Portrait of Marawi : The Islamic City of the Philippines

Marawi City as a beautiful symbol of our common Malay heritage can be harnessed & promoted as part of Philippine cultural “branding.”  But, it is not certain if this is important for the Maranao themselves. Certainly, war or terrorism & tourism do not go together. And this is such a pity because our sultanates are older than the Philippine republic. For now, Marawi is one of two cities in the whole of Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).  

One incisive analysis which must be heeded comes from former Mayor Omar ‘Solitario’ Ali who said that Marawi City suffers from the effect of neighboring “instabilities” and conflict situation. Like all parts of Mindanao & the entire country, Marawi city stands to benefit from a peaceful Mindanao. So, it is indicated that Marawi city as a local government agency  must be one of those working with ARMM to  take a leadership in investing & embarking on a Mindanao wide peace programs.

Ms. Melot Balisalisa, whose network is a member of MINCODE ( Mindanao Coalition of Development Network), says that “for as long as there is war in Mindanao & the root causes are not addressed, poverty persists. There was a study conducted in the nineties during the time of President Ramos & after the passage of the Organic Act & the signing of the Final Peace Agreement with the Moro National Liberation Front,Mindanao’s economy dramatically grew. And during Martial Law, it was the Mindanao agriculture that helped the country’s economy afloat.” This is relevant, too, because much of Marawi is into agroforestry.

Anyway, the whole of Marawi City & Lanao del Sur are watershed areas.Lake Lanao which is considered to be the deepest lake in the country & one of 15 ancient lakes in the world supply ¾ of Mindanao’s total power requirement. The outlet of Lake Lanaois the Agus River. Therefore, the watersheds are important and as such our government should seriously embark on a renewable energy program now. Part of the process is creating a social infrastructure towards a land use policy.

Our government offices are seldom able to hire the best & the brightest because government wages are low. Still, Marawi Cityis home to a big academe & so its local government could invest in developing a successor generation employing the skills of young graduates from the university to join government. And it would be beneficial, too, if governance as practices are linked to theory & research in this state university in Mindanao & thus produce the next leaders of this island. But, first to lure the young, the Marawi City LGU must be electronically wired to the rest of the Philippines & the world. There are no telephone land line systems in the city, too and so communications are done through mobile phones & hand held radio.

One icon of hope one finds in Marawi is the mushrooming of greetings of congratulations of recent achievements bannered across roads like it is a positive articulation of personal pride and maratabat.  

About urbanization - which is defined as concentration of people in places called urban - in the ARMM, I agree with the analysis of Professor Ernesto Serote, that there are two aspects of urbanization in the ARMM that is worth looking into in future studies in order to see the bigger picture (a) The status of the evacuees in the receiving communities, and (b) The effect of the evacuation on the communities of origin & to find out the character & slow or low level of urbanization pertaining to communities of origin.Davao City and Manila, for example, are now teeming with fellow Mindanaons from Marawi City & Lanao del Sur areas who are into trade & commerce.  This means the area of destination is now beyond the Autonomous Areas in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). And as recommended by Professor Serote, “policies dealing with both origin and destination of evacuees are proper items on the Executive-Legislative agenda of the ARMM. And if the origin-destination areas extend to the other regions, then policy making may be on Mindanao-wide basis.” 


Finally, we need to have a redefinition of progress & development. Our consciousness about human ecology must be allowed to inform urbanization. And for this let me quote, Ms. Agnes Miclat, a feminist educator who said, “Small is beautiful & sustainable, because "big" means having to build mining plants & the like to feed the greed of the country’s elite few, & the consumerist values they peddle to the so-called backward economies and of course resources of poor provinces they themselves exploit to maintain their wasteful lifestyles, and their economic & cultural hegemony.”  

Poverty Reduction

One of the reasons, many of us in the NGO sector say that we feel responsible for the problem of poverty in the country is that we have been engaging our government in writing into a law the policy for poverty reduction. And the reason why the NGO movement regard the Social Reform and Poverty Alleviation Act ( R.A. 8425) which created the National Anti- Poverty Commission (NAPC) as one of its gains is because, as NGOs, we participated in writing the narrative of this social reform agenda during the Ramos Administration. 


 So, where is NAPC now in this challenge towards poverty reduction? At the least, NAPC continues to engage fourteen (14) basic sectors in particular  and  the big civil society collective in general. This engagement is towards uniting the fourteen basic sectors in development sites and geographic areas. NAPC now “correlates poverty programs with programs for promoting economic growth (and) dividing the country into three economic zones: 1) rural and  peri-urban areas….(2) areas further away from urban growth centers but with good resource endowments and ; (3) areas with neither good resource nor logistical connections to urban areas.” 

 The one thing that must be understood up front is that this engagement is towards influencing policy as the NAPC is not a line agency implementing particular programs. The engagement of basic sectors is through partnership with government agencies because after all it is not the duty of NGOs to implement government programs. So, for example, the NAPC women sectoral council of the basic sector works in partnership with the Philippine Commission on Women, the urban poor sector works with the Phil Commission on the Urban Poor (PCUP). 

 What is the poverty picture of the Philippines? According to NAPC and the 2011 census: “more than one fourth are poor and ; we have been the only country in Asia where the absolute number of poor have increased ( over the years) from 1990 to 2005.” So, one of the major goals under the P-Noy administration is to reduce poverty by half. This P-Noy administration recognizes that increase in gross national product (Gross domestic product is now 5.9 %) will not result to poverty reduction and so written in the goal is the important role of budgets or the allocation of “bigger budgets for social services and  identifying 609 towns from the poorest regions and provinces.” 

 Two key components of the NAPC anti poverty strategy which have always been challenges since time immemorial are the strategy for asset reform and  employment. Asset reform is about agrarian reform and  the issue of ancestral domain. In turn, critics of the conditional cash transfer program ( 4Ps) say that providing employment is more crucial to poverty reduction. Of course, 4Ps or the Pantawid Pamilya Pilipino Program which has been successful in other parts of the world such as in Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia and Africa is designed to address inter generational poverty by making sure that children have nutrition and  are able go to school and the  mothers’ health are taken care of. So, even if the 4Ps may not provide jobs now, at least, there is food on the table and  the children are able to finish basic education  and hopefully find jobs later thus breaking the cycle of poverty. This is what social protection is all about. This way also, we are able to achieve the millennium development goals as agreed by a community of nations. 


 Some members of the basic sectors want to participate in the identification of beneficiaries of this Pantawid Pamilya Pilipino Program. My sense is that such participation should only be in the area of policy or  in setting the criteria for the process of selection of  beneficiaries.  Civil society or the basic sectors are advocacy partners but are not implementing partners of government programs. 

 In Mindanao, where majority of the country’s poor provinces are found, the poverty reduction program is also a “complementary track to the Peace Process by addressing the roots of the armed conflict.” This is a correct track because aside from politics and feudal wars, the main reason for the struggle with peace in most areas is poverty and  hunger. In 2005, the Human Development Network in cooperation with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), etc said “that deprivation and injustice rather than hardship alone, lie at the heart of armed conflict which can be empirically validated and demonstrated (and that) “measures of deprivation do predict the occurrence of armed encounters. Relative deprivation becomes more acute with minoritization.”

9/11

My daughter & I paid tribute in silence at Ground Zero in New York four years after 9/11 happened. The list of the names of the 2, 753 women and men who perished in September 11, 2001 was mostly the only physical reminder of that tragedy, even as that gruesome event is still very vivid in our minds today, many years after it happened.

As part of my “memory truth telling” responsibility to the younger generation, I am trying to recollect the events now because many of my students were still in pre-school when it happened.
When it happened, the entire world was glued to the television for days.

 My best friend in New York at first thought she was looking at a film on television.
Another friend who lived in Brooklyn could see the smoke from downtown Manhattan for days.
New York City and the United States and even the world are now changed forever by that single event. The how and the extent of the changes continue to unravel up to today, many years after.
The word terrorism came to be defined in national legislations – wrongly or rightly.
 Then, in 2003, Iraq was invaded for allegedly harboring weapons of mass destruction (WMD) led by the United States and the so called Coalition of the Willing. 

One of the more popular indictments of the events that followed was captured in 2004 in Fahrenheit 9/11, a popular film documentary by Michael Moore.
This documentary became a must see for the world.
I saw this film in a premiere in Europe (Amsterdam) and we talked about the film for days in class as a course treatise on film representation.
The film documentary opens with a suggestion that election fraud was committed in the way the voting controversy in Florida was managed particularly when politician friends of George W. Bush in media pre-maturely declared him as winner as President of the United States.

Then, the next scenes were about 9/11 and that when it happened, President Bush did not display any shock or that the way he handled his shock was to continue reading a poem to school children for about seven minutes after told of a second airplane that hit the Twin Towers.

And that the US administration of George W. Bush evacuated about two dozens of Bin Laden’s relatives on a clandestine flight when planes were apparently grounded after the attacks and without subjecting them to any routine investigation thereby implicating that the US government had a history of friendship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Bin Laden family and Taliban. 

The documentary is a treatise about the Iraq war - which Moore sees as based on a lie.
The documentary represents the Iraq war as the George W.Bush and his War on Terrorism agenda - as the iconic response to 9/11.
 It is a film which sought to suggest that the decision to declare a war in Iraq involved conditioning the minds of every citizen in the world as can be seen, for example, in the way security system was handled after 9/11;
and how we saw that the campaign against terror effectively produced paranoia as can be seen in the different and new ways of behaving after 9/11 which on the surface could be construed as either hate for terrorism and violence or values on patriotism.
 It is represented in the documentary that the world and the Americans were conditioned to feel fear to justify the war against terror.
The real life story of the mother who initially cheered and supported that Iraq war suddenly questioned the Iraq war when she lost her son in the senseless war. 

The documentary also attributes ulterior motives for the War in Afghanistan, as there is a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean.
 Moore in a gesture of gratitude to American servicemen who were serving in the war also finds out that the poor self selects themselves to enlist in a war and that only one member of the US Congress served in the Iraq war and so the film shows Moore giving armed services enrollment forms to members of the US Congress and urges the lawmakers that they enlist their children in the Iraq war. 

The documentary was dedicated to "countless thousands" of civilian victims of war as a result of United States official foreign military policy & activities in Iraq and Afghanistan.
 Based on archived film footage, interviews with politicians, an accounting of funds wasted in a war that was based on the likelihood of the presence of weapons of mass destruction, this documentary is one way of representing the still largely unresolved 9/11 tragic event and its aftermath. 

Picture credit : David Ake, AP, Sept. 17, 2001 & with many thanks to Ellen Dionisio for the picture.