When spokesmen of the Office of the Presidential Assistant on the Peace Process (OPAPP) earlier talked about the Peace Process with the MILF, they often went into a lecture on Philippine history, and repeat what our Islamic brethren have always claimed and like to hear: Christian Filipinos have continuously been exploiting them together with other indigenous tribes.

Other indigenous tribes?

Many of us have gotten used to the reference to Muslim Filipinos, that they are “indigenous” and entitled to the rights under the Indigenous People’s Rights Act (IPRA), although it is far from the truth. In reality, the IPRA has properly defined this.

Arroyo administration

A recent glaring error was during the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration, when her government negotiated, with Malaysian “assistance,” the Memorandum of Agreement on the Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD) virtually recognizing as Ancestral Domain of the Muslims almost all of Mindanao, the Sulu Archipelago and Palawan province.

This idea was conceived as a result of negotiating with the MILF under dubious circumstances in Malaysia, with Malaysians closely advising the MILF panel, and Malaysia supporting the effort. Last year’s investigations in Malaysia with regard to missing funds under the Office of the Prime Minister revealed large sums of money related to such.

Of course, Malaysia’s covert role within its overt presence in the Peace Process is quite known, and its problems with the Sultanate of Sulu is the primary reason.

A United Nations – International Organization on Migration (UN-IOM) Mission to study the land distribution problem in Mindanao wrongly used the Framework Agreement on the Bangsamoro (FAB) as something “given” although such “Agreement” together with the MOA-AD, was deemed constitutionally questionable. Its report showed that the status has the same general nature as those in other parts of the country: poor people getting, or complaining about “getting the raw end of the deal.” Its report, in fact even gives recommendations for the so-called Transition Commission under the FAB to address.

Let us look at the Philippines (before it got that name), say in the years before the arrival of the Arab missionaries that brought Islam to Indonesia, Malaysia and the southern part of the Philippine archipelago.

There were many Philippine tribes scattered all over the archipelago. The islands were peopled by Pacific islanders, followed by Indonesians particularly at the height of the power of the Majapahit Empire, which reached the Southern Philippines before it ended during the Islamization of Indonesia. Early British and American scholars classified the Filipino people as part of the Malay race, but perhaps better classed as Indo-Malays descriptive of the people that eventually populated Indonesia, the Malay Peninsula, Borneo and the Philippines. These are the only people in Asia (from North Africa and the Caucasus to Japan) whose languages are not written in Sanskrit, characters or symbols.

The real indigenous Filipinos, are all the tribes from the Batanes Islands to the Sulu Archipelago prior to the arrival of foreign influence.

It is known that conversion to Islam started with the people of Tawi-Tawi, then spread to mainland Mindanao and even up to Southern Luzon. Thus, since we define indigenous peoples as those unaffected by foreign culture, even early Muslim Filipinos were already non-indigenous, compared to the northern tribes, who were still unaffected by an alien culture and religion; the other tribes from Luzon and the Visayas at that time would therefore be classed together with the true indigenous peoples of today.

So how did the common terminology get confused? I used the term “common” because the real indigenous tribes are better covered in scholarly references.

When the Spanish “discovered” and named the islands as Filipinas, the process of conversion to Christianity began. The indigenous tribes were easy to convert and conquer through conversion, despite the early demise of Ferdinand Magellan, who was slain by the Cebuano tribe in the Battle of Mactan. Once Christianized, the tribes were considered mainstream, and subsequent scholars grouped the Muslims commonly with the other non-Christians as “indigenous.”

Reading a discourse on Constitutional policies regarding the ancestral domain as applied to Indigenous Peoples (IPs) does not imply a concession to what has become the current concept as developed under the past administrations, particularly with respect to the MOA-AD of the Arroyo administration, which has been ruled as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

The 1986 Constitution institutionalized the commitment of the Marcos presidency that was made in the Tripoli Agreement of 1976: It called for the creation of two autonomous regions, one for the Cordilleras and the other for Muslim Mindanao. Not merely because they comprised areas where the two liberation movements were active, but because the peaceniks were convinced that these were the only means of getting peace finally secured.

Aquino and Duterte Administrations

During the administration of Benigno Simeon Aquino Jr., the negotiation with the MILF, still with Malaysian involvement, continued and ended with the high profile signing of the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (CAB) at Malacañang. This Executive Agreement became the starting point for the Bangsamoro Basic law (BBL), indeed an unconstitutional reference. The Association of Generals and Flag Officers (AGFO) opposed the BBL. Notwithstanding the exchange of views with the representatives of the AGFO at the Office of the President in late 2014, the Aquino government pursued the BBL, but its passage was nevertheless delayed. However, President Rodrigo Duterte contends that the only way to solve the Muslim insurgency is to proceed with the BBL, and Congress went on to enact a much watered-down version, renamed the Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL). It has been signed into law but opposed by some quarters, including the provincial government of Sulu just this October, 2018.

In a lecture early this year (2018) before the Association of Generals and Flag Officers, the PHILCONSA Chairman Justice Manuel Lazaro stated clearly that creation of any new Bangsamoro region is unconstitutional because Section 19 of Article X prescribes the manner the ARMM should be created:

Section 19. The first Congress elected under this Constitution shall, within eighteen months from the time of organization of both Houses, pass the organic acts for the autonomous regions in Muslim Mindanao and the Cordilleras.

Thus, the only way to effect any change is to amend the existing ARMM Law. This also appears to be the same rationale in Sulu pleading before the Supreme Court.

We hope that the final resolution of this issue will not result in dire consequences for the integrity of the country and the real interest of the Filipino people.