An open letter to Duterte

Cong Corrales

I WOULD have wanted to write about Digong Dada’s reprehensible threat of bombing schools of the Lumad youth but I think the best way to counter his contrived narrative that the communists are using the Lumad as pawns in their protracted war is by letting them articulate their issues themselves. So I yield my space for their open letter to Digong Dada.

Please do read on:

An open letter to President Rodrigo Roa Duterte

This is to tell you that our Lumad children here have been through experiences that children should never have to experience. They have been witnesses to traumatic things you would never wish for your own grandchildren to see.

So when you told this to their faces, for all the world to hear, that they should leave their ancestral lands because you will bomb their schools and communities — the only home they have known for centuries — know that it isn’t the scariest thing these kids have heard. After your administration and the past ones massacred our leaders, violently destroyed homes, burned down schools, plundered natural resources, and forced us into too many evacuations, these children have long understood that this government is no safe haven for them.

These children remember everything.

The exact dates, the places, the chronological order of events, the exact lines during life-or-death conversations, and most unfortunately, even where the gunshot hit and wounds, or when and how a certain person was killed, which part of the school was the last to burn down and other explicit details of the state-sponsored violence they have witnessed and experienced right before their very eyes.

And just very recently, when you declared Martial Law in Mindanao which justifies the military presence in all corners to “take control of the situation in Marawi,” the harassment and the fear that our children and the entire community have been experiencing every day took its turn for the worst.

On July 6, 2017, 2,047 of us had to evacuate from our homes as one aerial bomber plane from your military encircled nine of our communities for an hour, in the middle of the night. Every sound we heard was amplified a thousand times. We had to walk miles and miles to and from evacuation sites only to go back to our equipment destroyed and our infrastructure ransacked.

While past administrations may have pretended not to know how their puppets wreak havoc in our communities, you Sir did it with no hint of pretension at all.

Using the all too-common reasoning that we teach our students to be communists, a rationale that has been debunked too many times before and can even be more proven had your government spent more attention in getting our institution more exposure to the public to get the support we really need, you have explicitly threatened our lives as if we aren’t part of the nation you promised to serve, as if you haven’t made pro-Lumad pronouncements back in 2015.

If you can remember the dialogue we had last July 18, 2017, we asked you for help and protection but your only response was to vehemently insist that Alcadev only teaches our children subversion, communism and how to fight against the government. But we would beg to differ, Mr. President. Our school’s curriculum is an open book and we would very much appreciate it getting popularized. You can have a battalion of critics look over our educational framework.

For here in Alcadev and Trifpss, we try to give our children the necessary knowledge to develop critical minds and enable them to contribute to the development of society.

We teach math to help them with their agricultural work, science that responsibly utilizes the wonders of nature, and history with a progressive perspective, among other things.

So when these children graduate from our schools, their mindset is always to give back to the country, to contribute to the good of the state; even when always, always, the government has forsaken and trampled upon their rights.

Mr. President, we have to tell you that our kids here at our Lumad schools have experienced things that the rest of the country should also experience. Our schools are gateways to a self-development that resonates all throughout the community and the country.

Every statement you give that goes against the culture and values we cultivate in our institution is a justification for all state-sponsored forces to continue attacking us and for the people to turn its back on us.

Instead of attacking us, we call on to your government to provide opportunities for our communities to get the support we truly need during these trying times. We ask you to put an end to militarization in the countryside, and to Martial Law that only further intensifies it, to finally give the children the sense of peace they’ve never come across in their lifetimes.

For most of these children, education is wealth with immense value. They build dreams, hopes, and plans out of the things they learn in our schools.

As the head of the Philippine government, we ask you to be at the forefront of upholding their right to education by using your power and influence to protect it at all costs, instead of being the one who holds the gun and pulls the trigger to kill their dreams and hopes in life.

In the service of the Lumad youth, Alcadev Inc., and Trifpss Inc..