Mindanao Revisited

Once again I spend a few days in central Mindanao. While a day in Pikit area, two days in Cotabato city and a brief stint to Midsayap gave me impressions, it was certainly not enough to immerse in a community and really deeply understand the impact of the current conflict. So I shall stick to a few impressions. In Cotabato I felt detached in a complex way, much the more since I spend a good chunk of time in the guesthouse in order not to be a liability on my companion’s short-notice trips to a hotspot area in Datu Piang.
Cotabato once again struck me as a sad town. While Davao, Kidapawan or even Midsayap are buzzing and booming with traffic and commerce and forever changing their faces, Cotabato still seems poor and neglected with a looming shadow. There are frequent bombings, assassinations of local politicians and the crime level is high. At one crossing in the town center there are about six or so pawnshops. Each time I come to Cotabato, friends and collegues tell me horror stories – “this is the café where a local councillor was shot the other day, I was just driving past”, “just 30 meters from my home a bomb went off last year, body-parts splashed up to the wall of my house”, “this hole is the remnant of yet another bombing of the bus station just a few months ago”, etc.
Of course, these superficial impressions are influenced by me being Caucasian, all the inner city travel advisory from my Filipino companions and the overall mystery of crime and punishment that overcasts conversations when you say you intent to travel to Cotabato. Also, the city hardly has any taxis – there are too many hold-ups and too few people are willing to pay the extra Peso for a cab, I was told. My mobility, in turn, was limited and I could not help feeling like a spoiled child waiting for people to pick me up.
I was touched by this lush and abundantly overgrowing garden around a small fishpond at my guesthouse – long ago somebody had created this little idyllic Eden there and had even placed clay figures into the scenery: In the middle of the pond stood a child wearing a T-shirt with “City Boy” written on and he was happily waiving its clay arms. To his left sat a large white swan, which in his glorious past must have even been able to spout water. I particularly liked four musicians joyfully playing from within an overgrowing bush and I could not help thinking of the Beatles. Above it all and in the back stood a large virgin Mary. I was really puzzled by this garden and I wondered what it said about its maker – other than that he/she was probably Christian – was this intended as an antidote to the city, like a treatment to the trauma of harsh everyday realities or was it merely an expression of somebody’s love to a city? The latter, somehow, seemed to me too naïve to be true. Maybe it shouldn't.
But what am I writing here… To be honest, I do not want to write about the conflict today, although I had some interesting conversations and I did get a fair grasp of the current situation. But I do not want to jam this place with half-baked political analyses. It’s meant for impressions...
Just a few snippets from my beloved Pikit – there are still about 400 families evacuating within the municipality, waiting in makeshift huts for the calamities in their villages to settle or too scared to go back just yet. There are many more in other places in Maguindadao and Lanao, all in all currently around 34,000 families. Rumours of war are frequently cropping up and there is a lot of uncertainty. From Pikit, we drove some way into Liguasan marsh and I was torn between the beauty of the area and the hardship of its people. An Al Jazeera TV crew was interviewing an old man in his preliminary shelter along the side of the dirt road: How many times in his life he had had to evacuate, they asked him. He could not remember. Another man told me they had not received any food supplies since the beginning of Ramadan and he was starting to get worried. Yet another one burst out in a frustrated rant against conflict, poverty and the government when I greeted him. Later on we drove past a large crowd of pupils on their way home from school and our companion said “here comes the next generation of MILF mujahideens.” I was wondering what else I would have become if I had grown up in this beautiful, fought over place.