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Home arrow Newsletter arrow Articles arrow The Limits of Illiberal Colonialism
The Limits of Illiberal Colonialism PDF Print E-mail
By Herbert Docena

The following are excerpts from Mr. Docena’s essay “GMA and Moro self-determination:
The limits of illiberal colonialism” in the book “Project 2010: Confronting the Legacy of the GMA Regime” recently published by Focus on the Global South. The selection is being included in the July issue of the FOP newsletter because it discusses a concern that will be critical to the new administration’s efforts to achieve long lasting, genuine change and needless to say to the future of the people in Mindanao as well as of the whole country’s.

Few, of course, now use this word, “colonialism,” to describe what’s happening in Mindanao. Many have shirked from using the term, resorting instead to such seemingly innocuous, supposedly more neutral terms like “conflict,” “problem” or “question”—as in the “Moro problem” or the “Moro question.” They say the word “colonialism” implies a value-judgment, as though the decision not to use it—and therefore to deny the specific kind of relationship that it aims to describe—were somehow not an exercise of value-judgment.

And yet—if our choice of words must depend on their fidelity to what we are trying to describe instead of on their capacity to get us to be accepted as “respectable” members of groups’ whose approval we crave—few other words seem more appropriate. For if “colonialism” is the “policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically”—to use a lay definition5—then it is difficult to find better words to use for the Moro people, and other indigenous communities in Mindanao.6 

First, the Philippine state has indeed sought to acquire political control over what was effectively a separate country—against its peoples’ will. What we now know to be the Philippine nation-state was—as all states in the world today—a social and historical construct, not a God-given, natural entity that has been in existence since the origin of time. Its present boundaries were decided as recently as 1946 by the American colonizers and their surrogate Filipino elites who, despite the repeated expression of opposition by Moro leaders, forcibly incorporated lands claimed by Moros and other indigenous peoples as part of Philippine territory. These areas, which previously existed as independent sultanates, had earlier been annexed by the American colonizers by force, if not by fraud.

Second, the Philippine state has indeed sought to occupy the lands claimed by the Moros with settlers. Claiming as much as 90% of all lands in the south as “public” land, and therefore as part of state property, the colonial and subsequent independent governments appropriated and turned over vast tracts of lands to wealthy elites and multinational corporations seeking lands for agricultural plantations, forest for timber, mountains for mines, etc. 

Partly to arrest the growth of radical landless peasants’ movements challenging entrenched landlord rule, the landlord-dominated government unleashed a massive resettlement policy that sought to move tens of thousands of landless peasants to the southern, Moro-claimed, frontier. What ensued was the biggest movement of people in Philippine history, enough to tip the demographic balance and turn the Moros into a minority in their own claimed homeland. Most of the land, however, was grabbed by elites and by the corporations; majority of the settlers have remained poor and landless.

Finally, the Philippine state has indeed economically exploited the areas claimed by the Moros, with the elites and corporations who appropriated the Moro-claimed lands funneling profits from the region’s produce back to their headquarters in Manila and beyond. At one point, it was estimated that Mindanao provided half of the resources being exported by the country, with 14 out of the top 20 dollar-earning export commodities coming from the region. With common resources such as the lands and the seas enclosed, Muslims lost access to resources for their own subsistence. Public statistics consistently show Moro regions as among the poorest in the country.

All this make such words as “problem,” “question,” or “conflict” too thin to describe the history and situation of Mindanao; they may be favored by those who seek shelter in vagueness—but they are by no means more “objective.” To be sure, alternative readings of history have been advanced to counter the interpretation above. But, if the Moro rebellion has accomplished anything over the last forty-plus years, it has been to make it ever more difficult for anyone to claim—disputes over history notwithstanding—that the Moros themselves freely and voluntarily wish to be part of the Philippines. 

That they are still aspiring for self-determination is supported by the continuing vitality of the movements, by their capacity to mobilize massive numbers of people (i.e., the MILF’s ability to draw over a million people to its annual “consultations,” for example, is difficult to match, even by mainstream Filipino politicians), by their establishment of their own social institutions such as courts of law or educational systems, by the failure of government authorities to secure local cooperation against their enemies, and by the innumerable small acts of daily resistance by people who have nothing else but what the political scientist James C. Scott calls “weapons of the weak.”7 

This continuing resistance clinches that decisive condition which, in my view, determines whether a relationship between two parties deserves the label “colonialism.” The emergence—and continuing survival—of national liberation movements, after all, is not adequately described as being just an answer to a “question” or a solution to a “problem.” No mass movement for liberation breaks out and endures if there is nothing from which said movement is to be liberated.

Democracy and colonialism
Arrayed against these movements, colonialism has largely kept together its usual constituency: the principal beneficiaries of state-sponsored land-grabbing, bureaucrats and military officers whose career advancement are tied to those of the state, intellectuals and opinion-makers who believe that the “greatness” of a nation can only be a function of its territorial size, and even Moro warlords, such as the Ampatuans, who feel they have more to lose from changing the status quo than from the present dispensation. 

In continuing to face down Moro resistance movements today, however, they face contemporary constraints and opportunities that previous colonial projects never faced: those generated by the diffusion of the norms and ideals of democracy that have resulted from the struggles against authoritarianism and despotism by pro-democracy movements worldwide—as well as from efforts to subvert them by those who have the most to lose from democracy. It is worth stressing that a relationship of oppression cannot rest on coercion alone because even the powerful are forced to justify their actions; the force of justification, in turn, has always depended on what the prevailing culture, itself an object of struggle, considers acceptable or not acceptable. The fate of colonialism has never been settled just by the question of who has more guns; perhaps as, if not more, decisive has been the ability to seize and counter those ideas that can make people unafraid of death. 

Unlike in the past, when colonial powers imposed martial rule and used raw force over colonized peoples as a matter of course, such an option is not only more difficult to enforce today, it may even be counter-productive, as the recent US experience in Iraq and Afghanistan prove. Marcos tried to defeat the Moros using all the means available to a dictator. He failed. Resorting to openly arbitrary, directly coercive means in pacifying the Moros is simply not the most effective way to rally support among those who have internalized the rhetoric, if not the substance, of democracy. 

So when Rep. Teodoro Locsin Jr, fulminating against the MOA-AD, likened the Moros to the Taliban and questioned their ability to govern themselves democratically, he was not just being a chauvinist, he was also tapping into that powerful missionary claim familiar to imperialists: that the Philippines is duty-bound to civilize the Moros, through democracy. Notwithstanding its questionable plausibility given the actual record of Philippine democracy, the claim that Philippine state is supposedly more democratic than any of the planned states by Moro rebels has been an important ideological weapon in the attempt to build cohesion among fractious Filipino elites, to secure the public support, but also to win Moro hearts and minds, especially among the intelligentsia and the middle classes. To renege on this claim would result not only in forfeiting this weapon, but also in giving Moros even more reason to want to secede. 

Supporters of colonialism, however, face one difficult conundrum: democracy, understood substantively, requires respecting the right of the people to choose their own destiny. That presumably includes not just the right to choose among competing candidates during elections, but the right to choose on even more fundamental questions—such as whether or not they want to remain part of the Philippines. Colonialism does not even want such a question asked; much less allow the Moros to freely express their answers. 

This, then, has been the contemporary strategic problem of supporters of colonialism within and outside the government: How can the Moros be deprived of their democratic rights “democratically”? How, in other words, can the Moros be forced to choose the choice of not being able to choose? 

Illiberal colonialism
Since the end of the Marcos dictatorship, there have been a number of broad, discernible lines of response to this conundrum.
The first is to appear to concede to the Moros’ demand for greater autonomy while dictating the bounds of the exercise of that autonomy and without providing the necessary political power nor resources to be able to make much of it. Thus, though the ARMM was established following the 1996 peace agreements, it remains an authority with little independent powers of its own, including its own source of funds. It has therefore continued to be reliant on the Philippine president and the Congress for its operations. Its power to choose its own programs and priorities remains effectively subject to the veto of the Philippine government.

The second related tack is to permit people to exercise choice by allowing them to select the officials of this nominally autonomous authority through elections—but through a process heavily influenced and directed by Malacanang using the powers of patronage. Indeed all of the winning governors of the ARMM to date, including Ampatuan, have enjoyed the blessings of the government, relying on its machinery for electoral advantage. As political scientist Nathan Quimpo has observed, this seems to have been the government’s way of neutering and luring otherwise independent and idealistic Moro leaders into the logic of the trapo or traditional patronage politics that characterizes Philippine electoral democracy.8 

Indebted to the administration for their electoral victory and dependent on it for resources to run their bureaucracy, ARMM officials receive their share of the spoils of patronage, but they remain ultimately subordinate to and powerless vis-à-vis the central government. At the same time, Moro participation in the elections is invoked as proof of their acceptance of the legitimacy of the Philippine government—even if, as those who sell their votes, who vote in order to prevent a worse candidate from winning, or who run for office in order to undermine the political system know better than others—there may be a host of other reasons why people choose not to boycott elections.

Because the Moros have increasingly recognized the hollowness of the autonomy accorded them, supporters of colonialism have also resorted to that oft-invoked “rule of law”—meaning the supremacy of the Philippine constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court—as a last bulwark of colonialism. In so doing, the goal is to conflate two very different things: democracy, which means the right to choose, with submission to rules, which is not necessarily compatible with respecting the right to choose, especially in situations where the very legitimacy of rules (and those who write and interpret them) is disputed. 

Related to this is the attempt to conflate democracy with the rule of the majority, with supporters of colonialism actively fanning the flames of chauvinist prejudice among a people predisposed, through the educational system and the media, to see the Moros as enemies. Equating the rule of the majority with democracy is even more problematic, however, when the majority’s being a majority—within a totality to which the minority has been forcibly incorporated—is what is being disputed.

When all else fails, however, there is always the threat or the actual use of direct coercion. Indeed, much of the southern Philippines continues to be garrisoned by tens of thousands of Filipino soldiers; and many places, especially those that are deep in the hinterlands or in the remotest of islands, continue to be ruled by little despots in camouflage uniform, effectively lording over as small-time colonial governors from their battalion or militia headquarters. In these places, reports of beheadings, summary killings, and disappearances get passed around in hushed tones among villagers, until they get completely drowned out by the sound of gunfire. Outside these fiefdoms, no one else is supposed to know that even formal democracy had been buried in the heart of darkness.

Taken together, these various elements—false autonomy, the patronage trap, the insistence on the rule of Philippine law and the rule of the Filipino majority, all backed by coercion—constitute in broad strokes what we may call illiberal colonialism, or the over-all strategy arrived at by supporters of colonialism to try to defeat Moro self-determination movements within the constraints set by the prevailing norms and ideals posed by democracy. This regime of colonialism is not completely arbitrary, in that there are forces upholding adherence to, and even seeking the improvement of, rules. But it is not completely democratic either, in that despotism remains its ultimate guarantee: the power to set the bounds of democracy, to choose what one is allowed to choose, remains firmly in the hands of the colonizers, and not in the colonized. 

Illiberal colonialism is not a strategy in the sense that it is written and expounded on in an official document sent out to everyone in the bureaucracy. It may not even be consciously adopted by those who execute it. Instead, it is an accumulation of decisions, policies, directives—all big or small, which add up as a response to a common problem faced by different actors within and outside government, all striving for common goals within common constraints, though in pursuit of different, perhaps even conflicting, interests. 

As this strategy acquires institutional form and force, it both structures—and is itself consequently structured by—the web of relationships between the national and the local governments, between central government officials and local warlords, among different agencies, between the bureaucracy and the military, among various factions of the elites, among civil society groups, and even between the Philippine state and other states. 

Arroyo, the Ampatuans, and all of the other individuals involved in one way or another in the project of colonialism were not helpless, passive agents trapped inside this web of relationships. Neither, however, could they just have freely transcended it. In fact, they have actively sought to shape and re-shape these relationships in ways that would favor their interests, but they invariably had to do so within the objective constraints set by larger military considerations, political realities, economic limits, and culturally-set boundaries. Presidents make history but—even with all the power at their disposal—they cannot make it as they please.

Arroyo’s legacy
Perhaps no other episode brings home this point more clearly than that other controversy for which Arroyo will be remembered: the collapse of the proposed MOA-AD, arguably the boldest attempt yet to come to a negotiated settlement to end the war in Mindanao. In the long history of peace negotiations between the government and the Moros, no previous agreement has gone farther in offering Moros more meaningful political autonomy and control over resources. 

By most accounts, Arroyo firmly supported the agreement—until she, of course, had to throw it away like a pin-less grenade after opposition politicians, the mainstream press, and even sections of the left raised an uproar. Speculation that the agreement was just a ploy to extend the President’s term was fueled by the widespread conviction that the agreement was “too good to be true,” that the government was offering way too many concessions to the Moros, even if in actuality, the agreement actually arguably demands more from the Moros than the government.9 The agreement, after all, only asks of the government to “share” its otherwise absolute exercise of sovereignty with the Moros; of the Moros, it asks that they renounce their dream of having their own state.

While it was certainly not beyond Arroyo to try to extend her stay in power, much of the analyses of the MOA-AD, rested on a questionable underlying assumption: that the government was negotiating from a position of strength. In fact, as Arroyo and the more farsighted among colonialism’s supporters could have realized in despair, the government did not necessarily have the upper hand: increasingly cornered, bleeding severely from having to fight at least three identifiable armed movements across the territory for decades, its foot soldiers heavily demoralized, its top brass wracked by mutiny, its civilian leadership teetering on the verge of being overthrown, its coffers almost always empty…

It is important to be sensitive to the cunning of dominant, but it may as well be just as important not to make them more powerful than they actually are: The MOA-AD may not have been the shrewdly magnanimous offer of a swaggering combatant, it may have been a shrewdly tactical retreat of one writhing on the ground, hoping to fight another day. As with Arroyo’s desperate cultivation of her alliance with the Ampatuans, the attempt to reach a settlement with the Moros may well have been a symptom not of strength but of vulnerability on the part of one of the weakest, most hated Presidents in history. 

And if it really did come to this, if the very viability of illiberal colonialism has been put in question under Arroyo’s term, then surely the Moro liberation movements that have been struggling unremittingly for self-determination—as well as the movements which have clamored for substantive as opposed to just procedural democracy—could not but have played a role in bringing it about. It is important not to exaggerate the effectiveness of resistance, but it is also important not to strip it of its power to shape history. 

Choices and history
For while individuals may not make history any way please, they still make it through the choices they make. Arroyo’s successor, for one, has a choice. He can ratchet up the pressure and try to salvage illiberal colonialism, but he will also have to reap the whirlwind of its contradictions: that of continuing dependence on monsters, deepening patronage, squandering of scarce resources, overstretching of the armed forces, and further strengthening of the very constituency that will make any attempt at negotiating in good faith with the Moros difficult, if not impossible.

Or he can give up trying to reconcile the irreconcilable and recognize that democracy requires respecting what the Moros have been deprived of for over a century now: the right to forge their own destiny. This will entail accepting what the state has always denied: that the Moros have been victims of injustice and that this injustice cannot be corrected by brute force, but only by a just settlement that gives the Moros the right to either be part of the Philippines on their terms or to strike out on their own if they so choose. 

In taking this second option, the incoming president will no doubt run into fierce opposition from all those who have profited economically or psychologically from this injustice. They will insist that any agreement be “balanced,” forgetting that balance is not to be achieved by exacting equal concessions from two uneven sides, but by pushing for a solution that will bring about a desired balance that does not currently exist. They will again cry “dismemberment!” as though the status quo were somehow one of harmonious unity, instead of togetherness at gunpoint. They forget that the absence of coercion may even be the basis—if the Moros exercising their right to choose, are so convinced—of a stronger, more lasting, because less unequal, voluntary union. 

But against this small, if organized and powerful, opposition, the president can count on what could be an even more powerful constituency: those who have had nothing to gain from this colonial project, those who can be persuaded to shake themselves free from others’ delusions of national grandeur, those who have nothing to lose but the lasting friendship of their sisters and brothers. Without joining this larger movement—one that is already out there and that will be there whether or not he chooses to join, the president will just be another individual, powerless against the machinations of the better organized pro-colonialists, weighed down by the inertia of institutions, and crushed by the burdens of history.

Choice is more of a luxury for the dominated. For them, the options are simpler: make peace with injustice or continue with what they have been doing for the last fifty years. That choice will be no less decisive. n

 
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