WHAT'S UP?

Trying to understand identity politics and the GRP-MILF peace process

Touching base: Istambay goes to school

2009 Hunyo 12
by mindanaw

It must have been months ago since I last posted an entry here. In fact I came to a point of really being unmindful of my blogs.

But once a blogger, always a blogger. And so here I am again not promising to return to active blogosphere  citizenship but showing desire to return so.

Apart from the summer schedule of workshops given and trainings attended, I was actually eaten by the monster that is preparing back to school.

I have enrolled into an MA Journalism program of the Asian Center for Journalism in Ateneo de Manila University. I thought I was lucky enough because its an online course, but now that the classes have started I consider my self having second thoughts. 

Why did I make life more complicated. Of course, I”m kidding. he experience is refreshing enough for my work and for life in general. 

This might appear as a caveat on my failure to update (as if somebody took notice). But for me this is just a submission of intent to renew one of these days my passport to our blogging experience.

Best regards to everyone.

A people with long history decides what makes a sacred mountain

2009 Abril 11
by mindanaw

A good read is what I consider Elson Elizaga’s piece on MindaNews about “Selling a Sacred Mountain”.

There are similar cases of such situation in the province of Bukidnon.

From my encounters with respected tribal leaders and elders, it is a long history of clans and tribes that determine what makes a sacred mountain and other people may have no choice but respect the mountains and other areas as part of other people’s ancestral domain.

This is a situation when development comes head on with respect for people and their culture, history, and traditions.

Surely, there are varying schools of thoughts that can articulate this issue

But not a theory can probably contest the universal value of mutual respect.

Read his full article here.

Good luck to the 2008 Bar examinees!

2009 Abril 3

Reports from Manila-based media say the results of the 2008 Bar examinations will be released tonight.

Congratulations to those who made it.Welcome new lawyers! May your flock help solve the problems of the country, help bring peace, justice, order, and progress to our land.

For those who need to take it again, God Bless!

Where are the ICRC hostages?

2009 Abril 1
by mindanaw

What’s up about this painful ordeal?

Hope-full stories I think are not of help. We feed on hard facts. We need to know the truth already. We had been kept hanging unfairly.

Are they alive or not? We pray they are.

Davao’s “Summary Killings”: Probe by CHR in 2009, UN rep Alston in 2007

2009 Marso 31

The two-day probe of the Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights this week on the “summary executions” in Davao City in Mindanao reminds me of the investigations by Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions in 2007.

The inquiries is making waves about the killings not only in Mindanao’s premier city but also around the Philippines.

For Alston, Mayor Rodrigo Duterte “dominates the city so thoroughly as to stamp out whole genres of crime, yet he remains powerless in the face of hundreds of murders committed by men without masks in view of witnesses.”

But Duterte said Alston’s 66-page final report on his Philippine mission in February, two pages of which are on his visit to this city, was written by someone who “does not have training to be impartial” and who has made a very short visit to Davao for him to end up with those conclusions.

For a review of the news report then, See this post.

CHR probes Davao’s “Summary Killings”

2009 Marso 30
by mindanaw

The hearing being held by the Commission on Human Rights on the alleged summary executions in Davao City reached boiling point when Mayor Rodrigo Duterte was subjected to questioning by CHR chair Leila de Lima.

Read this report by MindaNews’ Carolyn Arguillas.

Both the interrogator and the one interrogated stood firm, as it appears.

We hope this will produce results.

On Chip Tsao’s “The War at Home”

2009 Marso 30
by mindanaw

The employer-employee relationship between HK Chinese nationals and Filipino contract workers is a field that pokes always at some sensitive lines, in me.

I think it concerns all of us not just because of national pride, but because perhaps for most of us, we have our own personal encounters with people who work in HK or elsewhere around the world.

To me it is not just because of the Spratly’s Islands. There is something personal about it why I have to break a present status not to go online, much more to blog about it.

His foul attacks simply did not escape me. read more…

“WHY WE OPPOSE THE PROPOSED ‘RIGHT OF REPLY’ LAW”

2009 Marso 10

(Letter shared by Jose Torres, Jr. with media practitioners at the “Peace Consultation & Dialogue: Mindanao Media Forum on Peace, Conflict and Security”, hosted by Civil Society Organization Forum for Peace in Iligan City, 7-8th March 2009)

The proposed right of reply measure is by its very nature unconstitutional and only reflects the obsolete, if not selfish mindset of our lawmakers.

Our Constitution states that no law shall be passed abridging the people’s right to information and freedom of expression.

(Article III, Section 4): No law shall be passed abridging the freedom of speech …”

Article III, Section 7 states: “The right of the people to information on matters of public concern shall be recognized. Access to official records, and to documents and papers pertaining to official acts, transactions, or decisions, as well as to government research data used as basis for policy development, shall be afforded the citizen, subject to such limitations as may be provided by law.”

Unfortunately, this provision is not yet in force because Congress has yet to pass an implementing law. read more…

Peace talks is everybody’s concern

2009 Pebrero 15

Two weeks after a peace forum we have held at Bukidnon State University, the group that organized it is now reported to be under surveillance as tagged by the military to be an “MILF recruitment committee”.

This has been the most stupid and the narrowest split of sense I have heard of for 2009 so far.

This deserves condemnation. What supposedly is a “military intelligence report” as alleged appears to be lousy work without an iota of intelligence.

On 31 January 2009, an informal group my friends and I formed in Malaybalay City, Kanoy Bukidnon,  successfully organized and held a peace forum on the Mindanao peace process and history.

We invited retired MSU prof. Rudy B. Rodil as lecturer and he gave a hearty and substantial presentation at the Student Activity Center of Bukidnon State University to an audience from Bukidnon’s multiu-sectoral groups.

Every body was invited to that forum, including the military, the police, and of course Malaybalay’s United Muslim Association. The academe was there with retired BSU Vice President Leony Eduave and BSU Social Science Department chair Dr. Beulah Torres.

The business community was there with Rey’s Grill entrepreneur Rueul Gallo, who also is the vice president of the U.P. Alumni Association Bukidnon Chapter.

Provincial board member Atty. Roland Deticio attended it also along with datus from Bukidnon alligned with the Provincial Consultative  Body. Mayor Florencio T. Flores Jr was invited too.

Board member Atty. Oliver Owen Garcia, who heads the board’s peace and order committee helped fund the forum. We organized it in cooperation with BSU with funding assistance from Davao-based Initiatives for International Dialogue (IID).

There were also peace education students and social science faculty from BSU.

It was not a covert activity.

For us in Kanoy, it was a timely initiative now that Konsult Mindanaw is going around. (I hope they too won’t be branded as recruiters).

The intel report, if true, is absurd since it was an activity to help enlighten minds from a broad sector of the Bukidnon community.

It was an effort to uphold peace and understanding of Mindanao history not to side with any party but for the wider clamor for peace and unity.

We should not limit the peace talks to the armies that fight Mindanao’s ferocious battles!

In the end, the war affects every body so peace is every body’s concern.

As a journalist, I have a stake to the peace in Mindanao. That is why I allowed myself to be involved in Kanoy Bukidnon which promotes a community dialogue series in the province of Bukidnon.

We want to push a new community culture of peace –one that encourages into a dilogue a wider sector of people, not just the government leaders and the military, but everyone.

To the detractors of peace, we pray for your close minds to open up to a healthy and progressive world of open mindedness, cooperation, mutual respect and harmony.

The dungeons of your dark havens are too outdated in a modern world of intelligent and socially acceptable paradigms.

Mindanao 2009 Calendar, now out for sale

2009 Pebrero 6

Now on sale at P200 per copy (postage not included). Email your orders now at calendar at mindanews.com; call (082) 2974360; text 09285517750.

The Mindanao 2009 special edition calendar, from the thelandofpromise.com photographs of Bobby Timonera, one of the editors at MindaNews, is a project of the Mindanao News and Information Cooperative Center (MNICC). The Asia Foundation provided some assistance for printing.

View Calendar design here.

What is good and bad about celebrating Bukidnon’s Kaamulan Festival every year?

2009 Enero 29
by mindanaw

Please key in your response here.

Favorite part on President Barack Obama’s inaugural speech

2009 Enero 22

I glued myself to early morning television to see the inauguration.

Here’s my most favorite part, what’s yours?

“Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task. “

Read full text here.