AFTER 119 YEARS, THE SAME CLANS STILL RULE MUSLIM MINDANAO

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THERE are two unbroken verities in our sad, oftentimesbroken, country.

First is something we know by heart. That our democratic institutions are still weak and wobbly, standing on shaky ground. We do not have fully-functioning three branches of government that respect each other and treats each other as equals.

The executive branch is always dominant and Congress is the willing courtier and supplicant. The House of Representatives (HOR) cheers even at the most brazen abuse of executive powers. The Senate, once a proud rampart of free thinking and independent men and women, is now a collection of grovelling men and women. The judiciary has bright spots in honest and discerning judges but Erap’s description of most in the judiciary, that they are mostly HIRs (hoodlums in robes) is true. Painfully true. If they are not corrupt, they are pliable.

An aggressive, effective and independent media? Are you dreaming? The last paragon of an effective press was Joe Burgos’s Malaya , which shook and rattled a dictatorship. That it thrived under a martial law regime made it an impressive outlier. That it was called the leader of the “mosquito press” was the badge of honor bestowed on Joe Burgos, whose nightly reminder to his reportorial staff was either “ingat” or “always watch your back.”

Joe said that someone may stab our backs while pretending to rob our emaciated pockets.

Civil society is inhabited by poseurs. Give them a chance, and Peace Bonds “to enrich themselves.

single “sanctuary city” where those What is worse than this? Easy. Living in the hamlets of poverty and ignorance in Muslim Mindanao. Muslim Mindanao is the Exhibit A of stasis, or the failure of a place to move in lockstep with the exhilarating changes that sweep other parts of the globe. Muslim Mindanao gives you the feeling of living in a time warp where the political and economic leadership has not changed for more than a century.

Start with a simple quiz, trivia if you will.

Make an inventory of the families dominant (politically and economically) in Muslim Mindanao at the turn of the previous century. Make an inventory of the current leadership. If you can prove that much have changed, you are free to slap me around.

MM is not even a region where the dominant families rise and fall as they compete and one family takes charge while the competing family is down. There is nothing on record that says the Dimaporo family took a break from power, or loosened their grip on the bigger part of Lanao at any one time.

The Adiongs of the other Lanao are arrivistes if compared with the Dimaporos but still you can count the decades that they have been in power. Had it not been for the massacre of journalists, the Ampatuan family would still be in power in Maguindanao.

Some claim that that the story of clans in Mindanao is the story of the country. There are clans, like the Ortegas in La Union, who have been ruling their turf in over a century. But still, you can see that the tightest grip of clans is essentially a Muslim Mindanao story.

So what happens to the ambitious young men who want to challenge the elitist order?

The story of Nur Misuari, post UP and post his university association with Jose Maria Sison, is the story of a young man who tried to join mainstream political competition with all the postuniversity idealism. Naturally, the clans crushed the dream of the upstart his idealism and his vow to change the old ways of MM politics nipped in the bud.

That discontent led Nur to admit the folly of politics-as-usual under the clans and that discontent radicalized him. The MNLF and the war of secession, bloody and long- drawn, were the offspring of Nur’s failure to reform MM politics from within.

At some point, the struggle in Muslim Mindanao lost its secular luster and appeal and a religious injection came in. The MILF was a splinter of the MNLF but with a religious underpinning. It was not fundamentalist, of course, but the Muslim faith became a central tenet of the MILF’s insurrection.

The war of the Afghans against the Soviets was the breakout war for the Islamist fundamentalists. Afghan believers to the ISIS now, the young volunteers who have fought and died for the “cause,”