Jevilyn Cullamat
DAVAO CITY, Philippines —The young “lumad” (indigenous) woman killed in an encounter last month between the military and the communist New People’s Army (NPA) is remembered as wanting badly to change the injustice she saw around her.
Jevilyn Cullamat, the youngest daughter of Bayan Muna Rep. Eufemia Cullamat, was a shy yet diligent girl who took to heart all her responsibilities at home and in the farm, her cousin Pablito Campos IV recalls.
Her parents’ lifelong work with the lumad group Mapasu in upholding the rights of indigenous people subjected the family to constant threats, so that Jevilyn’s childhood was marked by constant moving from one place to another, says Campos.
The military has blamed the party list group Bayan Muna and similar progressive organizations, and even the lumad schools that it shut down before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, for “brainwashing” young people like Jevilyn to join the NPA, the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines.
But according to Campos, it was Jevilyn’s experiences that opened her eyes to the suffering of her people. He says that despite her being quiet and shy, she gradually assumed a leadership role in the community as she came of age at the height of the lumad evacuations in 2015.“She found that she could not go anywhere else because of the injustice and inequality that she saw all around,” he says. “She offered her life to change it. She offered her life as a sacrifice.”
Campos, who is 9 years older than Jevilyn, says he last saw her in 2018.
Jevilyn died in an encounter on Nov. 28 between the 3rd Special Forces’ “Arrowhead” Battalion and NPA troops in Barangay San Isidro, Marihatag, Bukidnon. She was 22.
Per the report of the Army that confirmed her identity from former rebels, she served as an NPA medic belonging to the armed propaganda unit of the guerrilla group’s northeastern regional committee.
Neither first nor last
Rius Valle, executive director and spokesperson for the network Save Our School (SOS), says Jevilyn was neither the first nor the last lumad or other Filipino youth to offer her life for the defense of oppressed people, especially now that the government had abandoned peace talks with rebel groups and chosen to end the insurgency through militarist means.
“The oppression that she saw pushed her to join the armed struggle,” Valle says.
Campos says he came to know his cousin well when the Cullamats moved to his family’s place in Barangay Diatagon in Lianga, Surigao del Sur.
Jevilyn, a product of lumad schools, consistently did well in her academics and in agriculture: first at the Tribal Filipino Program of Surigao del Sur for grade school, and then at the Alternative Learning Center for Agriculture and Livelihood Development (Alcadev) for high school.
She was 17 when members of the paramilitary group Magahat Bagani awakened and rounded up the Han-ayan community in Lianga early on Sept. 1, 2015.
The gunmen accused the villagers of supporting the NPA and gathered them in the basketball court, where Mapasu leader Dionel Campos, a first cousin of Jevilyn’s mother, and Juvello Sinzo, also a relative, were killed before their eyes.
Later, at sunrise, they found the body of Alcadev executive director Emerito Samarca in one of the classrooms, his throat slit.
The horrific killings, which eventually came to be known as the “Lianga Massacre,” drove the Han-ayan community to flee and seek refuge in an evacuation site in Tandag City, where they stayed for more than a year. It was in the makeshift Alcadev school set up in the evacuation site where Jevilyn completed high school in 2016.
Campos says he is proud of his cousin, whom the family fondly called Jevjev before she assumed the name “Ka Rev.”
“She was still very young but she chose to offer her life to fight for her people,” he says. “She was not thinking only of herself. We honor her for that, and we will give her a loving tribute.”
Outrage
But Jevilyn’s family and friends were angered by photos posted online of soldiers posing with her corpse, along with supposedly seized firearms and communist flags. “We were outraged by the desecration of her body,” says the SOS’ Valle. “It was not the first time they did it to the lumad,” he says, recalling another incident of lumad killings on Oct. 18, 2012, in Sitio Alyong, Barangay Kimlawis, in Kiblawan, Davao del Sur.
Daguil Capion, a member of the B’laan tribe, had armed himself in the course of opposing the Tampakan mining project in South Cotabato. His wife Juvy and their sons Jordan, 13, and John Mark, 6, were killed in a military raid on their farm, and their corpses were exposed to the sun to pressure him to surrender.
Congresswoman Cullamat, Jevilyn’s mother, has filed a complaint with the Commission on Human Rights (CHR). “They displayed mercilessly and without respect her remains like a trophy won by the soldiers…” the mother said in a letter to CHR Chair Chito Gascon.
Jevilyn was buried on Dec. 3 in a public cemetery in Lianga. Congresswoman Cullamat could not be present because of threats to her life.
“She wanted to come home for the burial but we told her not to because we were already grieving for the loss of Jevilyn. We wouldn’t be able to take it if we would lose another life,” says Campos.
Valle says President Rodrigo Duterte’s recent call for lumad who have joined the NPA to return home sounds like a threat.
Ethnocide
“You lumads, go home,” the President said on Nov. 30 in a speech, addressing indigenous people who have become insurgents. He added: “Tell your people that they are being deceived … by the NPA. That’s the truth. Many lumads have died. So if this thing goes on, the lumad, the really native Filipinos, will become an extinct tribe.”
Comments Valle: “That’s tantamount to a threat of ethnocide. To say that the lumad will soon go extinct, that’s dangerous and irresponsible to say.”
If not for the injustice and oppression that she saw around her, Jevilyn would have led a normal life, Valle says. “But the life of a lumad is not normal.”
He says that “barely two weeks” before the Lianga Massacre, there was the “Pangantucan Massacre”—a reference to the killing of five farmers in a remote village in Pangantucan, Bukidnon, on Aug. 18, 2015.
According to Valle, the lumad schools built by church people and lumad parents are being closed down, “shutting down the lumad dream for education.”
“Their ancestral lands are being taken away from them,” he laments, adding: “Where else can they turn?” INQ