CORDILLERA AUTONOMY : A failure of listening and imagination?

CORDILLERA AUTONOMY
CORDILLERA AUTONOMY : A failure of listening and imagination?

By Maurice Malanes
Philippine Daily Inquirer

Posted date: May 19, 2010

HARDLY ANY OF THE CANdidates in the Cordillera picked up regional autonomy as part of their platform for the May 10 elections.

This must be a fortunate coincidence, though. Otherwise, the political noise would have just drowned out a healthier debate about Cordillera autonomy, which, according to a University of the Philippines professor, needs a lot of listening and imagination.


For a debate on autonomy to prosper, the protagonists may have to sit down in the traditions of the dap-ay (the indigenous roundtable conference of the Bontok), the tongtongan (Benguet’s dap-ay counterpart), and the bodong of the Kalinga and Tinggian.

These indigenous institutions require the participants to listen to each other so they can agree on a consensus, which must ultimately serve the greater good of the community.

But the institutions and people who led in the autonomy debate had largely failed to lend their ears to each other. The result, says Dr. Athena Lydia Casambre, was a “disjuncture—the failure to meet point-to-point.”

This, says Casambre, a former UP Baguio faculty member, characterized the debate on Cordillera autonomy. “No wonder that the proposed Organic Act (draft law for autonomy) was soundly rejected in January 1990,” the first political exercise that could have helped institutionalize self-rule, she says.

Casambre, now a political science professor at UP Diliman, was at UP Baguio last month to attend a political science workshop and the launching of “Discourses on Cordillera Autonomy,” a book compiling her three essays on the upland region’s attempt at self-governance.

She cites almost the same failure of the various players to meet in 1998, when another proposed organic act was rejected.

Key players

Casambre analyzes how the autonomy issue and its key players evolved as a response to a long history of discrimination and neglect, which heightened during the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ martial law reign.

She also notes how the shift from Marcos’ martial rule to President Corazon Aquino’s liberal-democratic politics “provided the impetus for progressive groups in Cordillera civil society, principally the Cordillera Peoples Alliance (CPA), to push their political agenda further.”

After Marcos’ ouster in February 1986, the CPA sustained the momentum of mobilization against a series of the regime’s dam projects along the Chico River, she says.

With the “democratic space” under Aquino, it helped lobby for the inclusion in the 1987 Constitution of the provision for autonomous regions in the Cordillera and Muslim Mindanao, Casambre says.

This same democratic space and post-Edsa euphoria led to other interesting developments. Casambre cites the Aquino administration’s peace negotiations with Fr. Conrado Balweg’s Cordillera People’s Liberation Army (CPLA), which led to the sipat (peace pact) on Sept. 13, 1986, in Mount Data in Bauko, Mt. Province.

This pact eventually prompted Aquino to craft Executive Order No. 220, which established a special Cordillera Administrative Region to prepare the region for autonomy.

“The Edsa Revolt and the democratic politics immediately following upon it unquestionably hastened the coming to the fore of the issue of Cordillera autonomy,” Casambre says.

Since the constitutional provision for regional autonomy needed an enabling law, a measure was drafted and submitted to the Cordillera electorate in a plebiscite in January 1990.

Before the voting were intense debates on autonomy. Casambre identifies the main protagonists: CPA, CPLA, Bibak (Benguet, Ifugao, Bontoc, Apayao and Kalinga) Professionals Association or BPA, Cordillera Broad Coalition (CBC), and the regional National Economic and Development Authority.

Casambre notes, however, that the debates did not lead to a “clear, comprehensible and acceptable proposition” for supporting an autonomous region.

She finds it ironic that the CPA, which helped lobby for the inclusion of autonomy in the Constitution, made “a 180-degree turn,” campaigning to reject the proposed organic act.

Disjointed


The CPA’s move was “not least because what they (CPA leaders) had won in the form of a constitutional provision had become perverted as soon as the government entered into a sipat with the CPLA” but because the two groups “had radically different projects in mind,” Casambre says.

“The narrative of Cordillera autonomy,” she says, “became severely disjointed at this point.”

What Casambre calls the “middle” sectors, led by the professionals, “caught in a choice between two unacceptable projects, found themselves aligning with others behind the proposal for regionalization without the urgency of autonomy as espoused by the CPA and CPLA.”

The CPA argued for autonomy on the premise of a newly formed “pan-Cordillera identity” and called it “Kaigorotan.” This was not well-received because the Cordillera natives’ self-identity was and continues to be anchored in the village, Casambre says.

Its regional autonomy project was also conceived within “the larger politics of national democracy (nat-dem),” which, she says, “spooked” the majority of the voters.

Until now, she says, despite fostering empowered people’s organizations in the region, not enough voters would support an autonomous region as defined by the CPA because of the “nat-dem specter.”

“The CPA will have to engage in ‘coalition politics’ and collaborate with other groups in articulating a vision of Cordillera autonomy that will have a foreseeable future,” Casambre says.

But she says voters were also repelled by the CPLA’s version of autonomy based on a proposed “Cordillera Autonomous Socialist State” and a “romanticized Cordillera Nation,” with the bodong as the overall guiding indigenous political institution.

The participation later of bureaucrats and lawyers did not help either in clarifying issues on the autonomy debate, she says.

“Not a tenable basis for Cordillera autonomy has been achieved because of a general failure of imagination,” she says.

Casambre suggests the need for “discipline and direction” in gathering and analyzing data or putting the pieces together “so we could see the whole picture.”

Through these, the key players and stakeholders in the autonomy discourse can finally grasp the “unfamiliar from the familiar” and so “we can move outwards,” she says.