We, the national minority - the Indigenous Peoples and Bangsamoro - and advocates, are united in one goal: the realization of our right to self-determination. This means we have the right to determine our fate as a community and as a tribe. And determining our fate includes the use of our lands and the resources that come with it.
It is this right that the past regimes, even the colonizers, refuse to recognize. For hundreds of years, we have been in a constant battle for our very own existence. We have suffered from the continued hostility towards us to drive us away from our ancestral lands and use them for profit.
The late Ferdinand Marcos is no different. The dictator killed the likes of Macliing Dulag, a pangat (leader) of the Butbut tribe in Kalinga because of his stance to protect their lands and river Chico from destruction due to the proposed Chico Dam project. The first Marcos regime also massacred numerous Moro communities to suppress the boiling discontent of the Muslims.
Nearly fifty years later, we are still faced with the same tyranny and fascism. As Marcos Jr. takes the podium as the Philippine president and recites his first State of the Nation Address, the national minority will watch with much disgust and opposition. We see this as the height of a rotting system wherein the stench of the worsening economy can no longer be concealed through fake news and disinformation or violence.
With this crisis, we fear that our ancestral lands and territories will become even hotter beds for exploits such as large-scale mining, agri-plantations, and industrial zones. Combined with the oppressive policies such as the Anti-Terrorism Law and the continuation of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) with IP Centric tactic of the Whole of Nation Approach for the counter-insurgency program, the national minority will surely face graver threats to their lives, livelihood, and the existence of their tribe.
Former president Duterte even ended his regime with a whopping number of human rights violations using this combination to silence our ranks. There are 159 extrajudicial killings in national minority alone, 10 enforced disappearances, 40,023 victims of bombings, indiscriminate firing or aerial bombardment in the Moro and IP communities, and half a million forcibly evacuated due to the military operations and bombings.
Now the Marcos-Duterte regime will surely use this system to keep themselves in power and keep adding to their families’ ill-gotten wealth.
For this, our struggle will intensify. We join today’s SONA as a protest against the Marcos-Duterte regime. We hold an effigy of Marcos Jr. hiding inside the busted monument of his father. Mounted along Aspiras-Palispis Highway, in Tuba, Benguet, the monument displaced indigenous Ibaloi residents and were forced to sell their ancestral lands at a very low price. In December 2002, the monument was busted.
We believe that Marcos Jr. may be using his father’s legacy of governance to legitimize his presidency. Yet, it is the same Marcos Sr legacy - the dictator - that busted him from the presidency and toppled his regime.
We, the national minority, are committed to carrying on the fight to assert our right to self-determination. We are one with the rest of the Filipino people in aspiring for a nation free from poverty, corruption, deceit, and monopoly. #
Signatories:
KATRIBU Kalipunan ng Katutubong Mamamayan ng Pilipinas
Bai Indigenous Women’s Network
Sandugo
Katribu Youth
Tunay na Alyansa ng Bayan Alay sa Katutubo
Moro-Christian People’s Alliance
Reference:
Rei Paulin
National Coordinator
KATRIBU Kalipunan ng Katutubong Mamamayan ng Pilipinas
09178169258