Moro Liberation through Intercultural
Constitutional Dialogue
(April 6 – 18, 2008)
by Michael Frank A. Alar
 |
| Michael
Frank A. Alar |
In an archipelago of 7,107 islands dubbed as the “pearl of
the orient,” where more than 80 million people from a hundred
ethno-linguistic groups bask in a lot of sand, sea and sun, a Muslim
minority refuses to call themselves Filipinos. Such refusal is a
remnant of their resistance to centuries of Spanish and American
colonization and decades of marginalization and discrimination from
a predominantly Christian government and society. The
moros,
as they would rather be called, used to make up 76 percent of the
population of the southern Philippine island of Mindanao a century
ago
(1). Today, their percentage
has been sharply reduced to about 20-25 percent due largely to successful
resettlement of non-Muslim farmers from the Northern and Central
Philippines during the colonial period. The situation turned violent
when the Moro National Liberation Front emerged demanding secession
as a reaction to the dictatorial Martial Rule by Ferdinand Marcos.
But even after the revolution in Manila in 1986 that ousted the
dictator and restored democracy through the promulgation of a new
constitution, which included provisions for regional autonomy for
Muslims, the Mindanao problem persisted.
In his discussion of the elements of the Constitution of Liberty,
Dahrendorf wrote “the link between freedom and democracy”
is “the way in which power is organized…and reined
in.”(2) The 1987 Philippine
Constitution, though crafted by people who were still celebrating
their freshly recovered freedom from 20 years of tyrannical rule,
has not succeeded in re-distributing power from the center, which
people in Mindanao, even non-Muslims, still refer to as “Imperial
Manila.” Immense amount of power, including supervision
over the autonomous regions and other local governments units
in the country, was vested upon the president. Somehow it has
entrenched even more deeply a patronage political set-up where
the periphery is beholden to the center, waiting for graces from
Manila to rain upon them as dogs do for scraps from their masters.
And like dogs, some local chief executives sit when the president
says so.
There should be little wonder then why some people outside of
the national capital hardly find reasons for celebrating the first
People Power revolution besides the fact that it has been declared
a holiday; a day to enjoy the sand, the sea and the sun. This
feeling of alienation apparently is not just political but unfortunately
also social. An average of 56.75 percent of households in Mindanao
have rated themselves hungry and poor in 40 surveys conducted
from 1988 until 2007, which spans the past four government administrations
since the promulgation of the present constitution. Compare this
to an average of only 31.05 percent in the National Capital Region.(3)
As Mindanao is considered the fruit basket of the country, supplying
the rest of the archipelago and markets abroad, such a fact about
hunger there would have been funny if it were not true. This fact
becomes stark when the data shows that out of the 77 provinces
in the country, the bottom three are found in Muslim Mindanao,
wallowing in poverty incidences between 55.7 and 88.8 while that
of Metro Manila is set at 4.3.(4)
Their Human Development Indices are as low as that of impoverished
African countries like Ghana, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Swaziland –
between 0.498 and 0.540.(5)
The reform I wish to highlight, therefore, is constitutional.
Liberals in the Philippines are advocating such a reform as well,
proposing that the country switches from a presidential to a parliamentary
and federalist form of government. Federalism, they argue, can
better accommodate the differences and peculiarities in a culturally
diverse and geographically archipelagic country such as the Philippines.
Meinardus and Raichle(6) of Friedrich
Naumann Foundation and the Liberal Institute argued that the underlying
“principle of subsidiarity” in such a government set-up
offers the governed more power to decide thus providing more opportunities
at determining themselves. This thus gives more autonomy, which
essentially is synonymous with liberty. Though I agree entirely
with the liberals in my country, I wish to further this liberal
constitutional reform agenda by shifting the weight of the focus
not just on the agenda itself, which is the form of government,
but also on the process of reform to be undertaken. I strongly
believe that if we sincerely want to address the grievances of
our Muslim brothers and sisters down south, we as a nation of
diverse cultures, must reorganize the way we have allowed ourselves
to be governed.
So how do we exactly change our constitution? When Hernando de
Soto(7) told the Indonesian ministers
to listen to the barking dogs in the countryside, he was advising
them to discover “the people’s law” and facilitate
its integration into the formal system in order to make undocumented
capital goods available to the market. His thoughts can also serve
the purpose of my reform proposal. Our new constitution needs
to take not only Muslim but also indigenous cultural traditions
and legal systems seriously and to find a way to accommodate,
if not integrate, them within the formal set-up. A Filipino advocate
for constitutional change sees a need for such constitutional
negotiations to therefore become a form of intercultural dialogue
if we are to address the problem in Mindanao. I agree as I am
of the opinion that the way we Filipinos have organized our present
government is also reflective not only of our ignorance of the
true plight of the Muslims in the Philippines but also of our
prejudices towards them as a people.
A change process that is interculturally dialogical could open
the way for the search of a constitutional truth that, borrowing
from Popper(9), “demands
… the discovery of prejudices (emphasis mine) by way of
… critical discussion.” Beyond just discovering our
prejudices, but by “listening to the barking dogs,”
to speak in de Soto’s(10)
terms, in negotiating changes in our constitution (which I also
believe ought to be our approach in discussing blasphemy), we
may come to understand their language. This could hold the key
in liberating knowledge from the hidden narratives, which modern
academics and politicians have relegated to the sidelines or periphery
of things we now commonly consider as knowledge. Hopefully, through
this process, we Filipinos will be able to fashion a constitution
that is both reflective and respectful of the diversity with which
our country is blessed, along with our sand, sea and sun. Thereby,
not only protecting the interest of minorities such as the Muslims
down south but also giving them the liberty for which precious
lives have, for decades, been spent unnecessarily.
Michael Alar submitted this essay during the online phase
of this seminar.
1 Santos, Soliman M. Jr. (2001). “The
Moro Islamic Challenge: Constitutional Rethinking for the Mindanao
Peace Process. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press.
2. Dahrendorf , Ralf (2007). “On Freedom.” In Brack,
D. & Randall, E. (eds.) Dictionary of Liberal Thought. pp.
125-130.
3. Social Weather Station (28 January 2008). “Media Release:
December 2007 Social Weather Survey: Self-Rated Food Poverty at
record-low 34%” (URL: http://www.sws.org.ph/)
4.Human Development Network (2005). Philippine Human Development
Report 2005: Peace, Human Security and Human Development in the
Philippines. Quezon City: HDN. P. 19. (URL: http://www.hdn.org.ph/files/2005_PHDR.pdf)
5. _________, p. 105. The Philippine HDI is 0.721. (“The
HDI provides a composite measure of three dimensions of human
development: living a long and healthy life (measured by life
expectancy), being educated (measured by adult literacy and enrolment
at the primary, secondary and tertiary level) and having a decent
standard of living (measured by purchasing power parity, PPP,
income).”
6. In Nachura, A.E.B. & Malaya, J.E. (2003). “Liberal
Views on Constitutional Reform”. Manila: National Institute
for Policy Studies.
7. “Hernando de Soto on Property” (Extract f rom an
in Focaal – European Journal of Anthropology, no. 41, 2002,
reproduced on the Cato Institute website (www.cato.org) . It is
a condensed version of claims and material from Hernando de Soto's
The mystery of capital: why capitalism triumphs in the West and
fails everywhere else, London: Bantam Press, 2000.
8. Santos, ibid.
9. Popper, Karl (1963). “Public Opinion and Liberal Principles”
in Conjectures and Refutations. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
10 . Hernando de Soto, ibid.
