In his second State-of-the-Nation address, Joseph Ejercito Estrada declared in July 1999: "The needs of the people were given priority. The political system remained stable and our people feel safer in their homes and in the streets."
Among those who have heard the president's words were 700 families from Bgy. Tanong, Malabon in Metro Manila, who – the president's claim to the contrary – had just lost their homes to government demolition teams launching a road-widening project. Instead of acquiescing to the government plan to transfer them to a relocation site which they find very far from their sources of livelihood, they have built temporary shanties along Tanong's roadsides.
Based on ECDFC records, at least 53,000 families were forced to leave their homes in 1999, mostly to escape military operations launched in their communities, or, like the hapless Tanong residents, driven off to give way to "important" government projects. About 330,000 individuals were involved in these displacements.
Internal displacements was a big concern in 1999, as a significantly bigger number of people were forced out of their homes and communities. In 1998 ECDFC recorded only some 7,200 displaced families, indicating an almost eight-fold increase!
In the last half-year alone since Estrada made the above speech, ECDFC recorded almost 17,000 families displaced by military counterinsurgency operations and armed clashes between government and rebel forces.
The numbers speak of very sad events, said ECDFC chair, Sr. Evelyn Q. Coronel, RGS, because behind each statistic are "breathing and living people whose lives have been uprooted, disrupted and whose ordinary dreams have been shattered'.
People in rural areas were driven from their homes mainly because of government counterinsurgency operations against two resurgent forces: a nationwide Communist-led revolutionary movement and a Muslim secessionist movement in the south.
The country is home to one of the world's longest running communist insurgencies. For 30 years, the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed component, the New People's Army (NPA), have waged a revolutionary war against the Philippine state.
Talks with the National Democratic Front, the CPP-led alliance of underground organizations, opened in 1986, but bogged down in less than two months after marine soldiers strafed farmers holding a peaceful demonstration for rural reform.
Since then government and NDF representatives have held off-again and on-again negotiations. In 1999, negotiations were stalled again after NPA guerillas captured a military general and a captain in Davao and a police officer in Bicol. After a much publicized "word war", an independent mission negotiated the captives' release and also pushed for reopening the talks.
In June 1999, negotiations were discontinued once more when the NDF expressed bitter criticism over the Philippine Senate's decision to ratify a Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) with the US government. Military operations have since been launched against NDF forces. Six such operations in the year past displaced some 1,000 families from Bohol, Davao City and Davao del Norte, according to ECDFC records.
As the year ended, the four Mindanao provinces of Maguindanao, North Cotabato, Sultan Kudarat and Lanao del Sur and Mindanao's premier city, Davao were noted to be among the country's most troubled areas. Unresolved issues, notably the Muslim demand for greater control of Mindanao, remained the main sources of unrest.
Government and Moro rebel forces fought each other in five major battles in 1999, causing displacements of more than 32,000 families. Some 18,000 families more were displaced by military and paramilitary activities. Finally, some 600 families were affected by direct encounters between military and NPA forces
None of the government initiatives since 1986 have so far succeeded in finding a resolution to the Muslim demands.
In September 1996, government successfully negotiated a deal with the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) once the most powerful secessionist group in the south. The negotiations led to the creation of the Southern Philippines council for Peace and Development (SPCPD), with former MNLF leader Nur Misuari as head. SPCPD was touted to herald peace and development in Moro areas. However, due to organizational and financial constraints and weaknesses, the new administrative body only created greater discontent and deeper divisions among Mindanaons.
Meanwhile, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) refused to join the negotiations, preferring to pursue armed rebellion for an independent Bangsa Moro. It did open talks with the government in 1997, although it never conceded its armed forces and even achieved government recognition of its major camps.
Despite the organization of the SPCPD, the de-fanging of the MNLF and on-going talks with MILF, peace and development remain elusive in Mindanao. Violent clashes continue. And ordinary folk, Muslim and Christian, are bearing the brunt of these clashes.
The Quezon City based Moro Human Rights Center (MHRC) describes the situation in Mindanao as one of "unpeace", caused by government's persistent denial of self-determination rights for the Moro people.
The Moro center explains that trouble does not come from local people who are simply struggling to assert their rights. Trouble springs, instead, from a government unable to respond but violently to these legitimate claims. "Before, the government policy was (always war)", the center said. "It still is".
A settlement with the MILF in the next two or three years would be "a miracle," says Fr. Eliseo R. Mercado Jr., OMI, president of the Notre Dame University based in Cotabato City, and chair of the Fact-finding Task Force of the GRP-MILF Ceasefire Committee. He said some issues dividing the two parties seem irreconcilable, for instance, the MILF demand for an independent Islamic state vis-a-vis the government's no-compromise position on the country's territorial integrity and sovereignty.
Fighting in the south usually starts before and after the Muslims' sacred period of Ramadhan. Just hours after Ramadhan ended on January 24, 1999, the two opposing forces exchanged fire in what would become a week-long battle in Maguindanao. Bombs rained on homes and crops, as scores of civilian were hurt. Some 27,000 families abandoned their villages. To this day many of those who left have not returned.
Aside from insurgency-related conflicts, the rise in human displacement in 1999 was also traced to government "modernization" schemes that give too little consideration to human costs.
A billion-peso multipurpose irrigation and power project starts operations by July 2000 in Casecnan, Nueva Vizcaya in Cagayan Valley. According to a newspaper report, the government estimates that at least 2000 farmers would lose their farmlands because of the project. These farmers had already been ejected decades earlier when another dam was built in Pantabangan, in nearby Nueva Ecija.
Casecnan is one of a growing number of communities damaged or destroyed because of "development" schemes of the Philippine government to get the country to join the globalization bandwagon.
The country first heard of the Medium-Term Philippine Development Plan (MTPDP) under the Ramos administration, the aim of which is to speed up the country's attaining a NIC status ("newly-industrializing country"), and reach parity with neighboring countries like Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea. Flagship projects were drawn up and hastily implemented, and local laws drafted to attract foreign investors
In Metro Manila demolition campaigns were launched to drive squatters away and raze the pockets of slum communities that abounded in the metropolis. Particularly vulnerable were riverside and creekside communities as government launched projects to control Metro Manila's floodwaters and clean up historic Pasig River.
Citing data from the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), a Manila newsdaily (Philippine Daily Inquirer) reported that at least 10,000 families are planned to be moved out of Metro Manila's danger zones.
Yet, no funds are being set aside for resettlement sites. According to the DPWH, government lacks enough sites for the big number of squatter families to be moved out of Metro Manila. The Urban Poor Associates (UPA), a non-government organization monitoring urban poor demolition cases, reports that goverment relocated only some 3,864 families, less than one-third of some 12,172 families in 1999 whose houses it had demolished, mostly in Metro Manila.
Government also evicted poor families in such cities as Cebu, Butuan and Zamboanga, according to UPA. But the bad news is that for every demolition case it is able to monitor, two others usually go unreported, it said.
Violent demolition operations sometimes take place in privately-owned lands, UPA reports, also because local officials violate laws on due process, particularly those requiring a consultation process, sending due notices, and ensuring proper relocation measures.
While globalization is ushering in new opportunities, it is massively destroying rural livelihoods. The Philippine Peasant Institute (PPI), a non-government group monitoring agrarian issues, reported that in the 11-year period from 1987 to 1998, government allowed some 67,000 hectares of farmlands to be razed and converted to commercial, industrial or residential uses, frequently amid strong resistance from tillers and local residents.
The PPI also reported that wider areas of farmlands, about 200,000 hectares, were converted to non-farm uses even without the required government approval.
In development's name, government tramples upon the rights of Filipinos, demolishing slumdwellers' houses, destroying farmlands to build condominiums, golf courses, industrial estates and other commercial establishments, even dropping bombs on rural communities on the pretext of attacking rebel territory. More truthfully, residents are being evicted to clear the way for unpopular projects.
In these communities destroyed or harmed due to military operations or "development" projects live ordinary men and women, slumdwellers with irregular incomes (e.g., from selling cigarettes) lowly-paid workers, contractual workers, peasants, or ethnic peoples. They are mothers and fathers toiling hard to put their children to school. These are grandmothers or grandfathers in the twilight of their years who have struggled with poverty all their lives.
Filipinos who lost their homes are neither rich nor powerful. They are the mahirap in the president's catchy slogan: Erap para sa mahirap.
However, instead of finding themselves better off, "living safer in their homes," as Estrada's state-of-the-nation report vowed, a good number of poor Filipinos found themselves in 1999 homeless, more defenseless and poorer than ever. Some have already had the unfortunate fate of suffering demolition or evacuation more than once.
Yet even peaceful resistance has cost some lives.
A group of Manobos were driven out of their ancestral land in Quezon, Bukidnon in the early 1990s. The Manobos, members of QUEMTRAS-Quezon launched a legal battle to rebuild their community by applying for a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Claim. The CADC was granted by government in 1998.
Last December, they made a bid to return home and claim what was rightfully theirs, armed with that piece of paper awarded them by Victor Ramos, secretary of natural resources. Before they could set foot on the land, however, bullets met them and killed two of their members.
Not far away, in Impasug-ong, Bukidnon, another ethnic community of the Higaonon tribal group (SUHITRA, or Suminao Higaonon Tribal Association), which also won a CADC, faces the same predicament. The CADC has no power before influential and powerful local politicians who question the Higaonon's claim to their ancestral land.
These Manobos and Higaonons still live today in makeshift shanties as they continue their struggle to recover their ancestral lands.
"Internal displacements exacts a human toll that knows no bounds," says Sr. Coronel. When people lose their homes, they lose land and livelihood, are exposed to the outbreak of diseases, experience disruption in the children's schooling, become gravely insecure about the future, suddenly live in worse conditions with a little food and income, and personal property lost or destroyed. With the psychological and emotional trauma, tension rises within the family and with other families. Frequently, there is even physical injury.
Yet, the Philippine government is signatory to nine international human rights instruments, and therefore has a responsibilty to respect, and promote the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of her citizens as embodied in those instruments.
Government must take responsibilty for protecting, instead of harming civilians, under the Additional Protocol II of 8 June 1977 to Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949. This protocol declares that civilian populations should not be the objects of military attacks. If displacement has to be carried out, the civilian population must be assured of decent shelter, hygiene, health, safety and nutrition.
The situation indicates clearly that, instead of respecting people's rights, the government has been a major violator of these rights. The Estrada administration, in particular, must take responsibility.
The challenge facing the Estrada administration is the pursuit of a development that puts up the poor, not down, and keeps them in, not out. If 1999 is an indicator, however, more Filipinos may yet find themselves homeless and refugees in their own land.
