Published December 17, 2004
Sanctuaries amid war
Third in a series
COTABATO CITY, MINDANAO, Philippines — Pikit, a municipality in the southern Philippines, has been "always in the eye of the storm, a conflict zone," according to Oblate Father Roberto Layson, pastor of Immaculate Conception Parish there.
The quiet Filipino priest, standing just over five feet tall, has served as a powerful instrument of peace for people tired of the "constant war, sporadic peace," that he said has been the experience of residents for at least 30 years.
Father Layson arrived in Pikit in 1997 from the Philippine island of Jolo after his bishop was killed by rebels.
Since then, Pikit has been the scene of four major armed conflicts, in 1997, 2000, 2001 and last year, that have erupted between the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a guerrilla army that has been fighting the Philippine government since the 1970s.
For three days last month, Father Layson trekked through villages in the Pikit area with two Americans, Margaret Menting of Our Lady of the Angels Parish in Kenai and Joe Hastings, a California-based Catholic Relief Services community educator. Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. bishops’ international relief and development arm, facilitated a "global solidarity partnership" last month between the Anchorage Archdiocese and Cotabato Archdiocese in Mindanao, which includes Pikit.
In Pikit, population 69,000, most homes are constructed from "nipa," woven palm leaves. Lush green fields of rice and corn and groves of banana and coconut trees border Liguasan marsh, an area traditionally inhabited by Muslim people that is rich in mineral and natural gas resources. A national highway also runs through the municipality.
In several of Pikit’s villages, Hastings said, people stood outside their homes sweeping their arms broadly over the scenes before them. "All this was burned down in the war," they told Hastings.
Residents of the Pikit area — who practice Muslim, Christian and indigenous religions — have responded to the violence by creating what have become known as "spaces for peace."
In an area designated a space for peace, opposing factions agree to pass through and even live among each other without firing a shot.
But the spaces are not defined merely by the absence of armed conflict. Hundreds of volunteer residents have been trained to monitor the peace, report abuse incidents, solve conflict nonviolently and repair relationships broken by years of war.
Father Layson has played a key role in bringing this novel concept to life, and even he has been surprised at its success.
The "space for peace" idea was hatched in 2000, the year the Philippine government declared an all-out war on the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. As in earlier conflicts, the violence displaced tens of thousands of people for months in the Pikit region as homes were razed and fields burned.
Father Layson’s parish organized a disaster response team made up of 40 Muslim and Christian volunteers as young as 13. They delivered food and supplies to displaced villagers, who were using banana leaves as blankets and sleeping in the mud when it rained. In the evening, the volunteers — many of them high-school dropouts — returned to the parish to eat and plan the next day’s relief efforts.
"We prayed and we cried together when we heard somebody had died in the evacuation centers," Father Layson told the Anchor.
Even when the armed conflict subsided, people were afraid to return to their homes.
Their physical lives were all they had left, Father Layson recalled being told.
So the priest helped secure a guarantee from the Philippine army and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front that civilians would not be caught in the crossfire if they returned — they needed a space for peace.
Father Layson presented the space-for-peace plan to the military, then spent three days tracking rebels through the countryside before finally meeting with a commander.
The priest asked permission to convert three "barangays," clusters of villages, into a space for peace where each side would agree not to fight. A week later, the commander sent word that the Moro Islamic Liberation Front would not engage in armed conflict in one barangay — Nalapaan, home to 350 families.
"It’s a small space, a geographical location, and it’s also emotional and psychological in nature, where people could return and then start to build their lives," Father Layson said.
"It was a crazy idea … at the time, I had very little faith. You don’t talk about rehabilitation when the war is going on. You talk about relief operations. You talk rehabilitation after the war."
In 2002, the space for peace expanded to barangay Panicupan.
On Nov. 29 this year, five additional barangays were declared spaces for peace during a ceremony attended by Cotabato Archbishop Orlando Quevedo, a Moro Islamic Liberation Front representative, a general of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, international cease-fire monitoring teams and representatives from local nongovernmental organizations, including Catholic Relief Services.
At the ceremony, people frequently displaced by wars held cloth banners printed with the names of their various "sitios," or villages, now officially part of the space for peace. The space has been named Ginapaladtaka, a combination of the names of the seven participating barangays. ("Ginapalad" in Cebuano, a local language, means "fortunate" or "blessed.")
The recent declaration was translated into English in a Mindanao newspaper, MindaNews: "We wish there would no longer be oppressors and that no one will be oppressed; the return of harmonious relationship and trust; the reign of love, forgiveness and acceptance of faults; that each one will be true to his/her beliefs, culture and religion."
The Nov. 29 expansion, Father Layson said, is a "victory of peace over war."
Pikit is still the home of the third largest Moro Islamic Liberation Front camp and also a Philippine military battalion. Now there are cease-fire monitoring posts in Buliok, where just last year, Moro rebel camps were attacked again the military, sending refugees streaming into neighboring Pikit.
Catholic Relief Services’ Hastings visited one of those posts, a few miles away from Immaculate Conception Parish, made up of a pavilion and two nipa huts.
Standing less than 10 feet apart, the huts are occupied by military officers and Moro Islamic Liberation Front leaders. Eight trained villagers also volunteer for duty at the post to investigate any human rights violations or complaints reported in the space for peace, Hastings said. It’s part of a model that makes once-warring factions partners in securing the safety of civilians instead of enemies of the people.
"There is hope even in the midst of war," Father Layson told the Anchor, "and if the formal peace talks have collapsed, you must continue the peace process at the grass-roots level."