TWO days before 2016 ended, Cupertino Banugan, a Mandaya chieftain in the town of Caraga, was killed along with his brother and a relative by the New People's Army (NPA).
The NPA's version of the incident said they were “acting on self defense” when they were disarming Banugan's armed group, the Mandaya Ancestral Defense Unit (Manadu), in which the latter engaged them in a gunfight.
The NPA claimed that Banugan has used his position to “usurp” 14,000 hectares of land owned by five clans in Caraga, and exacted rent from the farmers. They also claimed Banugan's Manadu have been harassing and attacking farmers.
In 2016, Banugan and another chieftain, Ruben Labawan, a Dibabawon from Paquibato, were killed by the NPA. They have asserted claims of their ancestral lands through a paper called a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title and through force, by forming armed groups to “protect their ancestral land.”
The Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP) have raised for many years the violation on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples committed by the Philippine government, in its complicity by recruiting and arming the indigenous peoples into the paramilitary. The explanation that the paramilitary serves as “defense” for the ancestral domain downplays the real intent of militarism in the indigenous communities.
“Militarization is employed to secure state and corporate interests and to suppress community resistance for indigenous people rights.” says Windell Bolingit of the AIPP in their statement in 2012.
A book on the rise of lumad warlords, Modern Warlordism in Mindanao, published by the Union of Peoples' Lawyers in Mindanao, explained the pattern:
“This new form of warlordism developed in the wake of the passage of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act of 1997 which facilitated the issuance of Certificates of Ancestral Domain Titles (CADTs). With their CADTs, unscrupulous lumad leaders opened up thousands of hectares of tribal territory for exploitation by large corporations engaged in mining, logging, and agribusiness activities. These Lumad leaders have armed themselves to be able to grab a bigger share of the benefits from the operations of big business in the CADT areas.
“The lumad warlords are actively organized, trained, and armed by the military to protect these business interests and to help them fight the New People’s Army (NPA) that is active in the countryside.”
These paramilitary operations have resulted to more loss of lives, livelihood and schools of the lumads.
We can look at the narratives of the lumad schools under attack where paramilitary groups killed a school administrator and lumad leaders in Lianga, Surigao del Sur and a student in Talaingod.
The paramilitary leaders and the soldiers question the legitimacy of schools. But why don't we question their legitimacy of power by using a gun?
I have been writing about the struggles of the lumads in Mindanao in my columns, explaining the narrative of their struggle to protect their communities against the violence of militarism and plunder of mining and agribusiness.
The case of Banugan and other warlords drives further the point that the way to address the issue most especially in the ongoing National Democratic Front-Philippine Government peace talks of ancestral domain and self-determination of the lumads is not to give them arms, but rather the weapon of the mind through education, and the much needed economic support to build their farms.
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