52-year-old Datu was shot in front of his family, while tending to his farm at the
mountains of Sitio Palo 10, Barangay Camp Edward, Alegria.
On 4 April 2018, Antonio Takinan, the IP mandatory representative to the
town council of Magpet, North Cotabato, was killed in an ambush. Communist
rebels later claimed responsibility, declaring that the execution was an imposition
of revolutionary justice against “anti-people” individuals.
To date, killings on both sides continue unabated, with no end in sight.
Undoubtedly, rampant resource-exploitation by outside business interests has
given impetus to insurgency. These killings have been attributed in equal measure
to outside business interests, the military establishment, paramilitary groups, the
NPA, politicians, and a religious group, who all have commercial interests and
who all have benefitted from the exploitation of the resources in these ancestral
domains.
Clearly, indigenous communities in parts of ancestral Mindanao are fracturing
in conflict. In these conflict areas, three faces of the Lumad have emerged: that of
the CPP-NPA; that of paramilitary groups supported by the military; and that of
the largely uneducated, hapless Lumad majority, caught in the crossfires.
It would be simplistic to say that ideology is the single driver of conflict in
the ancestral domains of Mindanao. Documentary, testimonial, and anecdotal
evidence gathered during the Commission’s inquiry point to the fact that landuse and the extraction of mineral resources are inextricably linked to insurgency.
Unfortunately for most of the IPs, these natural resources, far from lifting them
from poverty, have only added to their misery and oppression.
Fear and poverty, abetted by government neglect and decades of exploitation,
have also contributed to making the Lumad vulnerable to displacement.
Indeed, even within their ancestral domains, the voices of the Lumad are
rarely heard, their human rights never fully respected. And, whenever they are
forced into displacement, their humanitarian conditions are quickly forgotten, if
not readily sacrificed in the din of partisan debate among politicians, government
agencies, NGOs, and religious organizations.
The recommendations in this Report are based on the results of field
investigations, fact-finding missions, ocular inspections, oral testimonies and
affidavits proffered during the public hearings and consultative dialogues held
by the Commission, and motu proprio cognition of relevant public reports and
documents up to the first half of 2018.
Roberto Eugenio T. Cadiz
Commissioner
Commission on Human Rights
of the Philippines
22 May 2018, Quezon City, Philippines
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