Mindanao: A War Without a Horizon
Early evening last December, Bible Centered Fellowship pastor Villalon Moralo was found lying dead with multiple gunshot wounds. His murder took place in close vicinity to the BCF (BCM Philippine's church association) church where he'd preached for the past five years. Beyond his ministry, Pastor Moralo was also a Mindanao tribal chieftain whose ethnic group had been awarded 100 hectares of mineral-rich land by the Philippine government. Many eyes, some belonging to powerful local figures, looked covetously on the land grant. After the murder, Moralo's relatives, some of them members of regional paramilitary groups, demanded vengeance for Pastor Villalon's death. Only the quick intervention of BCM missionary and BCF founder Mars Fuerte prevented more blood from being spilled over the tragedy.
From an outsider's perspective, Pastor Villalon's murder is just another case of religious hostility seething under the surface of Mindanao, second largest island in the Philippines. However, it is a grimly complex situation. To grasp it, one must understand the war that has been waged in Mindanao for over thirty years, the second oldest internal conflict in the world.
Since the 1970's, an exhausting guerrilla campaign has been waged against the Philippine government by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front with aspirations of transforming Mindanao into an independent Islamic state. Full-out civil war has erupted sporadically, saddling Mindanao's 18 million residents with a high cost as instability has spiraled the lush island into the poorest region of the Philippines. For its inhabitants, peace is an ideal mentioned in political speeches. Despite generations of violence, the end of conflict is still nowhere on the skyline. This is a war without horizons.
The current fighting is only the tip of the iceberg. Deep-seated tension has existed in Mindanao longer than the United States has been a nation. Unlike the Christian majority that exists elsewhere in the Philippines, Mindanao is inhabited by the Bangsamoro. This multilingual ethnic group originates back to the 13th century when Muslim Arab spice traders used the lush island as a resting point on their route north towards China. Through their influence, Islam spread throughout Mindanao, a religion the Spanish were unable to quell by force when they claimed the island as their own 300 years later. For many centuries Mindanao's Muslims were the majority population. But aggressive government-planned Christian settlements shrunk the Muslim dominance to about one-third the island's population. As result, fierce sentiments of prejudice and resentment have been nurtured on both sides.
Last August saw the region erupt with renewed violence after the Philippine government ultimately rejected a peace agreement between various armed factions. The fighting has uprooted approximately 600,000 individuals, one of the highest number of internally displaced people in the world. As one walks through evacuation centers hastily erected for thousands of fleeing families, the true face of the conflict emerges. It is not difficult to sense the hopelessness of these families' situation, crowded against each other under a sea of tattered blue canvas provided by international aid organizations. Many are rice farmers, and they can do little but wait for the firefights to move away from their homes as their rice crops rot in the fields.
Norodin Kayao, a lean young man, is one of them. He was shaken from his afternoon siesta by pounding shells landing only 30 meters from his house. He could see the explosions and feel them shake his home. Fearing for his wife and six children, he fled together with his neighbors, carrying few personal belongings. While hiking out, government soldiers directed them towards the nearest evacuation center where they now reside. Fortunately, there were no human casualties, though one neighbor's water buffalo was killed in the attack. But due to ongoing violence, no one has been able to return home.
It would be easy to blame religious dissension for the devastation that has wreaked havoc upon Mindanao. Both Philippine and international newspapers run articles that report bands of Muslim and Christian vigilantes who have taken the war into their own hands. And there is no denial that religion plays a key factor in igniting disputes between Muslim Bangsamoros and their Christian-heritage counterparts.
However, the war in Mindanao has evolved into something far more complicated and darker than either side anticipated. No longer a mere war of religion, it is as much social, political, and economical. Opportunists from all sides are using the region's instability and violence as tools by which to gain power, influence, and wealth. Only two years ago the Philippines was named one of the most corrupt countries in the world by Transparency International. These days the war has become a veil in which to conceal killers who will murder a man for his faith. Or his rights to land property. Or his position as a tribal chieftain.
It has been close to one year since BCF Pastor Villalon Moralo was found dead outside a church that BCM International aided in planting. Tragic as his death was, it is only one in thousands of murders that have taken place in Mindanao without any repercussion. No one has yet to be brought to justice for his murder, and recently several of his relatives have been threatened with the same fate. Please continue to pray for his family, the island of Mindanao, and all the Christian workers who risk their lives to bring the light of Jesus Christ to a land where no horizon of peace is yet in sight.
