There’s no going back

While the Marawi siege was happening in 2017, the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process held consultations and conversations with various IDP sectors in Marawi, Iligan and Cagayan de Oro cities to make sure future interventions were aligned with the needs of the displaced population. The outcome was a report titled “Post-conflict Needs Assessment Report for Marawi and Other Affected Localities.”

The report noted the land problem as a major issue government needed to approach with caution.

“The land issue in Marawi is complex,” the assessment noted. “Existing laws may not suffice (and in fact even serve to escalate issues) and extra-legal options and alternative dispute (traditional) resolution mechanisms need to be explored. Such creative solutions must consider the need to correct historical injustices brought about by land dispossession during the colonial period.”

When the American colonial government ordered the titling of land, not all Muslims were fully informed of the legal significance of the process, and so not all complied. As a result, Meranaw residents interviewed for this report said, many of them have no proof of land ownership except for pieces of paper written in the hand of their forebears,

passed from generation to generation.

An example is the Philippine Muslim Teachers’ College owned by the Sharief family, which has two buildings standing on Sarimanok Avenue outside Ground Zero. According to the school’s acting president, Datu Agakhan Sharief, “Hindi ito na titulo ng mga lolo namin kasi hindi nila alam ano ang ibig sabihin ng titulo (This property is not titled because our grandfathers did not know what a title meant).”

As far as he knows, Sharief said, the land also cannot be titled because it is part of what has been classified as a military reservation from way back during the Amercian occupation. All structures in the vicinity up to the bridge, he said, would be in the same situation as PMTC.

Sharief believes government should impose a status quo on all land in Marawi or risk facing a problem too difficult to solve. “Kasama yan sa pinagrerebelde namin, na bakit kami naka military reservation...Nauna kami rito (Part of why we are rebeling is why we are under military reservation .... We were here first),” he said

Marawi’s total land area is around 8,700 hectares, of which 6,600 have been classified military reservation since the early 1900s when the Americans built their first camp in Lanao. Over the years, at least seven different land proclamations have covered Marawi. A portion of the military reservation would later be reclassified and set aside to build what would become the Mindanao State University campus.

Muslim leaders foresaw that land in Marawi would be a post-conflict issue. In September 2017, before the liberation of Marawi, the late Ghazzali Jaafar, vice chairman of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, had appealed to President Duterte to correct the historical injustice by giving back to the Meranaw the land the Americans took from them.

Instead of heeding the Muslim leaders’ call and working to assuage fears over the touchy land issue, Duterte ordered the expropriation of MAA land to establish a new military camp in Barangay Kapantaran, estimated to cost P400 million. The groundbreaking took place in January 2018.

In April 2018, the Legislative Assembly of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao passed a resolution formally asking the government for the return of military land to the Meranaw. Nothing came of that appeal.

Social healing not a priority

As important as the land question and the rebuilding of homes is the need for social healing. The post-conflict needs assessment noted the trauma the

Meranaw felt from the destruction of Marawi, considered the heart and soul of the Lanao provinces, and the spiritual and business center of Muslim Mindanao.

Central to any post-conflict action, the report said, would be the need to address and overcome “the pain, grief, hurt, and anger over the destruction of Marawi City, the displacement of the population, the loss of cherished properties, the prospects of land dispossession, the uncertainty of access to basic needs, and of their future in general.”

Even the Joint Task Force Marawi through the Philippine Army made a similar assessment. “The Marawi crisis affected the displaced civilians physically, psychologically, emotionally, and socially. The people of Marawi City suffered a great loss – death and injury; damage to personal property, cultural and religious structures; loss of livelihood and income; and a disruption of business and education. They were also confronted by the appalling living conditions in evacuation centers. We could not and should not have been indifferent to the plight of these displaced persons,” wrote the Philippine Army in an article titled “Soft Power Approach” published by the Joint Task Force Marawi in its website “Marawi and Beyond.”

The task of psychosocial healing fell on the groups like the International Committee of the Red Cross because government failed to allocate funds for this need in its budget. “Social healing was not included because in the initial stage in the drafting MOA we didn’t really know what we were facing,” Del Rosario said. TFBM ran into problems with the Commission on Audit for allocating funds for social healing in the form of trips to Mecca for select IDPs that were not part of the budget allocation.

The post-conflict needs assessment had emphasized the importance of social healing. “Rebuilding will require not just physical reconstruction of destroyed infrastructure, but the repair of damaged relationships and weakened social cohesion, as well as psychosocial healing processes.” (With reports from Jowel Canuday and Maitel Ladrido)

This report was produced as part of the Ateneo de Manila University’s Agenda for Hope project and is a collaboration between Ateneo and the Davao-based Mindanews. The website containing this and other stories was launched on October 17, 2019