Chapter 6
Postcolonial Transitions
On July 4, 1946, a severely war-damaged Philippines received its formal independence. A number of scholars have observed that the most notable feature of the newly created Philippine republic was its continued economic and military dependence on the United States (see, e.g., Constantino 1975; Walton 1984; Wolters 1984). Independence did significantly alter the structure of local and provincial politics in the Philippines. The electorate was expanded,[1] campaigns grew more expensive (at least partly because vote-buying became more common), and politicians became more dependent on the top-down distribution of funds through one or the other national political parties. Those funds flowed primarily through the party that controlled the state, much of them originally acquired from the national treasury or directly from American aid and international funds (Wolters 1984; compare Lande 1965).
In this chapter I relate how these nationwide trends in electoral politics—a larger electorate, more expensive campaigns, and an increased reliance on extralocal resources—took on a peculiar cast in postindependence Cotabato. In Cotabato, the immediate postcolonial period saw both a surge in Christian immigration to the region and the continuation of autocratic rule by colonial-era datus. The expanded electorate in Cotabato was composed overwhelmingly of Christians, many of whom voted for datu candidates for prominent offices based on the perception that Muslim officeholders could best supervise indigenous
Muslims and thereby protect Christians. While datu politicians received significant national party funds, their political expenses did not measurably increase because their armed domination of their districts precluded the need for extensive campaigning or vote-buying. Datu politicians instead invested in various emblems of Islamic identity—pilgrimages, mosques, and Islamic schools and organizations. I argue that those investments in identity represented both the continued development of the transcendent Muslim ethnic identity first nurtured in the late colonial period and an effort on the part of particular Muslim politicians to project the image of a unified and revitalized Muslim populace in order to gain purchase in a nation-state controlled by Christian Filipinos.
The most significant change in postcolonial Cotabato was a demographic one. Independence brought a tremendous expansion of Christian immigration from northern provinces to the South and particularly to the Cotabato Basin.[2] I begin by telling the story of that postcolonial migration, then go on to describe a second, related one—the movement of Cotabato Muslims in significant numbers, for the first time, to Cotabato City. Next I examine the continuation of "traditional" datu rule in postcolonial Cotabato despite political and economic changes far greater than those seen in the colonial period. Finally, I consider the ethnicization of Islam in the new Philippine republic by examining the evidence for an Islamic resurgence in the Muslim Philippines in the early postcolonial period.
Christian Immigrants and the Peripheralization of Rural Muslims
Government-assisted migration to Mindanao on a large scale began with the establishment of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935. While the American colonial government had sponsored agricultural colonies in Muslim Mindanao as early as 1913, those settlements remained limited and experimental.[3] American efforts to encourage Christian immigration to Muslim Mindanao were motivated in large part by the intention to "civilize" Muslims by contagion. That intention was articulated by Governor Frank Carpenter in a 1917 report: "The problem of civilization of Mindanao and Sulu according to modern standards, or as it may be termed, 'the Philippinization' of the Mohammedan and pagan regions which comprise almost the entire terri-
tory of Mindanao-Sulu, has its most expeditious and positive solution in the movement under Government direction to that territory of sufficient numbers of the Christian inhabitants of Visayas and Luzon" (Carpenter quoted in Gowing 1983, 294).
The Commonwealth administration was principally interested in developing Mindanao economically for the benefit of the nation as a whole and, particularly, in providing an outlet for tenant farmers in the population centers of the North who had become further impoverished (and increasingly embittered) by the global depression. Christian political leaders at the national level neither anticipated nor encouraged any significant Muslim participation in their development schemes (Thomas 1971). In 1939, the National Land Settlement Administration (NLSA) was established and given the task of creating and administering a larger and better integrated system of settler colonies in Mindanao. By early 1941 the NLSA had established two large colonies, both in Cotabato Province—in the Koronadal and Alah Valleys (see map 2)—that accommodated approximately thirty-seven hundred families, all of them immigrants from the North (Pelzer1945). Unlike the earlier American-sponsored agricultural colonies, no effort was made to include Muslim families among the settlers (Thomas 1971).
After the wartime hiatus, government-sponsored and subsidized immigration resumed at an accelerated pace under a succession of new government agencies. One of those programs was specifically intended to relieve severe political as well as population pressures. On the eve of formal political independence in 1946, the fledgling Philippine state was faced with a rapidly expanding armed rebellion in Central Luzon, the most populous and agriculturally productive area of the country. By 1950, the Hukbalahap Rebellion—a popular insurgency seeking agrarian reform as well as complete economic independence from the United States—had an estimated fifteen thousand armed fighters and a half million sympathizers and was posing a severe challenge to the postindependence state[4] (Kerkvliet 1977; Walton 1984).
The Hukbalahap Rebellion was subdued in 1953 with the application of immense amounts of military aid and development expenditures by the United States (Walton 1984). Foremost in the government's policy of attraction—and the only element of its agrarian reform program that was effectively implemented—was a resettlement program for "Huk" fighters and supporters in Mindanao. The army-administered Economic Development Corps (EDCOR) established
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settlement projects primarily in Cotabato (in Buldun and Alamada), but its first project, in 1951, was in the fertile Kapatagan Basin in neighboring Lanao Province (Scaff 1955). Demographic data are available only for Kapatagan, but they illustrate the scale of the postwar influx of Christian migrants. There were about 24 Christian settlers in the Kapatagan area in 1918. By 1941 their number had risen to 8,000 and by 1960 there were a total of 93,000 immigrants, many of whom had arrived under the EDCOR program. By 1960, Christian immigrants vastly outnumbered the 7,000 Maranao Muslims still living in the area (Hausherr 1968–69 quoted in Thomas 1971, 317).
The demographic shift throughout Muslim Mindanao in the postwar years, while not as dramatic as in Kapatagan, was equally momentous. The population of Central Mindanao (comprising the pre-1968 provinces of Cotabato, Lanao, and Bukidnon) soared from .7 million persons in 1948 to an estimated 2.3 million persons in 1970; representing a growth rate of 229 percent, as compared with the national figure of just under 100 percent (Burley 1973). Cotabato received the bulk of the postwar migrants. Net migration to Cotabato province in the period between 1939 and 1960 totaled 523,037 persons compared with 231,445 persons for the rest of the region (Burley 1973). During the twelve years prior to the 1960 census, the population of Cotabato Province grew at a rate of 8.48 percent per year, the highest population growth rate of any province in the Philippines (Wernstedt and Spencer 1967). Table 1 displays figures (reported by O'Shaughnessy 1975) showing that, while Muslims comprised 54.5 percent of the population of Cotabato Province in 1939, by 1960 Christian in-migration had caused the Muslim share of the population to slip to 34.6 percent.
While the scale of Christian immigration to Cotabato caused inevitable dislocations, the manner of its occurrence also produced glar-
ing disparities between Christian settlers and Muslim farmers. As early as 1935, prominent Muslims such as Salipada Pendatun were complaining about the inherent disadvantages faced by Muslims who tried to compete with Christians in acquiring legal title to lands (see chapter 5). From 1935 onward, the successive administrations of the Philippine Commonwealth and Republic provided steadily more opportunities and assistance to settlers from the North. By contrast, the government services available to Muslims were not only meager compared to those obtained by immigrant Christians but were also fewer than they had received under the colonial regime. The land laws of the postcolonial government defined all unregistered lands in Mindanao to be public land or military reservations (Gowing 1979). Unfamiliar with the procedures or deterred by the years of uncertainty, the steep processing fees, and the requirement to pay taxes during the interim, many Muslims neither applied for the new lands opened up by road construction nor filed for the land they currently occupied (Thomas 1971). For their part, officials and employees of the Bureau of Lands (virtually all of them Christians) were at best indifferent to Muslims. Christian settlers, on the other hand, regularly obtained ownership of the best new lands as well as crop loans and other forms of government assistance. The new Christian communities became linked to trade centers and to one another by networks of roads while Muslim communities remained relatively isolated.
By 1970, this differential access had produced a profound economic gap between Muslim and Christian communities throughout Mindanao. In 1971 the Philippine Senate Committee on National Minorities reported that until that year there were no irrigation projects in any municipality in Mindanao where Muslims were a majority (Gowing 1979). A 1972 survey of three communities in Pigkawayan, a municipality adjacent to Cotabato City and one of the leading rice-producing districts in central Mindanao, revealed circumstances symptomatic of Cotabato as a whole. Muslims, who comprised 20 percent of the population of the municipality, occupied a remote, swampy portion of one of the villages in the three-village sample and did not possess legal title to the land they farmed. They had adopted new rice varieties but, unlike Christian farmers, did not use fertilizer, herbicides, or tractors and threshers. In sharp contrast to Christian farmers, no Muslims had received government aid, although all Muslims polled cited government aid as the most important way that farming could be improved (E. K. Tan 1974).
The fact of differential access to state resources for Christians and Muslims despite an official policy of equal access was exacerbated by the purposeful thwarting of the intentions of the government policy by bureaucrats and speculators. Both ordinary Muslims and Christians were disadvantaged by these manipulations, but the most obvious abuses of the system often favored Christians over indigenous Muslims.
Pelzer (1945, 12) notes that during the Commonwealth period it was common for homesteaders to rush to a road construction site to find that "influential persons who had been privately informed of the construction even before it was begun had taken up the choice land on both sides of the road. These people then held the land for speculative purposes, using hired labor to meet the bare minimum requirement for improvements."
Such collusions between speculators and bureaucrats were still common in Cotabato in the 1950s and 1960s. Speculators received information on roads to be constructed through undeveloped sections and gained title to the best adjoining lots for later resale. Legal limitations on the size of landholdings were circumvented by, among other means, titling lots in the names of fictitious persons or absent relatives and hiring children to simulate (by using their big toes) the required thumbprints on application forms. Philippine Constabulary officers were reportedly able to obtain large and valuable tracts of land for themselves. Also common was the practice by employees of the Bureau of Lands to apply for title to parcels of land in recently surveyed areas in the names of their absent relatives in Luzon or the Visayas. Their applications would be given priority treatment and relatives would then be notified to come to claim their lots.
Most rural Muslims (as exemplified by the indigenous inhabitants of Pigkawayan) found themselves peripheralized in place as a result of the maneuverings of Christian settlers and speculators. Others, however, were physically dispossessed of their lands. The Bureau of Lands recognized land rights on the basis of priority of claim filed, not priority of occupation. It was not unusual for individuals to obtain legal titles, either intentionally or unintentionally, to already occupied lands.[5] In such cases, the legal owners were mostly (but not always) Christians and the previous occupants ordinary Muslims. Poor Muslim "squatters" would usually be offered small amounts of money to vacate the land and would often accept it and leave. If the occupants refused to move and the titled owner was sufficiently wealthy or influential, he or she would gain possession of the land by use of armed might, most of-
ten supplied (in the case of Christian titleholders) by local units of the Philippine Constabulary.
Muslim Migration to Cotabato City
The dislocations wrought by the massive migration of Christian settlers into Cotabato in the postwar period provided a major stimulus for an internal migration of Cotabato Muslims into Cotabato City. The migration of large numbers of Muslims within Cotabato was not in itself a novel phenomenon. The indigenous inhabitants of the region had long responded to perceived external threats by moving en masse out of harm's way. Laarhoven (1989) reports the 1693 migration of five thousand families upriver and away from the coastal capital because of the fear of a Dutch-English invasion. Another massive upriver migration followed the occupation of the Pulangi Delta by the Spaniards in 1861 (Ileto 1971). The postcolonial movements differed from previous internal migrations in two important ways. First, the direction of movement was reversed, with migrants transferring downriver rather than up. Second, this was a rural-to-urban migration, with most Muslims relocating to Cotabato City and taking up urban occupations. Those who arrived prior to 1970 were overwhelmingly economic migrants. While many were pushed into the city as the result of the rural disruption caused by Christian immigration, others were pulled there by the new economic opportunities made available by that in-migration and more generally by developments in the postcolonial economy.
The movement of rural Muslims into Cotabato City in the postwar period may be seen as one component of a gradual rehabitation of the traditional downriver capital after the withdrawal of its Spanish occupiers in 1899. That process began with Datu Piang's attack on Cotabato town in the wake of the Spanish evacuation and was advanced with Datu Sinsuat's move to Cotabato town in the 1920s. Regrettably, hardly any information exists about ordinary Muslims in the city proper prior to the 1950s. Chester Hunt, who conducted a survey in the población (provincial town) of Cotabato in 1953, reported a "considerable representation" of Muslims there ([1957] 1974, 194). He found a majority of Muslims in the city working as fishermen or stevedores, with a small number operating small businesses such as goldsmithing and a few in river transportation, a business of somewhat larger scale.
The ethnic geography of Cotabato City has changed hardly at all from the way Hunt found it in 1953. Muslims still tend to live and work close by the Pulangi River or along tributary streams on the outskirts of the city. All three major mosques in the city are located on riverbanks. Christians, on the other hand, generally reside in neighborhoods on the higher ground south of the city center or along the main highway running south.[6] The Chinese still typically "occupy flats located above stores in the business district" in the center of the city (Hunt [1957] 1974, 197). The continued riverine orientation of city Muslims is most strikingly apparent on the banks of the Pulangi at the northern edge of the city. Virtually all of the economic enterprises and activities found here—water taxis, coffee shops, goldsmithing, furniture-making, fish-selling, vegetable-vending, cargo handling—represent uniquely Muslim occupations. Christians, by contrast, rarely travel on the river and hardly ever venture into the Muslim areas along its banks.[7]
In 1963, ten years after Hunt's survey, the Mindanao Cross , a weekly newspaper published in the city, reported more than 750 "landless families" living in Cotabato City (August 24, 1963). In 1966, in a newspaper article by a local social worker, it was noted that there were about 1,000 families "living in slum conditions" in Cotabato City, most of them along the riverfront road that forms the core of the Muslim sector of the city (Mindanao Cross , December 10, 1966). Hunt's 1953 survey makes no mention of urban shantytowns or squatters. While some of these families may have been composed of destitute Christian immigrants, it is most likely that the great majority of them were Muslim urban migrants arrived since the mid-1950s.
In the early 1960s a new community of Muslim urban poor was created in the middle of the Pulangi River. This was Bird Island (also known simply as Punul , or "The Island"). Bird Island was originally a small, low-lying island in the Pulangi River directly across from the main city pier. The Spaniards had built a brick armory there in the late nineteenth century and the Americans had used it as a garbagedumping site during their short occupation of Cotabato City after World War II. After a disastrous flood in the city in 1960 caused by unusually heavy rains and the progressive silting of the Pulangi River bed, city fathers, with the help of Congressman Pendatun, successfully petitioned the national government to dredge a cutoff channel. The channel straightened the lowest portion of the river, from Cotabato
City to the sea, Part of the sand from that dredging operation was placed on Bird Island, creating five hectares of relatively high, dry land. Within a very short time a community of more than two hundred dwellings emerged in the middle of the river.
At the height of its occupation in the mid- to late 1960s, Bird Island was a vibrant multiethnic Muslim community with two mosques. The eastern, or upriver, half of the island was occupied by Tau sa Laya (upriver) Magindanaons, many of whom worked as laborers at the main city pier. Most of the residents of the western, or downriver, side of the island were Iranun from the coast, and they worked as fish vendors in the riverside neighborhood of Mabini. Bird Island was a convenient refuge for Muslim urban migrants. There they could live without the cost of land rent in a secure Muslim community only a few hundred yards from their work sites.
When asked today to recall life in Cotabato City in the 1950s and 1960s, Muslim residents invariably recollect a cleaner, safer, and more prosperous city. One lifelong resident offered a typical remembrance: "When I was a boy I could dive for five-centavo pieces in the Pulangi River at Matampay bridge, the water was so clear. The river was filled with large shrimp, clams, and fish. Fishermen would give fish away. One peso would buy a string of large dalag [mudfish]. [Muslim] Women wore nothing but gold jewelry, and they were ashamed if they had only one piece. They wore heavy wrist and ankle bracelets, hairpins, necklaces, earrings, and brooches—all gold." Even allowing for the soft focus of reminiscence, such memories suggest that life for ordinary Muslims in the city then was appreciably less difficult than today. The remembered abundance was due in large part to a relatively thriving provincial economy stimulated by at least three new sources of external revenue. First, the immediate postindependence period saw an influx of wealth into the province in the form of war-damage payments, back pay awards, and reconstruction aid received directly or indirectly from the United States. We shall consider the political effects of that new source of wealth shortly but may presume for now that some significant proportion of it benefited Cotabato Muslims. Second, the 1950s and 1960s brought not only a flood of new people into the province but also large amounts of government resources to pay for road building and other infrastructural improvements and as loans and other forms of aid to Christian migrants. Muslim urban dwellers benefited indirectly in that virtually all Christian migrants to the province
passed through Cotabato City, thus making more work available for cargo handlers, fish vendors, and transport workers—all occupations where Muslims predominated.
The third novel source of external wealth was largely the result of Muslim enterprise and most directly benefited significant numbers of ordinary Muslims in the city. Beginning in the mid-1950s, a lucrative Philippine-wide trade in contraband American cigarettes became centered in Cotabato City as a group of Muslim entrepreneurs—mostly Iranun speakers—began to take advantage of a newly opened economic niche: an enormous, unfilled demand for low-cost, high-quality cigarettes. Until the outbreak of World War II, the Philippines had exported significant quantities of high-quality cigars and cigar tobacco. While much of the productive capacity of the tobacco industry was destroyed during the war (Reed 1963, 351), equally damaging to the national industry was a shift in domestic and world market demand away from cigars (which the Philippines produced) to cigarettes (which it did not). American cigarettes flooded Philippine markets in the immediate postwar period and, for the first time, the country became a net importer of tobacco products.
The government passed legislation in 1954 intended to revitalize domestic production through a combination of government price supports, high tariffs, and import restrictions (Hartendorp 1961; Golay 1961). The price supports discouraged, however unintentionally, the production of higher grades of tobacco, and by the mid-1950s the combination of high demand for quality cigarettes, severe import controls, and continued low quality of domestically produced cigarettes led to large-scale smuggling of American cigarettes into the country (Reed 1963). The so-called back door to the Philippines from Sabah in Borneo through Sulu to Mindanao was the ideal entry route for illegally imported cigarettes, and Jolo (the capital city of Sulu) and Cotabato quickly became the two key points in a very substantial contraband trade.[8]
The Iranun residents of the Cotabato coast were perfectly situated to participate in the cigarette trade-with Borneo. As seafarers, fisher-folk, or fish traders, they were familiar with the sea routes and maintained long-distance ties (including kinship connections) with partners in Zamboanga and Jolo. Iranun smugglers, usually working with partners from Sulu (who were sometimes also Iranun speakers), captained kumpits —large motorized boats with a loading capacity of thirty
tons—manned with an armed Iranun crew. The kumpits would sail to a port in Sabah where they took on cartons of American cigarettes (actually produced in Hong Kong under American license) as well as umbrellas, perfumes, and enameled goods. They would then proceed to Cotabato, attempting to avoid government anti-smuggling patrols.
On their arrival in Cotabato, the boats put in at isolated moorings in the river delta west of Cotabato City. New Muslim communities grew up at the river mouth whose residents ferried cargo from the boats at night to the city and other distribution points. From Cotabato City, cigarettes were shipped by truck throughout Mindanao and by interisland ferry to Manila and other northern cities where they were readily available for sale on most street corners. I found no evidence of non-Muslims participating in or funding smuggling ventures and only very limited involvement by the Cotabato Muslim political elite. The smuggling economy did, however, have wide-reaching effects among Muslim residents of Cotabato City. It not only provided direct employment for a significant number of ordinary Muslims in various stages of the smuggling operation but also infused money into Muslim urban communities by stimulating the growth of numerous secondary enterprises ranging from boat building to the fabrication of nipa-palm panels for simple urban housing. The two main Muslim riverfront communities in the city, which today are noted primarily for their poverty and high unemployment, were both economically vigorous in the mid-1960s at the height of the smuggling economy.
By 1970, cigarette smuggling had been largely curtailed due to an anti-smuggling pact negotiated by Ferdinand Marcos with Malaysia, to more efficient antismuggling patrols in Cotabato, and to a drop in demand for imported cigarettes as better quality cigarettes came on the Philippine market.[9] The most successful smugglers invested in legitimate business ventures in and around the city, but the widespread prosperity of the smuggling economy was not restored.
The relative prosperity enjoyed by urban Muslims in the postcolonial city was also on the wane by 1970. Early in that year Bird Island was ordered demolished by the Christian city mayor as an eyesore and a hindrance to shipping in the river. The Pulangi had silted up once again and it was decided to remove Bird Island entirely to facilitate the free movement of river traffic,[10] By June of 1970 the dismantling of Bird Island had begun, with no relocation sites provided for its residents. They dispersed to various Muslim areas in or near the city, and
some went to the low-lying, swampy area on the edge of the city that came to be known as Campo Muslim. It was a far less desirable location than Bird Island and, as we shall see, a more difficult place to live.
Postcolonial Datus and the Persistence of Autocratic Rule
How was Muslim politics in Cotabato affected by the changes, demographic and otherwise, introduced under the Philippine republic? Here I will examine the political and economic strategies employed by various postcolonial datus, both in Cotabato City and at the provincial level.
For the first twenty years of the Philippine republic—from 1947 to 1967—the mayorship of Cotabato City was held by Datu Mando Sinsuat, a son of Datu Sinsuat Balabaran. His tenure in office represented the continuation of Sinsuat control in the city. Unlike his father, however, Datu Mando officially governed all the residents of Cotabato City, not solely its Muslim inhabitants. He required the votes of a large percentage of the Christian electorate to remain in office and received them without difficulty, according to the Christian editor of the city's weekly newspaper. The editor, who by 1986 had observed Cotabato City's political scene for almost twenty-five years, related that among Christians in the city prior to the late 1960s, "there was an idea that a Muslim mayor could control Muslims," and that many Christians opted to vote for Datu Mando "because of his personal appeal."
Additional indirect evidence exists to support this view. In Cotabato City electoral politics from 1946 to 1968, ethnic political coalitions were virtually absent. The slates of city council candidates that campaigned in conjunction with a particular mayoral candidate were almost always composed of both Muslims and Christians. Muslim mayoral candidates invariably had Christian running mates, while Christian candidates paired themselves with Muslims. Every city council in each of Mando Sinsuat's administrations had a large majority (and in one instance, a totality) of Christian members. Moreover, despite Datu Mando's continued electoral successes, the Sinsuat political clan neither monopolized Muslim politics in the city nor, for that matter, did it form a united front. In every one of his campaigns for office, Mando Sinsuat was opposed by another Muslim candidate for mayor, very often one of his half-brothers.[11] Given this relatively free market for votes in city elections, it seems likely that Christian voters or, more
to the point, Christian political brokers, would support the mayoral candidate most able to protect their interests.
Another son of Datu Sinsuat, Datu Blah, exploited a new urban niche using methods reminiscent of his father's. One of the primary urban occupations for poor Muslim males in the postwar city was that of dockworker, or kargador (from the Spanish, cargador ). Cargo handling at Cotabato City piers was (and remains) strenuous and dangerous work for very little pay. It was also viewed as demeaning labor associated traditionally with banyaga (chattel slaves). From the early 1950s, most Cotabato City dockworkers were organized into associations referred to euphemistically as "labor unions" (see Hunt [1957] 1974). Those organizations determined the piece rate charged to shippers, provided workers to handle cargo, and guaranteed against damage to cargo that occurred during handling. Two of these organizations were established in Cotabato City in the early 1950s by two Magindanaon commoners, one of whom made his way from labor gang foreman to controller of the largest share of riverfront cargo handling. This was the peak period for immigration to Cotabato and a time of rapid growth in the amount of goods shipped to and from the province.
By 1957, the scale of expansion on the waterfront (and the potential profits to be gained there) attracted the participation of Datu Blah Sinsuat (a former Congressman—see below), who began an organization of his own, the Progressive Labor Union. Because of his name, and the force he was able to exert, he soon succeeded in taking control of most of the riverfront by establishing new contracts with shippers and bodega owners and drawing laborers away from the established organizations through intimidation. While one of the commoner labor bosses succumbed rather quickly to the offensive mounted by Datu Blah, the other boss—Makabalang, who wielded unprecedented power for a Muslim commoner in those days—resisted him vigorously and effectively for some time. His defiance led to his eventual death by ambush in the city at the hands of Philippine Constabulary troops loyal to Datu Blah.
In 1986, all dockworkers at the main city pier were members of the Progressive Labor Union (PLU), now headed by the daughter of Datu Blah, Bai Fatima Sinsuat. According to the laborers I interviewed, the PLU appropriates 20 percent of the daily earnings of member laborers by withholding that amount from the handling fees earned by each labor gang. In addition, each worker pays an annual membership fee of
6.
Muslim kargadors (laborers) unloading cargo
at a riverside landing at the main city market.
fifteen pesos. In return, members receive identity cards and little else in the way of regular benefits. They are not insured against accidental breakage and must pay for the goods they damage from their earnings share. Workers have no job security and no guarantee of daily earnings. They typically work seven days per week and earn twenty to thirty pesos (approximately $1.00 to $1.50) per day, but there are also days with no work and no earnings. On those days, they may ask their foreman for a cash advance. PLU members also report that Bai Fatima has given members money in times of family emergencies and has also bailed laborers out of jail. This organization of work relations on the city's main pier, first consolidated by Datu Blah, demonstrates a combination of exploitation and protection (from economic calamities or governmental authorities) that duplicates to a remarkable degree the structure of traditional relations between datus and their subordinates.
To consider the fortunes of the postcolonial datus at the provincial level we may first examine the postwar career of Datu Salipada Pendatun, the most prominent former student of Edward Kuder. Pendatun was appointed governor of Cotabato in 1945 by Philippines President Sergio Osmena and was the first Muslim to serve in that post. He was subsequently elected to the Philippine Senate in 1946. His Senate term
ended in 1949 with the election of Elpidio Quirino to the Philippines presidency. During the Quirino administration, Cotabato province was controlled by Pendatun's political rivals, the Sinsuats. Quirino appointed Datu Duma Sinsuat (another son of Datu Sinsuat Balabaran) governor of the province. His half-brother, Datu Blah, was elected congressman while Datu Mando, also a half-brother, served as mayor of the capital.
Pendatun returned to practice law in Cotabato City until winning election to the House of Representatives in 1957, where he served without interruption until the declaration of martial law in 1972. During his tenure in Congress, Pendatun (having apparently learned from his experience in the Senate) changed his party allegiance more than once in order to remain aligned with the party of the man who held the presidency—such allegiance securing access to the primary font of political funds.
In 1966, Pendatun ushered a bill through Congress to divide Cotabato into two provinces: North Cotabato and South Cotabato. Political leaders in southern Cotabato, virtually all of them Christian, had been agitating for a division since 1956. Because of the rapid increase in population, there had been twenty-six new municipalities created in the province since independence; most of them offshoots of the two large settler colonies established in the Alah and Koronadal Valleys in 1941 (Wernstedt and Spencer 1967). Pendatun championed the bill after losing the southern Cotabato vote in a previous Congressional election by a two-to-one margin to a Christian former protégé. As a result of Pendatun's efforts, the old Empire Province of Cotabato was divided in two on the first day of 1968. With an eye to the continued preservation of his political position, Pendatun was, as early as 1966, planning the further subdivision of the province (Mindanao Cross , July 16, 1966).
Congressman Pendatun was a respected but somewhat remote figure to most Cotabato Muslims. That detachment was due in large measure to his absence from the province for a good part of any year. It was also, however, a cultural distance. Pendatun was very highly educated by provincial standards, had married a Christian wife, and moved in social and political circles far removed from the traditional Muslim politics of Cotabato. When non-elite Muslims remember Pendatun today, they occasionally refer to the supernatural powers he must have possessed to survive a Manila assassination attempt in 1972, but are more likely to remark on the presence of Catholic statuary in his Cotabato City mansion.
Datu Udtug Matalam
A far less remote figure, who was also considerably more "traditional" than Pendatun and almost equally powerful, was Datu Udtug Matalain, who held the post of governor of Cotabato Province from 1946 to 1949 and from 1955 to 1968. Datu Udtug was a lifelong comrade of Salipada Pendatun and in most ways his political opposite. Whereas Pendatun was Westernized, cosmopolitan, and relatively aloof, Matalam was traditional, provincial, and personally popular among ordinary Muslims. Together, they controlled Cotabato politics for the first twenty years of the Philippine republic.
Datu Udtug was the son of the Sultan of Pagalungan, another small upriver sultanate aligned with the larger Buayan Sultanate. He was born in the last decade of the nineteenth century and spent his life under nominal American or Philippine hegemony. Nevertheless, an anecdote related by Datu Adil (a close associate of Matalam's) concerning Datu Udtug's childhood establishes Udtug's ties with a heroic precolonial past.
When Udtug was just four years old his father was defeated in battle and beheaded by Datu Mantawil, the Sultan of Kabuntalan. The place where he was beheaded is still called Pagagawan [the Battlefield]. One day not long after his father's death, Udtug was playing with other children beside the Pulangi River. Datu Mantawil passed by with his men in a vinta [longboat] beautifully decorated with mirrors. The children heard the rhythmic paddling and then the datu's caller announcing, "Datu Mantawil is passing." Young Udtug found a piece of wood, threw it, and hit the old datu. Datu Mantawil unsheathed his kris and demanded to know the culprit. He was told that it was Udtug, the son of his slain enemy. Years later, the family of Datu Mantawil submitted to Datu Udtug. He vanquished them but did not kill them.
In 1914, while still a young man, Datu Udtug was appointed assistant colony superintendent of the American-sponsored agricultural colony established in his district of Pagalungan. He was charged with managing the affairs of the Muslim colonists, who comprised approximately half the total number (Gowing 1983). Later, he became the district school inspector and saw to Muslim school attendance, persuading Muslim parents to send their children to colonial schools. Datu Udtug's early career was thus spent cooperating with colonial authorities by facilitating the incorporation of Muslims into the new American order.[12]
With the Japanese occupation of Mindanao during World War II, Pagalungan became a central assembly point for the anti-Japanese
guerrillas of Cotabato. Datu Udtug fought at the side of his brother-in-law Salipada Pendatun and was given the rank of major. His arms, men, and supplies were a key factor in the successes of the guerrillas.
In 1946 Datu Udtug was appointed governor of Cotabato Province at the behest of Pendatun, who had just been elected to the Philippine Senate. Within three years, ten new municipalities had been created in the province and Udtug, despite his lack of formal education, had gained a reputation as an able administrator. He resigned the governorship in 1949 with the installation of a new national administration but was elected to the same office in 1955, the first year of full suffrage, and served four consecutive terms until his retirement in 1968.[13] The provincial leadership of Udtug is remembered as strong and efficient and his administration is noted for its fiscal soundness. In a parallel to political arrangements in Cotabato City, many Christians in the province were apparently of the opinion that a Muslim governor could better keep Muslims in line and were specifically in favor of the governorship of Udtug Matalam. According to the newspaper editor quoted above, "Christians really trusted Matalam." They also reportedly felt their interests adequately represented by his "formula" for administrative power-sharing—a Christian vice-governor and a Christian majority on the three-man provincial board (Mindanao Cross , January 1, 1983).[14]
Those who knew him recount that Datu Udtug was an indifferent campaigner and infrequent speechmaker by comparison with other Muslim political figures.[15] His political staying-power seems to have been a direct consequence of his continued access to external resources. That access, first acquired through his personal political skills, allowed him to attract followers and create political allies. The possession of such resources and skills was a particularly critical factor in the Muslim politics of postwar Cotabato because the indigenous political arena had been significantly altered as a result of the war. The absence of American colonial authority during the Japanese interlude and the infusion of firearms and ammunition into the region during that period allowed reinvigoration of the political power of local datus in Cotabato and throughout the Muslim South and the resurgence of precolonial patterns of feuding and adjudication (Gowing 1979; Mednick 1965; Thomas 1971). The influx of wealth into the province after the war, in the form of war-damage payments, back pay awards, and reconstruction aid amplified this process. Local datus spent a good deal of the newly obtained cash on bridewealth payments, pilgrimages to
Mecca, mosque building (see below), ceremonial feasts, and other means to increase their prestige and followings (Mednick 1965). Violent intra-elite conflict among datu families was also common in the early postindependence period.[16]
It was the talent of Datu Udtug to be able to forge a number of these revitalized local datus, as well as a growing number of Christian politicians, into a political bloc. That was accomplished in part by providing local leaders with official political bases as the mayors of newly created municipalities. Udtug granted local datus officially sanctioned local power as well as a certain amount of public and party funds. In return, the mayors guaranteed the votes of their constituents. In municipalities with populations that were overwhelmingly Muslim, voting typically did not occur at all. Mayors merely delivered tally sheets indicating 100 percent support to the provincial center and local subordinates dared not protest their disenfranchisement. In mixed Muslim-Christian municipalities with datu mayors, voting might take place but results were altered if unacceptable. According to Datu Adil, Datu Udtug regarded this, and most other datu larcenies, as "a necessary evil."
Throughout the postindependence Philippines, the possibilities for self-enrichment through election to office at the provincial or municipal level were greater than ever before due to the increased importance of the state as a provider of capital and the absolute reliance of central state politicians on the votes delivered by local officeholders (Wolters 1984).[17] In Muslim Cotabato, however, in contrast to most other provinces in the Philippines, the costs of attaining political office did not rise concomitantly because the local capabilities of autocratic datus precluded the need for the expense of extensive campaigning and/or vote-buying.[18] Connections at the national level were of course important, and these were provided by Salipada Pendatun. Pendatun and Udtug ruled Cotabato in tandem: Pendatun furnished the high-level associations in Manila, while Udtug cultivated the provincial alliances and generally followed Pendatun's lead in party affiliation.[19]
As the effective owner of provincial votes, Udtug was courted by representatives of both national political parties and provided with significant amounts of party campaign funds.[20] As Datu Adil remembers: "Liberalista Party and Nacionalista Party leaders would come to Udtug and ask him for his support. They would give him money even though he would never promise them anything. That money was the single largest source of his income despite the fact that he never asked for any of it." There is a sense in which Datu Udtug approximated the
cultural ideal for datus envisioned in the precolonial ideology of aristocratic rule: he was regularly presented with tribute without having to demand it. Of course the greatest portion of Udtug's revenue came not from subordinates but from powerful outsiders, and a more accurate analogy is available from the colonial period. Datu Udtug was the true political successor of Datu Piang of Buayan, who enriched himself by selling supplies and services to Spanish and American colonial occupiers. Datu Udtug brokered votes, the new political currency of the postindependence Philippines and, like Piang before him, was adept at obtaining favorable terms in his dealings with external political forces.
Datu Udtug was a popular and impressive figure for Cotabato Muslims. As the first Magindanaon governor of the province, he represented the assumption by indigenous Muslims of modern political authority and the end of colonialism. As the heir, in body and spirit, of the Sultan of Pagalungan, he personified a cultural continuity with the precolonial past.[21] Most important for ordinary Muslims, however, he embodied the characteristics of a "good datu" (mapia a datu )—one who protected his subjects without exploiting them. Datu Udtug's inclination to behave in such a manner was certainly encouraged by his ready access to externally derived resources. Like Congressman Pendatun, Datu Udtug is said to have accumulated significant wealth during his career, much of it in the form of productive land. However, Unlike many other colonial and postcolonial datus, his wealth seems not to have been gained primarily at the expense of his subordinates.
The careers of Datus Pendatun and Udtug illustrate one of the most interesting features of the postcolonial datus in general: a distinct discontinuity among them that correlates with a greater or lesser degree of incorporation into the dominant culture of the Philippine state. Congressman Pendatun is a notable example of the more culturally incorporated type. These postcolonial datus had some college education (often having attended Manila universities) and were usually professionals (most often lawyers or educators). They tended to be familiar with, and comfortable in, Manila, the national capital, often having lived there for a number of years. They were versed in national party politics and personally acquainted with national political figures. In addition, they exhibited a pronounced tendency to marry Christian wives and often to remain (or become) monogamous as a result of those marriages. Hunt ([1957] 1974) cites evidence that as many as forty prominent Magindanaon men (most of them presumably datus) had Christian wives in 1953.
Because of the relative acculturation of these datus, as well as their tendency to be physically absent from Cotabato for significant lengths of time, they risked alienating themselves, socially and politically, from Magindanaon followers and allies. That danger tended to be averted by the maintenance of special relationships with representatives of the other general type of postwar datu. The partnership between Congressman Pendatun and Datu Udtug exemplifies that sort of relationship, and Datu Udtug epitomizes the second variety of postcolonial datu. Those datus (much more numerous than the former type) tended not to be well-educated. Many were effectively illiterate and most, like Datu Udtug, neither spoke nor read English, the language of national politics. They were local leaders—in the case of Datu Udtug a metalocal leader—and national politics held little interest for them. In most essential aspects, in fact, they were datus ruling ingeds and no different from their precolonial counterparts. Those with mayoral offices governed traditionally and autocratically, with little regard for official rules or administrative procedures. In most areas they continued to adjudicate traditional cases and impose fines. They usually completely controlled the armed force and electoral outcomes in their municipalities. They tended to be polygynous, maintained relatively large personal followings, and in general were tradition oriented in most of their practices.[22]
Islamic Identity in the New Republic
It remains to inquire about the further development, in the early postcolonial period, of the transcendent Philippine Muslim identity fostered under American colonial rule. As argued in the preceding chapter, American colonial policies had the effect of ethnicizing Muslim identity in the Philippines. By "ethnicizing" Islam I mean to say that American colonial rulers encouraged the development of a self-conscious Philippine Muslim identity among a generation of educated Muslim elites who were otherwise divided by significant linguistic, geographic, and, to some extent, cultural barriers. It was an identity founded upon the Spanish ascription "Moro" (or Philippine Muslim), but, as the term "Moro" remained a pejorative among Philippine Christians, the most common alternative denomination became "Muslim Filipino," connoting a Muslim citizen of the new (or soon-to-be) Philippine nation (see, e.g., Glang 1969 and below).[23] As with so many other ethnic identities in the colonial and postcolonial world, Muslim
Filipino identity was as much negatively as positively defined; Muslim Filipinos were non hispanicized Filipinos who shared the profession of Islam. The Islamic content of that identity was, as we have seen, rationalized—even sanitized—to conform with Western assessments of Islam's "favorable" aspects.
How was the new ethnic identity engendered among Muslim elites in the late colonial period employed and expanded in the new Philippine nation? The standard account of the postcolonial history of Muslim identity in the Philippines (in simplified form) is that, beginning circa 1950, an Islamic resurgence began to manifest itself throughout the Muslim areas of the Philippines (see, e.g., Bauzon 1991; Majul 1985; Hunt [1957] 1974; Gowing 1979), and that this Islamic consciousness intensified and eventually culminated in an Islamic insurgency against the Philippine state (Madale 1986; Gowing 1979; George 1980; Majul 1979). A critical review of the available evidence suggests to the contrary that, rather than witnessing the widespread development of a heightened Islamic consciousness, the early postcolonial period saw a strengthening of ethnoreligious identity on the part of prominent Muslims. What is evidenced, in other words, is not an expansion of Islamic observance among Philippine Muslims as a whole but rather an amplification among political elites of an ethnic identity as Muslim Filipinos. That ethnic assertion represented not a reversal of the tendencies of the colonial period but their logical extension.
More than one chronicler of the postwar Muslim Philippines has commented that American war-damage payments and back-pay awards at the end of the Japanese War stimulated, among other things, a surge in mosque-building, the establishment of madrasahs (Islamic schools; the Arabic plural, madari , is also sometimes used by Philippine Muslims) and pilgrimages to Mecca (see, e.g., Thomas 1971; Ravenholt 1956; Gowing 1979; Madale 1986). That link between the final American expenditures of the colonial period and an increase in Islamic-related investments by certain Muslims suggests something about the nature of the postwar Islamic resurgence in the Philippines. The major share of American reparation payments was monopolized by established Muslim elites, especially those (such as Salipada Pendatun or Udtug Matalam) most closely aligned with the Americans before and during the war. The financial boon allowed many more of these individuals than ever before to make the pilgrimage to Mecca and to enjoy the prestige that attached to hadji status.[24] The most prominent among them invested in more elaborate status enhancements, building mosques
and opening madrasahs. Muslim congressmen especially endeavored to become patrons of Islamic schools (Mastura 1984; Ravenholt 1956). The competitive character of such sponsorships is revealed in a passage from Ravenholt relating the short history of a madrasah established in 1951 by a Maranao congressman: "For a time some 600 Moro students were enrolled in Mindalano's 'college' . . . The school, however, was located too far from the main centers of Moro population on the Lanao Plateau, and when several competing Muslim 'colleges' were started in and around Dansalan by his political enemies Mindalano's enterprise foundered" (1956, 8).
The stated purpose of this and other enterprises in religious education was to promote a specifically Muslim contribution to the new Philippine nation. Ravenholt reports that "it is the conviction of Mindalano and the group working with him that if they are to bring constructive order to their people and make them full-fledged participating citizens in the [Philippine] Republic, this can only be accomplished by making them better Muslims" (1956, 11).
Similar sentiments may be found in the writing of postwar Muslim intellectuals such as Alunan Glang. In a representative piece entitled "Modernizing the Muslims" (1969), Glang, a Magindanaon datu, first restates the sine qua non of Philippine Muslim identity previously pronounced by Saleeby—the moral authority of datus: "The system of datuship has long kept the Muslims united and spiritually bound together. So deeply ingrained into the fabric of Muslim life is this institution that the faith and loyalty of the Muslims have withstood the severe vicissitudes of time and change. Down to this day, many of them still hold the datus in characteristic religious awe and adulation" (1969, 33). Glang then proposes a prescription for "modernization" remarkably resonant with that proposed by Saleeby more than fifty years earlier: "One of the biggest single factors that may bring about the orchestration of the Muslim Filipino into the fabric of Filipino national life appears to be the Muslim leaders themselves whose pervasive influence had for centuries dominated and dictated much of the Muslim Filipino thinking and psychology" (1969, 33). Taken together, the statements reported for Mindalano and written by Glang indicate an effort to undergird datu leadership in the Muslim regions of the new Philippine nation by reemphasizing its Islamic nexus.
While it is difficult to assess with any accuracy the socioreligious effects of the heightened Islamic activity among Muslim elites in the postindependence period prior to 1968, that activity does not seem to
have resulted in an Islamic resurgence as the term is normally understood (see, e.g., Denny 1987; Hunter 1988). There is, for example, no evidence for any significant increase in attendance at communal prayers or of an enhanced political role for clerics.[25] The newly established madrasahs had minimal results in heightening the Islamic consciousness or religiosity of ordinary Muslims (Hassoubah 1983). Of the Islamic organizations created in the early postcolonial period—organizations often cited as tangible evidence for Islamic resurgence (see Gowing 1979; Mastura 1984; Majul 1979)—most seem to have been little more than paper entities with no genuine existence apart from an organizational name and set of bylaws.[26]
An important exception was the Muslim Association of the Philippines, the oldest, largest, and most vigorous of the new Muslim organizations. The composition and activities of the Muslim Association of the Philippines (MAP) tell us much about the nature of the postcolonial Islamic resurgence. The association was headquartered in Manila, the national capital, and had as its forerunner the Society of Indian Muslims, an organization established in 1926 to look after the needs of immigrant Muslims. By the mid-1930s, the society had reached out to include Philippine Muslims living in Manila, mostly politicians and students (among them Salipada Pendatun), and changed its name accordingly. The association fell dormant with the Japanese occupation but was revived in late 1949 by Congressman Ombra Amilbangsa of Sulu.
By the time MAP sponsored its first National Muslim Filipino Conference, held in Cotabato City in 1955, its membership was primarily indigenous Muslims who were nearly always also Western-educated politicians, professionals, or university students. A featured speaker at the first conference was Edward Kuder, now an official with the United States Veterans Affairs Office in Manila and occasional consultant for the Philippine government on matters pertaining to Philippine Muslims. Kuder's chosen subject was "Education—A means of Improving Conditions in Muslim Communities." In his speech he noted with understandable satisfaction (given his key role as superintendent of public schools in the Muslim South) that "it is mostly due to increased literacy among Muslims, and to the rise of a highly educated articulately literate class among them, all because of the Philippine Public School system, that such nation-wide conferences of Muslims [as this] are now not merely a possibility, but a reality. I thank God I have lived to see it" (Muslim Association of the Philippines 1956, 42). Kuder also
reviewed once again the benefits for the Philippine nation of an appropriate Islamic education for Philippine Muslims, remarking that "the Muslim parents and children who are acquainted with the precepts of their religion are more peaceful and better citizens" (1956, 43).
It is hardly overstatement to describe the annual Muslim Filipino conferences sponsored by MAP in the 1950s (the national conferences were its primary formal undertaking) as the postcolonial product of Edward Kuder's tutelage.[27] The conferences brought together members of the "articulately literate class" of Muslims from throughout the Philippines to acclaim their newfound ethnic identity as Muslim Filipinos, advocate Muslim self-improvement, and deliberate the place of Muslims in the fledgling Philippine nation.
The emblems of Islamic resurgence in the two decades following independence were primarily signs rather than practices. Rather than spawning a religious revival in the Muslim Philippines they signaled a deepening ethnic self-recognition (found primarily among elites) as Muslim Filipinos. The ethnic affirmations initiated by Muslim political elites were the logical extension of the process of Muslim Filipino identity formation begun in the late colonial period. Western-educated Muslim elites such as Pendatun and Mindalano underscored their shared hyphenated identity as Muslim-Filipinos rather than their separate ethnolinguistic designations as Magindanaon or Maranao. The Islamic content of that shared identity was affirmed largely by rationalizing it through the establishment of various Islamic "colleges" and organizations. The expressed intention of molding individuals into "better Muslims" referred fundamentally to creating self-consciously ethnic Muslims. Such efforts and intentions were expressive of the Muslim elite's contradictory position (established during the American colonial period) as modernizing traditional leaders. While intent on retaining and reinforcing their customary positions as Islamic authority figures, they nevertheless remained the most Westernized (and Filipinized) of Philippine Muslims. Unsurprisingly, none of the public Islamic assertions of Muslim elites during this period directly challenged the legitimacy of the new Philippine state to rule Muslims.
While the Islamic affirmations of Muslim elites in the postindependence period are largely understandable as the natural progression of forces set in motion during the colonial period, they should also be examined in light of the disjunctions brought about by the establishment of the Philippine republic. As we have seen, the most consequential of those was large-scale Christian migration to the Muslim South. As il-
lustrated by the postwar careers of Congressman Pendatun and Datu Udtug, the responses of Muslim political leaders to the influx of Christians tended to be quite pragmatic. While the demographic balance remained favorable to them they readily formed coalitions with Christian politicians and appealed to Christian voters. Implicit in those appeals was their claim to be able to "control" Muslims, which presumably included the assurance of Muslim acquiescence to continued Christian immigration.
When the demographic tide shifted against them, Pendatun and Udtug did not hesitate to cede large portions of their political territory in order to retain a secure hold on power. That consolidation of Muslim territory in response to rising Christian political power in Cotabato suggests an additional motivation for the activation by Muslim elites of rationalized emblems of a single Muslim ethnic identity. Such signs of Muslim solidarity may also be seen as a defensive response to Christian ascendancy in Mindanao. To Christian politicians and agents of the central state, they projected the image of a unified and energized (though manageable) Muslim populace—a populace that would tolerate large numbers of new arrivals but would countenance neither official disregard nor displacement from its core territories.[28]
In the watershed decade that began in 1968, mutual tolerance gave way to sectarian violence between Muslims and Christians and governmental inattention was replaced by state aggression toward Muslims. Most datu politicians in Cotabato lost a great many of the capabilities they had possessed to manage the Muslim populace, as they were confronted with new and severe political challenges, both internally from a new Muslim counterelite and externally from the particular Christian forces that controlled the state.