Unnatural disasters, 2

BY ETHAN CHUA

(Continued from yesterday)

IN THE WAKE of Taal’s eruption, state representatives have emphasized the need for disaster preparedness and resilience on the part of vulnerable communities – but how can the state claim to be preparing communities for disaster when its own campaigns of militarization erode the very fabric of community resilience across the nation?

In Mindanao and in the Cordilleras, the factors that prepare communities for survival – sustainable practices, collective strength, and care for the environment – are being violently repressed. The international corporations that the Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines has said could be found legally liable for human rights harms to Filipinos resulting from climate change are the very corporations whose investment Duterte continues to court.

Flashy infrastructural projects intended to “modernize” the Philippines, such as the P607-billion Clark ‘Green City’, are set to displace tens of thousands of indigenous people. And resistance on the part of environmental rights defenders is crushed through an unprecedented exercise of executive power which bleeds money from necessary social services while sponsoring a spate of extrajudicial killings, with the death toll continuing to rise.

In the Philippines, if climate crisis is ever to be averted, then the militarism of the state has to be dismantled. Our nation cannot ever be prepared for disaster if it destroys the communities most committed to living sustainably – communities like the Lumad where education touches not only on subjects like math and science, but also farming and the passing down of knowledge from elders. But when communities come together to display genuinely revolutionary resilience, then disaster can be averted.

The country is rich in historical examples of resilience in the face of state-sponsored disaster. In the late 1970s, following his nationwide declaration of Martial Law in the Philippines, President Ferdinand Marcos chose the Chico River as the site for his chief infrastructural project – a series of four mega-dams to be funded by the World Bank and implemented by the National Power Corporation.

The Chico Dam project would have devastated the livelihoods of several indigenous communities who called the Chico River home, with more than 100,000 of them displaced. But in response to the World Bank-funded project, indigenous communities in the northern Philippines reworked traditional peace pact systems in order to build community solidarity.

A wide network of modified, multilateral peace pacts among communities in Kalinga, Mountain Province, and Abra was forged in opposition to the Chico Dam. Building from this network, indigenous activists began employing civil disobedience tactics against the Marcos regime. In one of the most dramatic instances of this civil disobedience, activists at the Tomiangan work-site prevented the National Power Corporation and its corollary police force from assembling their work camps four times, even under threat of death. Eventually, thanks to the resistance of the Tinggian, Bontok, and Kalinga communities and the outpouring of international support that followed, the World Bank decided to withdraw its funding for the dam project.

These examples of resistance are ongoing – in the Lumad schools of the south, in the IPM’s continuing work in the north, in the diasporic organizations that raise funds from overseas Filipinos for relief. To honor them, however, requires a commitment to dissent against a state that would rather make war on its own people than build up their collective strength. 

***

Chua is a member of the International Migrants Alliance USA Chapter and the Malaya Movement to end Human Rights Violations in the Philippines. (Bulatlat)

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here