The Construction of Campo Muslim

A prominent datu politician, in a 1985 speech to support the reelection of Ferdinand Marcos, expressed the opinion of many of his fellow members of the Cotabato Muslim establishment when he stated that the most significant architectural accomplishment of the martial law period in Cotabato was the construction of the impressive Regional Autonomous Government (RAG) complex at the edge of the city. I was unable to find any poor Muslim resident of Cotabato City who shared that assessment. Most of those whom I asked had never been to the RAG Complex, for lack of travel fare or interest. Some of them referred to the complex bitterly as "the Graveyard of the Martyrs," inasmuch as it had been built on the site of a celebrated battlefield of the rebellion. In respect to most of its residents, it would be far more accurate to say that the construction of Campo Muslim was the most notable architectural consequence of martial law and the Bangsamoro Rebellion.

The story of the creation of Campo Muslim as a refuge for Muslims displaced from other communities because of political violence or economic loss is best introduced through the words and experiences of two early migrants to the community.

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.

The Case of Imam Akmad

Imam Akmad is the chief imam (prayer leader) of the Campo Muslim mosque. A man of about fifty years of age in 1986, he and his wife are the parents of eight children. Imam Akmad was born in Kalanganan, just a few miles west of Campo Muslim.^[3] He is also an Iranun speaker. Imam Akmad's father, whom he never knew, was a colorful character, and I was told many stories of his exploits as an aristocratic gambler and adventurer. The father of Imam Akmad was the first cousin of the Amirul Umra Sa Magindanao, the noble titleholder who ruled the district of Kalanganan.^[4] Because of this kin relation, he possessed some tribute rights over land in Kalanganan and elsewhere. Imam Akmad related to me the following about his father: "I was told by my father's old friend, the Sultan sa Nunungan [in Lanao] that my father had more than twenty wives living along the shores of liana Bay from Bongo Island to Malabang, and others in Lanao and Sulu. My father would marry a woman, leave her with child and some means of support for a year or so, and move on. He returned once to my mother's house to claim me when I was three years old, but my mother hid me

under a basket when she saw my father approaching." Akmad's father roamed throughout the South evading marital commitments and gambling debts. He fought and won numerous duels and performed many supernatural feats in his travels. "My father possessed many mystical powers. He was able to repel blades and bullets and could travel in mysterious ways. He would sometimes tell a companion to go ahead to a certain place and he would meet him there later. When the companion reached the appointed spot my father was already there and seated."

Imam Akmad's mother farmed her parents' land dressed like a man, wearing trousers and bolo (bush knife), to support her son. Akmad was also reared by his mother's brother, a guru, or traditional religious instructor. His uncle taught Akmad to recite the Azan (call to prayer) and to read the Qur'an. Akmad's vocation as an imam developed gradually. He farmed as a young man. After he married, he moved to Cotabato City to the house of his wife's father, a fairly prosperous smuggler, and went to work for him delivering cigarettes throughout Cotabato. He first served as an imam at the mosque in Katuli, a Muslim community directly across the river from Cotabato City. When the first mosque was built on Bird Island in 1968, he was asked to become the head imam there. After Bird Island was demolished in 1970, Akmad moved his family to Sulun, north of the city, to farm the land of his wife's mother.

In 1973, some of the earliest fighting of the rebellion in Cotabato broke out in Sulun, compelling Imam Akmad to move with his family to Campo Muslim. Campo Muslim was still rather sparsely settled in 1973, and Akmad was able to buy a small house close to the main road through the community—a road that had been built up with sand taken from Bird Island. They enlarged the house as the family grew. Akmad became head imam of the Campo Muslim mosque, a small concrete block structure with a tin roof. It was squat and unadorned but sturdier than most of the houses in the community.

Patterns of Immigration to Campo Muslim

The migration histories of the families of Kasan Kamid and Imam Akmad provide qualitative context for the quantitative census data I collected on migration to Campo Muslim. Nearly half (47.3 percent) of current Campo Muslim household heads moved to the community before 1976. The great majority of those arrived in the years between

1970 and 1976, the period when political violence was most pronounced in Cotabato. In contrast to Kasan Kamid and Imam Akmad, the majority of pre-1976 arrivals (63.8 percent) moved to Campo Muslim directly from their birthplaces. Of the eighty individuals who moved directly to Campo Muslim from birthplaces outside the city prior to 1976, thirty-four (42.5 percent) left their rural communities as refugees from either sectarian violence or the Bangsamoro war. Forty (50 percent) moved to the city for economic reasons. The great majority (89 percent) of all pre-1976 arrivals to Campo Muslim reported that they chose to reside in that community because they already had relatives living there (28 percent), or because it was the safest, most convenient, or only available place to live (61 percent). Census data indicate that Campo Muslim grew together from its edges. The areas nearest the two already established communities were occupied first, often before 1970. The swampier inner portions were then taken up by later arrivals.

Campo Muslim, then, has never been a community made up entirely—or even primarily—of war refugees. It is, nevertheless, an urban refugee community to the extent that the great majority of its pre-1976 arrivals (93 percent) migrated to the city to escape political or economic problems in the countryside. In particular, 63.3 percent of pre-1976 immigrants were farmers forced, for one reason or another, from the land. All the same, Campo Muslim is not a community of landless cultivators. Some 32 percent of pre-1976 arrivals reported that they "owned" agricultural land.^[5] Thus, many Campo Muslim residents had rights in land but had (temporarily or permanently) abandoned that land either because they could not make a living from it or, as in the cases of Kasan Kamid and Imam Akmad, conditions became far too dangerous to continue to support themselves on it.