Earlier this week, I was in Butuan City at the Father Saturnino Urios University to give a keynote address in the Peace Studies Conference the university was hosting. I accepted the invitation because I know three of the top administrators of the university well—its president Fr. John Young and two of its vice presidents Fathers Randy Odchigue and Kits Butardo, and its law school dean Atty. Josefe Ty. I have seen how dynamic FSUU has become.
The topic of peace is timely, given the challenges to peace this country and the island Mindanao (where I hail from) confronts. In fact, while I was in Urios, President Duterte for the nth time terminated once again the peace process with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP). This is a sad development. In my view, as I told my audience in Butuan, we need a revolution in this country but a revolutionary government is not necessary for that. What the country need is a comprehensive agreement on socio-economic reforms (Caser) that addresses effectively the roots of our social conflicts. The NDFP talks was the best chance for that. In any case, as my friend and favorite living martial law hero Antonio Arellano posted in Facebook – the door to peace may be closed but it is not yet locked.
How do we open the door?
In Butuan, I reiterated my long standing proposal: the only way the peace process with the national democrats can succeed is if the parties accelerate the negotiations and achieve quickly the agreements on socio-economic reforms (two one week marathon talks with a one month break for consultations is enough) and political reforms (process should start in parallel and conclude two months after Caser is agreed). A ceasefire and release of political prisoners can be agreed immediately upon the initialing of Caser. Overall, six months should be the timeframe to finish everything. Protracted talks is like protracted war—it will only result in stalemate and the same old thing, failure to achieve peace with justice.
But the door will remain closed if hearts are not open. That is why, in Urios, a Catholic university, I invoked words of Pope Francis from several World Day of Peace messages he has delivered in the last four years. His insights and exhortations about fraternity, solidarity, and non-violence are particularly inspiring.
Pope Francis proclaims fraternity as an essential human quality, a consequence of our nature as relational beings: “A lively awareness of our relatedness helps us to look upon and to treat each person as a true sister or brother; without fraternity it is impossible to build a just society and a solid and lasting peace.” But this vocation to become a community “is still frequently denied and ignored in a world marked by a ‘globalization of indifference’ which makes us slowly inured to the suffering of others and closed in on ourselves.”
Quoting Benedict XVI, Pope Francis observes that globalization “makes us neighbours, but does not make us brothers.” “The many situations of inequality, poverty and injustice, are signs not only of a profound lack of fraternity, but also of the absence of a culture of solidarity,” he continues.
For Pope Francis, peace is the outcome of a culture of solidarity, mercy and compassion. We must work for this culture, developing solidarity, “as a moral virtue and social attitude born of personal conversion, calls for commitment on the part of those responsible for education and formation.”
Finally, Pope Francis promotes active nonviolence as “a way of showing that unity is truly more powerful and more fruitful than conflict”. Indeed, “Everything in the world is inter-connected.” And while differences cause frictions. we should face them constructively and non-violently, so that “tensions and oppositions can achieve a diversified and life-giving unity,” preserving “what is valid and useful on both sides.”
In Uriios University, owned by the diocese of Butuan and named after a great Jesuit missionary, it seemed right to start my keynote address by sharing my forty one years of experience as a peace and justice worker, motivated mainly by my Christian faith as passed on to me by my family and my Jesuit formators.
I was 16 years old, a senior in Xavier University High School, when war erupted in Mindanao and my hometown Cagayan de Oro was flooded with refugees from nearby Lanao provinces fleeing the hostilities battles between the Moro National Liberation Front and the Armed Forces of the Philippines. I became active in our school’s relief efforts for those refugees, a job which included ministering to the sick and burying the dead, mostly children. Since then, I have told myself that war is wrong and never justified, and that I will do my best to work for peace.
That same year, I also got exposed to many social ills of the country, land, labor and environmental issues for example, the latter because of the proposal to build the Phivedec industrial park in Villanueva, Misamis Oriental. Thanks to a Jesuit scholastic the late Alex Benedicto, I also got conscientized about martial law and the Marcos dictatorship. Clearly, even then, I knew that working for peace was intimately related with working for justice.
Consistent with these early insights I became first a social activist fighting the Marcos regime to a human rights and environmental lawyer representing indigenous peoples and local communities in many of the great forest, land, and environmental battles in the last thirty years. When I became an environment undersecretary in 1996, I discovered I was a good consensus-builder (negotiator and mediator) and assisted in the final stages of the negotiations between the MNLF and the Ramos government in 1996. Later, in 2009-2010, during the Arroyo administration, I became a member of the government peace panel in the negotiations with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, helping get the peace process back on track after the fiasco resulting from the Supreme Court declaring the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain unconstitutional.
During the Ramos administration, I also helped our peace panel, led by Ambassador Howard Dee, negotiating with the NDFP. More recently, I was part of a University of the Philippines team, headed by Dr. Edna Co, that has been assisting the Philippine panel in the same negotiations.
I have come to believe, from these more than four decades of experience, that peace based on justice is possible, that mercy and reconciliation must accompany accountability, that the work never ends and must be constantly renewed, that intellectual discourse and ideas are critical for that renewal to happen, and that hope is always the final word in the work for peace.
For those who ask how long will we have to wait for peace and justice to descend permanently in our land, the soaring words of Martin Luther King assure and comfort:
“How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever. How long? Not long, because you shall reap what you sow. How long? Not long.
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, Yet that scaffold sways the future, And, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, Keeping watch above his own.
“How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
And if I may add, peace.
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