The Case of Kasan Kamid

In 1986, Kasan Kamid was a thirty-five-year-old resident of Campo Muslim, married with four children. He supported his family by working as a middleman in the public market—buying coconuts or other produce from farmers or wholesalers at the river pier and selling them to retailers or retailing them himself at the nearby marketplace. A community organizer, he had established a residents' association in his Campo Muslim neighborhood to resist evictions, and organized Muslim street vendors to fight attempts by city authorities to remove them from the street fronting the public market.

Kasan is Iranun, and he was born in the city to a family of farmers originally from Nuling (now known as Sultan Kudarat), the coastal municipality just north of the city on the opposite side of the Pulangi River. His father owned three hectares of land in Nuling as part of a larger family holding but moved his family to Cotabato City in the 1950s, at a time when cigarette smuggling had begun to create economic opportunities for Muslims in the city. Kasan's parents operated a tiny stall in Matampay, a Muslim urban community on the river, where they sold nipa, vegetables, and bananas. His father often returned to Nuling to help his siblings harvest coconuts and rice.

In the early 1960s, Kasan's father purchased through installment payments ten hectares of land in a hilly region sixteen kilometers from the city near the main road running east. He relocated the family there and attempted to grow cash crops such as mongo beans and corn. In 1965 their water buffalo was stolen and the family, unable to replace it or to support themselves solely on the farm without it, moved back to the city. There, Kasan's mother again worked as a vendor while his father continued to work his land as best he could, traveling back and forth to the farm. In 1970 their house at the farm site was burned by the Ilaga.

That same year, Kasan began studies at the local college on a scholarship. At school he heard of secret military training for Muslim separatists in Malaysia. He planned to take part but could not afford the required travel expenses. In 1971 he eloped with a young woman from the city—a Christian who subsequently converted to Islam. His parents were at first bitterly opposed. They had a Muslim girl in mind for him, he knew, but he doubted he could ever afford the bridewealth payment.

The couple struggled their first year together. They lived in a Muslim community near the public market. While his wife worked sewing

buttons for a tailor, Kasan parlayed twelve pesos into seventy-five pesos of trading capital by selling first cigarettes and later chickens on the street in front of the public market. With that stake he was able to begin buying and selling vegetables. He also managed to attend college until martial law was declared in late 1972.

Kasan did not join the fighters when the rebellion began a few weeks later because he was by then a father. He did at one point use his knowledge—acquired from two years of ROTC training—to assist in the training of a contingent of rebels just outside the city. The rebellion, and the military occupation of the city, altered the character of Muslim marketing in the city. After the army closed the river systems to civilian traffic, Muslim farmers were unable to bring their products to market or easily obtain city goods. They became willing to sell their goods very cheaply or even barter them for such needed items as salt, sugar, and cigarettes. City residents, on the other hand, were willing to pay more for scarce produce, often not bothering ever/to bargain out of the haste created by their concern to avoid the daily army patrols at the public market. Good returns were thus available for those Muslims willing to take great risks by disregarding the military's ban on river travel in order to place upriver goods for sale in the city market. The following is Kasan's account of those days: "When the military closed the upriver areas to the city, we middlemen would have to sneak out of the city to obtain goods, traveling by foot or in small boats. I would return to the city with as many as thirty chickens and ducks and three goats. I was fired at by army helicopters patrolling the river. I would leave the goods in the open and hide and come back for them. If you were caught by military patrols they would beat you and steal your goods. But it was the only way for middlemen to survive."

Kasan and his family moved to Campo Muslim in 1974, after much of the neighborhood where they had been living near the public market was destroyed in a single night by a fire started by military gunfire. The public market neighborhood before the fire was divided into Muslim and Christian halves with a single barangay captain who was a Christian.^[1] In late 1973, a Civilian Home Defense Force (CHDF) detachment composed exclusively of Ilonggos was stationed at the public market area,^[2] and began to harass Muslim residents. On this particular night, the CHDF detachment fired a single shot into the Muslim neighborhood. The regular army infantry battalion across the river, mistakenly believing that the shot was directed at them from the Muslim neighborhood, opened fire on the neighborhood, a barrage that continued for most of the night. It took Kasan and his family' five hours to

crawl two hundred meters to safety. The resulting fire destroyed a great number of houses in the Muslim neighborhood.

The military attack and fire had finally made life in the public market area unendurable for Muslim residents, and many of them, more than one hundred families, moved within the next few weeks to Campo Muslim, seeking a safer place to live. Those evacuees whose houses were still standing sold them "for pennies" to Christians. Campo Muslim was an undeveloped swamp far from their places of work but it was the only area in the city proper with a Muslim barangay captain, one who they hoped might be able to protect them from the deadly harassment of the Philippine military.

Kasan moved to Campo Muslim in the company of most of his neighbors. What they found was a marsh with water waist-high in parts. They used a convenient pile of garbage to begin to fill the swamp. Those who could afford them bought mollusk shells for additional landfill for their homesites. The evacuees brought wood salvaged from the destroyed houses in the public market community to build their first homes in Campo Muslim. They also began to pay land rent immediately to the owner of the property—five pesos (approximately U.S. twenty-five cents) per month.