ONE of the main reasons the military is pushing militiamen to terrorize indigenous people, locally called lumad, in Mindanao, is because local and foreign investors want to control tribal lands to be converted into palm oil plantations, a lawmaker asserted on Friday.
“Surely, only big businessman, especially tycoons from Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, will benefit in the expansion of palm oil plantations,” Gabriela Rep. Emmi de Jesus said to explain why the government is ignoring complaints of militarization in the guise of counter-insurgency operations.
De Jesus also warned the government’s proposal to convert idle lands to palm oil plantations, possibly including the ancestral domain of indigenous peoples, poses a big threat not only to the well-being of lumad but also to the environment.
Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Ramon Paje had earlier announced the government’s plan to convert some 8 million hectares of idle lands into palm oil plantations.
“The rapid and massive encroachment of palm plantations in Mindanao is sure to duplicate the forest fire haze drift from Indonesia, and would also cause an escalation of killings and displacement of the indigenous peoples,” she warned.
Even the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees mentioned the “extraction and agro-business” interests that are encroaching into ancestral domains, De Jesus said.
“The lumad fleeing military terror in their ancestral domains are currently in Manila to get President Aquino to rein in his army and pull out land-grabbing corporate investors from their lands,” she said, referring to some 700 lumad who arrived in Manila on Monday.
“Indigenous peoples in the island are being evicted in counter-insurgency campaigns by army battalions, to give access to multinational investors to mining and farmlands,” De Jesus said.
Last year, De Jesus protested pronouncements from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to convert to plantations up to 1 million hectares of hinterlands in Mindanao that the agency insists are unused and unpopulated.
She contested the DENR’s claim and said that lumad live and farm in these areas. Currently 50,000 hectares are already under cultivation.
“Those are the lands of our lumad brothers. Now, they are being killed and their lands taken. But there is less basis to run after palm oil plantations because the world price has dropped because of the weakening economy of China, a major importer of palm oil,” De Jesus said.
But the military insisted that the killings of lumad in Mindanao are actually part of a plan by the communist New People’s Army to execute “counter-revolutionaries” and blame the slays on the military.
On Friday, the military claimed the Catholic Church-backed International Fact-Finding Mission, composed of local and foreign clergymen and rights advocates, is “disrespecting” Philippine sovereignty in investigating the killing of lumad.
“Despite the fact that these tourists were not given authority by the Department of Foreign Affairs, they still insisted to push their unsolicited inquiry. They even violated the Lumad Free and Prior Informed Consent [FPIC] thus desecrating the Indigenous People Rights Act [IPRA] Law,” the army’s Fourth Infantry Division said in a statement.
“Tourists [have] no right to intervene on our country’s internal affairs. They are already making [a] mockery [of] our laws and [placing our government institutions in disrepute]. They should know their ground,” the statement quoted Col. Isidro Purisima, commander of 402nd Infantry Brigade, as saying.
The military said the “church and school personalities who invited these tourists are the accusers [but they are] now conducting investigation and later will give their [biased] result.”
The military lamented that the investigation did not look into the killings of 357 other lumad who lost their lives in NPA atrocities and cited the killing of Mayor Dario Otaza, Datu Cadoy Sulhayan of Imbahandi, Nasipit and Datu Sandigan of Talaandig Tribe of La Paz, Agusan del Sur.