The alleged massacre in Purok 7, Paradise Embac, Paquibato District highlights another scenario of militarization even in a popular city which recently ranked as the 4th safest city in the world.
Three civilians were killed. All of them were farmers, while two of them were Ata-Manobo community leaders. Aida Seisa, the owner of the house where they were attacked, is a known women-leader of the peasant group Paquibato District Peasant Alliance.
It glaringly illustrates how the Philippine state forces, including its paramilitary units, treat organized communities whose goal is to primarily defend their land and the environment.
Where the United Nations policy document (UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) urges all states to promote and protect indigenous peoples (IP) rights, further, it provides for strengthening IP organization and leadership as it advances cultural identity.
The state agents believe otherwise – eliminate their local leaders in order to secure foreign and local investors in their greed for the natural and mineral resources that abound in the locality.
While the Philippine law (IPRA) upholding the international legal instrument is mired with its own lapses, it embraces the call to sustain self-organization of Lumads and envisions self-sustaining communities, to say the least.
This approximation of UN instrument does not guarantee full enjoyment of the Lumad rights and meeting their needs as a distinct people evidently with rising extrajudicial killings committed against conscientized tribal leaders.
Defence of their territories is inherent in the IP culture and politics. It is a way of life that each is expected to respect and sustain if society wants to integrate them to mainstream development following principle of inclusion and right to self-determination.
Science dictates that their indigenous knowledge contributes to the lowland settlers’ advancement and the nation as a whole if only formal leaders recognize this unequivocably.
Terminating their lives and other acts of ethnocide like closure of schools and clipping their initiatives in improving their lives call for a national and global action that this present dispensation has to squarely face now and in the near future.
The blunder against the IPs with environmental plunder are critical issues that this administration cannot escape.
