral lands.