CETRI
The decades-old conflict in Mindanao, southern Philippines, is often framed as a Muslim–
Christian conflict and reinterpreted as such within the US-led global war on terror, with the
Muslim secessionist movement standing accused of providing a hub for international jihad.
In the meantime, global economic integration has made it easier to ignore the agrarian roots
of violent conflict in Mindanao, enabling national and sub-national actors, including the
international community and the Muslim or Moro separatists, to dismiss the issue of
agrarian justice. We counter these arguments by using an agrarian political economy
framework to uncover the roots of resilient violence in Mindanao, using historical narratives
of the region from the end of the nineteenth century that accentuate the links between
state-making, control of land and labour, and processes of agrarian modernization. We
emphasize the critical role played by the Muslim landed elites who shaped processes of
state-making by brokering the interests of their clans with exogenous actors at the national
and international level.We shed light on emerging state policies and competing interests
among other landed and agribusiness elites that resulted in the spread of a parallel
underground economy, renewing opportunities for violence and crime within semiautonomous
social worlds.
Introduction
The long-running conflict in the southern island of Mindanao in the Philippines is often
framed in terms of a conflict between Muslims (roughly about 10 per cent of the national
population and concentrated in the southern portion of Mindanao) and Christians (overwhelmingly
Roman Catholic), hinting at religious roots as a factor in explaining the situation
(e.g. Hernandez 2005 ; Stewart 2009). The armed conflict between the government and Moro
secessionist rebels erupted during the Marcos era (1965–85) and continues unabated. The war
has involved six national administrations and several factions of the Moro secessionist movement,
and has claimed more than 120,000 lives on both sides of the fighting, causing untold damage to local livelihoods and displacing some 2 million people (Soliman 2001 ; Lara and
Champaign 2009 ; 4). Hostilities remain, despite the huge amounts of aid and expert advice
given by foreign donors to end conflict in the region.
The US government enlisted the Philippines in the global war on terror after 11 September
2001, tagging the Abu Sayaff Group (ASG), a small armed faction involved in kidnapping and
extortion in the southernmost islands of Mindanao, as a member of the al-Qaeda network
and a vital link in international jihad. In 2002, the Bush administration sent 660 US troops to
the Philippines, deploying them in the south of the archipelago to assist in hostage rescue and
counter-insurgency operations.This contributed to the opening of a second, South-East Asian,
front inWashington’s war on terrorism and consequently legitimized the security apparatus of
the Macapagal–Arroyo administration (2001–10). Since 2001, the Philippine army, with support
from the United States, has carried out several operations against the ASG in the islands of Sulu
and Basilan, leading to the further displacement of hundreds of thousands of people in both
provinces (IDMC 2008).
Several articles in the journal Foreign Affairs (Gershman 2002 ; Rogers 2004 ; McIndoe 2010)
have challenged the flawed security framework that underlies the ‘war on terror’ adopted against
Islamist extremists in the Philippines.This framework obscures the enormous complexity of the
Mindanao situation and diverts attention away from the socio-economic and political issues
related to the local economy, the weakness of states in the region and the fragility of democratic
institutions. Several studies have warned against treating the conflict as a case of a violent
Muslim population terrorizing its Christian neighbours, or suggesting links to al-Qaeda and the
operatives of the South-East Asian Jemaah Islamiyah network without adequate evidence.These
flawed perspectives fail to recognize the historical roots of the conflict, and the ways in which
violence and war are embedded in specific processes of social transformation in a regional
political economy. It is unlikely that there is a single explanation for the conflict in Mindanao,
and therefore scholars examine different dimensions, such as land disputes, political representation,
state discrimination and cultural differences (Gowing 1988 ; Azurin 1996).The desire for
a hasty peace agreement, in the hope of preventing more violence, ignores the insurgency’s
deep historical roots. Collier and Cook (2006) have argued that this might hurt the peace
process itself and prevent solutions addressing the agrarian roots of the war. [1]
After more than three decades of violent conflict, no fundamental solution is in sight for the
problems of poverty and separatist conflict in Mindanao. The road to peace has become long,
complex and intractable. There have been two peace agreements (1976 and 1996) and the
passage of three laws (the 1977 Marcos proclamation, Republic Act 6734 and Republic Act
9054).The peace process has harnessed the support and mediation of international actors (the
Organization of the Islamic Conference, the Libyan and Indonesian governments, and others),
leading to numerous plebiscites and elections, and the creation of various transitional bodies
such as the Southern Philippines Council for Peace Development (SPCPD), headed by Moro
National Liberation Front (MNLF) chair Nur Misuari. After the 1996 peace agreement, the
unsettled negotiations between the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF)
became more crucial as a barometer of armed conflict, especially after President Joseph Estrada
launched an all-out war against the insurgents in 2000. This was repeated in 2008 after the
aborted signing of the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD).
National and local political elites who feared the loss of their territories and constituencies in
the mixed barangays (Philippine community units, ranging in size from small villages to towns
with thousands of households) won a petition to block the MOA-AD in the Supreme Court.
The agreement would have expanded the scope of autonomy and conferred self-governance to
local communities (McIndoe 2010).
This paper develops two arguments grounding the continuing war in agrarian questions.
First, we argue that the conflict is symptomatic of social justice issues not addressed by a
succession of Philippine governments, the Mindanao elite and the mainstream Moro revolutionary
organizations.We point to the highly skewed distribution of ownership and control over
land resources in the southern Philippines and the politically contested and competing formal
and informal regulatory institutions around social relations of land property, a situation with
deep roots in the colonial and post-colonial political economy (Gutierrez and Borras 2004).
Second, we assert that violent conflicts are symbolic of an ongoing painful process of economic
and social transformation particularly affecting the political position and power to accumulate
of local strong men, embedded in a new and evolving division of labour driven by global
agrarian modernization affecting group structures and regulatory ties in agrarian communities
(Vellema 2002).
In this context, solutions to violent conflict require inclusive development processes that
include some forms of redistributive reform – that is, land reform and land restitution – and
must ground conflict resolution and peace-building in agrarian structures and institutions.The
need for such processes lead us to argue that while it is critical to link analysis to the colonial
and post-colonial exploitation of the region, and discrimination against Muslim and indigenous
peoples, it is equally important to address contemporary political–economic dynamics within
Muslim society itself (Lara and Champaign 2009). In this paper, we do this by linking a
historical perspective to a description of the emergence of an underground economy, and to an
investigation of a case throwing light on the integration of local Muslim societies into an
agribusiness scheme.
