A miracle on ‘Macarena road’

Third of a series

 

READ: For this mayor, pink is the color of peace

 

READ: Moro doctors try to heal suffering

PIAGAPO, Lanao del Sur, Philippines—For the 1,159 residents in 149 households in Mamaanun, a mountain barangay that seemed to have been caught in a time warp, the concrete tire path being laid on “Macarena road” is seen as nothing less than a miracle.

Mayor Ali Sumandar had named the rough trail after the Spanish dance song by Los del Rio because the passenger jeeps rocked on the dirt road before it was repaired.

“The tires had chains or spikes during the rainy season and these dug deep into the mud, making the jeep dance,” he recalled.

Travel has eased since the concreting project—two parallel tracks running uphill side by side—started on Oct. 11, 2014. When completed by the end of this month the lanes would stretch 4 kilometers, divided into six 400-meter segments covering the most difficult portions of the route.

The main mode of transportation had been on horseback in the mountain barangay nestled 700 meters above sea level with its cool air and a spectacular view of Lake Lanao set amid some of the country’s remaining rainforests.

Before, corn, sweet potatoes, cassava and assorted vegetables often got spoiled because of the impassable road. Now these crops are able to reach markets in Marawi and Iligan on time. During emergencies, the seriously ill had to be transported by horse down to Amai Pakpak hospital in Piagapo, on a trip that took several hours.

There is no medical facility or other basic services, or water systems in the village. Electricity is spotty at best. Children had to walk several kilometers to the nearest school on roads that were dusty in the sun and slippery in the rain.

On a sunny Thursday morning, a jeep packed with newly harvested corn broke down, slid and headed toward a pickup truck with Mayor Sumandar and a reporter aboard before the driver mercifully swung the vehicle to a stop at the elevated side of the tire path under construction.

“It’s a miracle,” said Ismael Imam, a volunteer Madrasa teacher of Arabic with an education degree from Mindanao State University in Marawi, the province capital of Lanao del Sur. “If we did not organize ourselves, this tire track would not have come to us.”

Imam, who at 46 looks old with flecks of gray in his hair and sporting a mustache, is the president of the People’s Organization in Mamaanun, formed by the Bangsamoro Development Agency (BDA) as part of preparations by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) to build the bureaucracy of a proposed substate in the region.

Ja’far Lomondot, 40, nodded in agreement. The project could not have come at a more opportune time for his wife, who was then heavy with his fourth child. The birth pangs came in the middle of the night on Feb. 9. The village midwives had been unable to deliver the baby. The mother had to be rushed to the hospital in Piagapo.

“The new road saved her life,” he said. “Without it, it would have taken hours before she could be rushed to the hospital for emergency treatment.”

Lomondot is Imam’s vice president. For 13 years, he had worked as a coordinator in a trading company in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. With his earnings, he built a one-story stone house painted blue—the most impressive residence in the village.

He had returned to his first love—farming—in a fertile land that had been turned into a battlefield in intermittent fighting that had stained an 18-year ceasefire the Fidel Ramos administration had signed with the MILF.

The People’s Organization in Mamaanun is one of the 214 in as many barangays in the Mindanao-Sulu region that the BDA had formed since the agency was created as a result of the talks in Tripoli in 2001 on the implementation of the relief and rehabilitation component of the 1997 ceasefire agreement.

People-driven projects

The Tripoli agreement empowered the MILF to “determine, lead and manage rehabilitation and development projects in conflict-affected areas,” except when public funds are utilized, in which case, government procedures and rules apply. The MILF then formed the BDA to receive funding from foreign donors for its “community-driven” projects.

 

READ: A Tripoli Agreement inside story

 

READ: Enrile memoir: Tripoli Agreement was a sellout

 

READ: Tripoli agreement key to attaining peace in Mindanao—diplomat

The two other strands in the 1997 ceasefire were the setting up of truce mechanisms and the creation of a juridical entity in a designated Moro homeland, the latter a more contentious undertaking that had sparked a rebel rampage in 2008.

In the aftermath of the massacre of 44 police commandos out to take out terrorist bombers harbored by Moro radicals in Mamasapano in the neighboring province of Maguindanao on Jan. 25, the proposed Bangsamoro Basic Law that would create a Moro substate under a peace agreement the Aquino administration signed a year ago faces rough sailing in Congress.

Overshadowed by the intermittent outbreaks of violence is the painstaking peace building without fanfare in the past 14 years being done at the grassroots, the training of a cadre of bureaucrats that would form the backbone of a Bangsamoro government when genuine peace comes.

 

Real people, not monsters

The main platform is the People’s Oganizations created by the BDA, of which the unit in Mamaanun is an example, staffed by real people—not monsters—elected by the community, with simple dreams and aspirations.

Under the MILF’s arrangement with the BDA, the Mindanao Trust Fund for Reconstruction and Development Program (MTF-RDP) was created to receive funding from multilateral and bilateral donors.

The World Bank administers the fund. The finance manager is the Community and Family Services International (CFSI), a humanitarian organization implementing programs of various UN agencies. The renowned SGV conducts an audit of BDA’s activities.

When he stepped aside as BDA executive director after two three-year terms, Dr. Danda Juanday said he received congratulations from the World Bank for findings of “zero corruption” in the agency’s work with project recipients. He was likewise elated by the result of the SGV audit at the end of his term in 2009.

“We had no backlog. We did all our activities,” he said in an interview in his clinic in Cotabato City.

The People’s Organizations decide which projects to undertake in their communities. Priorities in remote areas are tire paths, water and sanitation facilities, solar dryers, warehouses and community centers.

These grassroots organizations serve as the practical training ground for democratic governance that is the hallmark of the ancient barangay system.

The organizations open bank accounts in which CFSI deposits funding for projects—anywhere from P500,000 to P1 million—that communities agree on and provide voluntary labor to carry out. CFSI workers conduct training and seminars in project implementation and management in partnership with other agencies.

As of April 2014, project beneficiaries had totaled 412,219—51 percent of them women—through the People’s Organizations in 214 barangays in 75 municipalities in Bangsamoro areas, according Dr. Saffrulah Dipatuan, the BDA chair.

Training for self-rule

The agency has 260 well-trained staff serving in seven regional offices, aside from the more than 3,000 volunteers that had received training under the MTF-RDP, said Dipatuan.

“Under our engagement with Unicef and Australian DFAT (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade), we’ve trained 500 managers and 500 pre-Madrasa teachers. Ninety-six of our nominees have completed their master’s degree studies under the Australian-sponsored, in-country scholarship program,” he said.

“We’re also able to send more than a hundred Bangsamoro professionals to undergo training in Malaysia under the Malaysian Technical Cooperation Programme and also in Turkey,” Dipatuan said.

Through the years, some BDA trainees have been elected barangay chiefs or councilors.

Dipatuan expressed confidence that the MILF would be able to mobilize Moro professionals and experts once the Bangsamoro government is organized to supplant the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) that the Aquino administration said had been a “failed experiment” in self rule.

READ: Palace says ARMM failed experiment

 

READ: Malacañang declares ARMM a ‘failed experiment,’ supports poll postponement

“I hope they will be able to maintain the degree of integrity that has characterized BDA operations,” he said.

In Piagapo, the BDA projects receive support from Mayor Sumandar, 42, an electrical engineer who had spent most of his adult life working in Manila, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Ghana, Vietnam and Australia but decided to return to his hometown to try and make a difference.

He could have stayed in Australia, his last home overseas, as his wife had urged him to do. There, he was living a comfortable life, spending leisure time off-road driving or skydiving. But as the eldest of 14 children, he heeded the family counsel and ran for mayor, winning handily in 2013 in the fourth-class municipality of 21,000 mostly impoverished farmers.

There was little infrastructure to crow about in Piagapo in the midst of uncertainty in the peace process as the Army mounted an operation against MILF renegades in what appears to be nothing more than an acoustics war to appease critics in Manila for its failure to swiftly respond to the police commandos being slaughtered in Mamasapano.

 

Rare breed

The main problem for farmers is building farm-to-market roads to lift them from poverty.

“We need to do here what we have seen and learned in the places we have been to,” said Sumandar, looking relaxed in a checkered shirt and blue jeans behind his desk with his nameplate on it, saying “public servant.”

“We are very blessed with agricultural lands in this province,” the father of two children said. “God willing, we will realize our dreams.”

Sumandar belongs to a rare breed of committed young mayors that has emerged in recent years in the rural areas—rebuilding communities wrecked by a massive earthquake, a supertyphoon, storms and civil strife.

The task had not been easy in Mindanao where ARMM officials were rarely seen in the hinterlands.

There had not been a regional government that people trusted and delivered by and large. There were possibly some shining moments in the current Mujiv Hataman administration, but in general the ARMM had not been in touch, according to the folks in Mamaanun.

All the villagers hear are accounts of ghost teachers in nonexistent schools, pensions that are not being remitted to the Government Service Insurance System. There’s no basic services, no roads to speak of in the barangay.

Excited at the attention given to them by a reporter and photographer for making them feel “valuable,” they laid on a feast of assorted sweets and chili tongue burners fit for the gods.

 

Roller-coaster

They are eager to part with their two cents on the roller-coaster peace process in the past two decades. They see not light at the end of the tunnel, but a caroming train after the Mamasapano mess that has put in jeopardy in Congress a proposed charter for Bangsamoro rule.

Said one executive in Manila:

“We’re so far down the road that if you suddenly make a U-turn and take another path, I think, No. 1, the view that Imperial Manila cannot be trusted will be reinforced in the eyes of many people. For the MILF, there will be loss of face, stature and good will.

“The willingness to engage will go down the drain. Those who said to the MILF don’t trust the government, don’t talk to the government, don’t negotiate with them, those who are standing on the sidelines will be springing into action if things collapse.”

Over a month into the Mamasapano embroglio, people wonder whether the investment in peace building had been worth it. But by and large, people have seen the fruit of peace, even a peace without an agreement, here in Mamaanun, in the miracle on Macarena road.

“People here don’t want war,” said Ismael Imam, the president of the MILF-inspired People’s Organization. “That is our appeal. We want peace.”

(Conclusion tomorrow: A school of peace)