|
|
|
|
A Pearl of Great Price
One day the inhabitants of Hungduan in the Philippines did a brave thing. They succeeded in getting the guerrilla New People’s Army to withdraw from the locality. The next thing the municipality did was to prevent the army from setting up a detachment in the town. From this experience, the Coalition for Peace developed the concept of Peace Zones. It would be established by local communities wanting to protect their residents from the violence and losses of armed conflict. Communities would declare those areas off-limits to armed operations by both sides of the conflict. The idea sparked a new impetus for peace-building in the country.
‘It was the task of the citizens peace movement to pick up the pieces and continue and steer the peace process,’ says Ging Quintos-Deles of the Gaston Z. Ortigas Peace Institute in the Philippines.
She is referring to the beginnings of the movement, its launching in 1986 with the people’s power revolution.
When Cory Aquino came into power, she inherited a country racked in internal armed conflicts. There was the eighteen-year-old communist insurgency, a Muslim separatist movement in the south, and an oversized army conditioned to maintaining the power of the establishment and repressing civilians. Thus began a long lasting citizens movement aimed at peace and reconciliation, very closely interlinked with the movement for justice and democratisation.
The 1986/1987 peace talks broke down early. The peace movement therefore focused not only on communist insurgency, which had posed the most widespread armed opposition to government and with which the underground movement and broad segments of the social change forces have historic ties, but also on other internal strife.
And there were plenty of hostilities. One of Aquino’s first steps was to call for peace talks with the communist insurgent forces. It was the first gathering of representatives from various people’s movements to talk about the issue of peace. Her idea was that in a peace negotiation there should be space for the expression and participation of the vast majority of the people who bore no arms.
But the cease-fire was aborted and talks between the government and guerrillas broke down. It became clear that the peace talks on the communist insurgency could not succeed without the involvement of a third party.
‘Thus,’ explained Ging Quintos-Deles at an International Colloquium on Peacemaking in the Philippines, ‘our intermediate objective has been the building of this third party from among our own people.’
Quintos-Deles is executive director of the Gaston Z. Ortigas Peace Institute, the secretariat of several major Philippine peace organisations, including the Coalition for Peace(CfP), an umbrella for more than fifty organisations based in all the regions of the Philippines, and the National Peace Conference (NPC).
Initially, when the CfP sought to keep the government and the NDA at the negotiation table it was rebuffed with the retort: ‘Why? Who are you? How many are you?’
From then on, it reoriented itself. From primarily urging the peace process and promoting the peace agenda to the parties involved in the armed conflict, it shifted to building and making visible the national ‘constituency for peace’. It saw the need to evolve local initiatives to end the conflict on the ground.
The CfP wanted to encourage new approaches to peace which could positively influence policy on military operations and thus relieve local communities of the burden of armed conflict. The strength of the Coalition has always been that it supports local communities and local groups to take up grassroots-based peace initiatives, while at the same time integrating itself with initiatives focused at peace processes at a national level. It began stimulating one of the most dramatic actions which local communities could take: the installation of peace zones.
In September that year, the idea was launched with the first of such geographical peace zones: the Zone of Peace, Freedom, and Neutrality (ZOPFAN) declared in Naga City by the Hearts of Peace (HOPE). This was followed in November by the declaration of a Peace Zone by the indigenous people of the municipality of Sagada. After that, many communities in several parts of the archipelago followed the idea.
The question is: how effective are these peace zones? It is not easy for a small community to make the armed parties recognise that their area is a peace zone. After all, the very notion of a peace zone negates all concepts of military movement.
‘Whether the local group can sustain itself even when they are not recognised, and survive armed incursions, depends on if they had some structure already in place,’ says Quintos-Deles. ‘Such communities are either those of indigenous cultural peoples which have the basic indigenous structure still intact, or those, for example, where the church has done a lot of organising.’
A guerrilla force in the mountains. Photo Henny van der Graaf
Thus, peace zone communities only have a chance to survive if they have a basic organisation. If not, the chance of failure remains large and the experience of militarisation can be very disempowering. ‘The community that does not have indigenous internal structures cannot seem to do it,’ says Quintos-Deles. ‘And this should tell us a lot about where NGO organising should go on.’
Besides this, the peace movement needs to provide more cross-peace-zone experience for peace workers to broaden their view, says Quintos-Deles. After all, peace zones are very local experiences.
‘You have here a pearl of great price, and make sure it’s not stolen away from you,’ said a participant to an international conference on peace in the Philippines ten years ago. The peace movement fears that there is always a chance that this might happen. For example, a national commission related to the government declared the peace zones as social development areas to be allocated 5 million pesos each. A former, similar experience in a peace zone had proved that the community became prone to patronage and corruption. Allocation of the money through the people themselves, and not through the local government, could avoid these practices, the representatives of the peace zones said. But, at the end, the Fidel Ramos government decided to donate the money through the local administration anyway.
Besides the CfP, there are a number of other groups who try to build peace from the grassroots. One of them is the National Peace Conference (NPC). Members are non-governmental and peoples’ organisations. In 1990, after consultations with seventeen sectors, a peace agenda was passed. ‘The Basic Peace’ agenda was going to be pushed by the people’s movement both with the government and the National Democratic Front.
The murder of Ninoy Aquino in 1983 was the beginning of the end
of the Marcos dictatorship. Although the assassination of the
Philippines’ foremost opposition leader was headline news around
the world, it was almost unreported by the Marcos controlled media
in the country itself. The media silence was accusation enough.
Two million mourners attended the funeral ceremonies in the largest
political demonstration to date in the history of the archipelago.
The Non-violent People’s Power Revolution of 1986
Something had snapped in the Filipinos’ passive acceptance of
the dictator’s repression. The people wanted to reclaim their
political freedom and dignity.
At the end of 1985, Marcos suddenly announced elections, to be
held at the beginning of 1986. Aquino’s widow, Corazon ‘Cory’
Aquino became the main opposition candidate for president. The
elections turned out to be a farce. Aquino refused to concede
defeat and called on her followers to rally the next day in Manila’s
Rizal Park. Close to a million supporters responded, to hear Cory
outline a national campaign of civil disobedience. She called
for a boycott of the businesses owned by Marcos’ crony capitalists,
and for a general strike to begin on February 25; the day of Marcos’
inauguration.
A few days before the inauguration, two important politicians,
Enrile and Ramos, announced at a news conference their withdrawal
of support for Marcos due to the massive fraud he had committed
at the snap elections. They called on the armed forces to join
the rebellion and barricade themselves in Camp Aguinaldo. Marcos
urged them to ‘stop this stupidity’.
The archbishop of Manila called on all peace-loving Filipinos
to bring food to the soldiers at Camp Aquinaldo, pray and keep
vigil.
‘They are our friends’, he said.
The call was heeded. Assembling at the camp, people formed a human
barricade to block an attack by forces loyal to Marcos. For once,
the civilians were to protect the military.
The day after, a large marine force, led by tanks and armoured
personnel carriers, headed for the camp. They were stopped a mile
from their target by tens of thousands of people forming a human
shield. The marine commander threatened to shoot. The people did
not budge. They threw flowers and cigarettes at the soldiers in
their tanks.
The soldiers had only learned to attack armed people. Helpless
against this shower of affection from innocent people, they withdrew.
On February 25, almost two million people came out to protest
on the EDSA, the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, a main road named
after the revolution. Nearly the entire Armed Forces had peacefully
deserted Marcos in support of Cory Aquino. The EDSA revolution
had been bloodless; the people formed the winning party.
From 1990 on, more and more organisations became members of the peace movement. This demanded co-ordination. The Gaston Z. Ortigas Peace Institute came into existence as a base for the various volunteer citizens’ groups.
‘We are all practitioners,’ says Quintos-Deles about the peace movement in the Philippines. ‘We do not have time enough to study and reflect on what we do. We hope in trying to make things understandable to others, we will make things understandable to ourselves.’
The Catholic church has played an important role. More than three-quarters of the population is Catholic and the church has had a large influence. Before the revolution, it was a major power with some credibility among the people. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) has a network of thousands of parish churches all over the country. Its pastoral letters had become more and more critical towards the dictatorship and urged non-violence and passive resistance. During the People’s Power Revolution, the church was in the forefront, gathering the people, calling for non-violent resistance, and, at the same time, trying to avoid a bloodbath.
Feedback please to
j.verhoeven@euconflict.org