MAMASAPANO, Maguindanao, Philippines – Nothing could persuade 4-year-old Ider to show us his toy. He hides it in the shallow cave of his own cupped hands, his eyes close to tears.

“He is afraid you will take it away,” his sister Fatma explains the boy’s terrorized look. “It is the only one he has.”

Ider’s lone possession, according to his sister, is a plastic white horse that has lost its two front legs and its tail broken at the tip.

Under the canopy of a tent, Mohammed Macadisdis pretends to fly a toy helicopter that has lost its wings and propeller with his right hand while his other hand grips a plastic bottle of milk formula from which he drinks.

His father, who is nursing a swollen foot, cuddles him. “See, the copter has blood all over. It got hit,” the father explains in jest why the yellow-painted toy was smeared with red paint “from the antimortar of the Moro.”

Internally displaced

Ider and Moner are just two of the hundreds of children who are among the bakwit, or the internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Mamasapano, Maguindanao. They belong to the huge civilian population of Maguindanao descent who are caught in the crossfire of protracted hostilities between government troops and Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) rebels after the peace talks collapsed over the ancestral domain agreement in August. This month, the Supreme Court upheld with finality its ruling that the unsigned draft agreement, popularly known as MOA-AD BJE (Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain Bangsamoro Juridical Entity), is unconstitutional.

Non-government organizations assert that the IDPs now number close to 600,000, but the Nov. 18 update by Glenn Rabonza, executive officer of the National Disaster Coordinating Council, says they are around 296,000 only. Two-thirds of the IDPs are in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao.

The two children, toys in hand, were also among the 10,000 persons who stood for hours along the Maharlika Highway recently in order to launch a campaign upholding the rights of IDPs, especially of children like themselves, which was supported by the Kadtuntaya Foundation Inc.

Globally, the non-government Save the Children, reports that “of the estimated 24.5 million conflict-related IDPs in the world, about 50 percent are children.”

Children at risk

“With an uncertain future, repeated emotional stress and only minimal access to education, children are at risk of sexual abuse and exploitation, physical harm, separation from their families, psychosocial distress, gender-based violence,” Save the Children says

According to data compiled by the Cotabato-based Consortium of Bangsamoro Civil Society (CBCS), most of those who are victimized by the war are children.

“The casualties and injured are mostly children and women, aged less than a month to 18 years old,” observed Mike Kulat, CBCS Peace Building Officer at a recent stop-the-war peace rally and dialogue in Midsayap, North Cotabato.

Moner, 10, stays almost all day inside a trailer-cum-cart. The cart carries everything that his family salvaged as their house burned after being hit by artillery fire in the village of Dugengen about four months ago.

It, too, has become his family’s temporary dwelling.

He slays imagined enemies with his plastic silver sword. But he refuses to play with other boys. “He would not play with others,” says his mother. He missed school, she added. It has been almost four months since he stopped going to school in July.

Interfaith mission

As a result of the military offensives, a recent interfaith fact-finding mission reported, many children among the evacuees are suffering from trauma and display anti-social behavior like Moner.

“This [trauma] is manifested in restlessness and the disruption of sleeping patterns,” says Amabella Carumba, secretary-general of the Mindanao People’s Peace Movement (MPPM), which led the fact-finding mission.

Carumba also told the Inquirer that at therapy workshops held by the same mission at evacuation centers in Datu Piang and Pikit, children expressed fears of war, soldiers and guns. “They also are afraid of going back to their communities,” she noted.

A total of 214 children underwent therapy during the mission.

The Department of Social Work and Development and the NGO Community Family Services have provided play therapy and storytelling sessions to 436 children in the village.

But there are children IDPs who don’t even have toys. Norhamir Salibo, whose tarak-tarak (toy truck) got left behind as they fled from burning homes, spends time drawing the same images over and over again on the pages of a notebook: he draws a house and above it, a helicopter.

Then, he draws circles and hatches over the house till there is almost nothing but a dark inkblot. “It is on fire,” he explains when asked why he blots out the house.

“The plane threw fire on our house and our house is burning, burning.” Whose plane is it? The enemies, the military, he answered quickly.