The ripple effect

a crowd of refugees from the war-torn city last June 20, 2017, it was the president himself, who expressed his regrets about martial law and the heavy-handed military action that followed after the Maute Group occupied Marawi City. Two days later, the Armed Forces of the Philippines also conveyed their apologies for failing to recapture the whole of the city a month into their oper at i ons.

Regular military press conferences have so far painted a grim picture of the siege. The Maute group has been far too numerous, with a seemingly endless supply of ammunitions and logistics, and whose snipers managed to occupy strategically located points throughout the city, all making it difficult for the military to flush out the enemy. Complicating matters are the scores of civilians trapped within the combat zone. Footage and anecdotes from the field show that it takes days and the deaths of dozens of soldiers just to recover a single enemy position despite the advantage of close air support that conduct regular bombing runs.

What initially was a covert military operation to capture the Abu Syyaff commander designated IS (Islamic State)-emir Isnilon Hapilon has now transformed into the first major peace and order crisis of the Duterte administration. I have said before that militarily, the odds are stacked in favor of government forces. But the longer the siege continues; the theatre of conflict will also shift away from the real battlefield in Marawi City to other socio-political arenas elsewhere. As the fighting stretch on and now entering its first month, the ripples of conflict are now seen and felt beyond Marawi City.

We have seen the cities of Iligan and Cagayan de Oro City bear the social and economic effects of the conflict. The strict curfew and security measures in Iligan City have hurt businesses and have stretched people’s patience to the limit. There is a threshold to what people can endure in terms of how security measures have become a great inconvenience.

Oftentimes, the long lines and religious profiling in these checkpoints and house raids have become occasions for old wounds to be re-opened. The Maranao, who have evacuated now find themselves at the suspicious end of these random street interrogations and house searches resurfacing decades-old feelings of distrust against government and the dominant Christian population. As the carrying capacity of small cities like Iligan is stretched to the brim, the situation is just ripe for repressed social frictions to surface.

A similar thing is happening in the adjacent cosmopolitan city of Cagayan de Oro where landowners and business patrons have been reported to shun Maranao evacuees from their business and real estate. There is a deep but unrecognized hypocrisy here. Well-meaning members of the city’s upper class are quick to respond to appeals for donations and medical missions to evacuations centers in Iligan City. Chances are, however, the same soft-hearted individuals, however, will be the first to protest the entry of evacuees from Marawi into their gated subdivisions.

The checkpoints now dotting the highway between Marawi and the rest of Mindanao are like symbolic oneway valves, goods and people can be sent from Iligan and Cagayan de Oro to Marawi City, but if it can be helped, not the Maranao people going to Iligan and Cagayan de Oro. The courteous but meaningful question of the soldier manning these checkpoints scrutinizing ID (identification) cards and asking about “where did you come from sir?” confirm as much.

As Marawi is razed to the ground, many Maranaos have begun to feel helpless and shunned by both the government and the social discrimination they are now experiencing from the Christian-majority of the population. This is the precisely the kind of socially engineered situation that the terror-groups like the Maute want to create and exploit. Between a government soldier, and a Muslim terrorist fighter, with who would a common Maranao find greater affinity with?

Just this week, last June 21, 2017, the IS-allied Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters, a break-away group from the MILF (Moro Islamic Liberation Front), figured in what news reports was an occupation of a public school in Pigcawayan, North Cotabato, almost straddling the shared border of the province of Lanao del Sur. It was a show of force perhaps that they can also open another arena of conflict in the province of Maguindanao.

But the ripple effect has also elicited a political response from government that, on the one hand, has the potential of curtailing the attraction of terror groups like the Maute and IS by reinvigorating the political stock of the MILF in the region. Of course, to the renewed discomfort of other groups opposed to an expanded autonomy for the Bangsamoro. President Duterte has announced that he will be sending a new draft of the Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL) to Congress at the end of the Ramadan this week.

The Marawi siege may end sooner or later but, for better or for worse, a new exhibit of the Mindanao problem will now be showcased in the halls of Congress. Can Duterte’s political machinery really overturn the strong political and economic forces that killed the BBL the first time around or are we seeing an expanded theatre of conflict once the MILF joins the fray from the fall out of the BBL in the time of Duterte? I shudder at the thought.