The Tagumpay Ng Bayan Rally: Popular Protest and the Ascendancy of the Muslim Counterelite
The Tagumpay ng Bayan (People's Victory) Rally was the first major political event of the post-Marcos period in Cotabato City. The rally, which took place in the Cotabato City plaza on February 26, 1986, was similar to many political gatherings held throughout the Philippines
that day. It had been planned as a popular protest against the apparent theft of the presidential election by Ferdinand Marcos but was quickly transformed into a victory celebration after the so-called people power coup earlier that week induced the flight of Marcos to the United States on the twenty-fifth, the day before the scheduled protest rally. As a result, Corazon Aquino, his electoral opponent, assumed the presidency, ending the fourteen-year Marcos dictatorship.
The rally capped an exhilarating month for Cotabateños, including the residents of Campo Muslim. Even those community members who had most vocally professed disinterest in the 1986 "snap" presidential election were swept up in the contagious excitement of election day, February 7, and its aftermath. Local observers remarked on the unusual level of enthusiasm in the city for a presidential election, comparable to that generated by a local election. One reason for the high excitement was that the 1986 voting represented the first genuinely contested presidential election in seventeen years, the last having occurred in 1969, prior to the declaration of martial law.[3]
At the polling place closest to Campo Muslim the mood was festive. Children played while parents searched for their names on voting lists and cast their ballots. Young adults, most of whom had never voted in a national election, excitedly shared information. Elders lounged beneath trees drinking coffee and discussing politics. Later in the evening, after the polls had closed, Campo Muslim residents gathered in clusters on the main road to discuss the local results, exchange rumors, and listen to reports on the radio.
In Cotabato City, the challenger, Corazon Aquino, won in the polls by more than a two-to-one margin, while in the rest of Maguindanao Province Ferdinand Marcos led by an even greater, three to one, margin. The election in the city proceeded peacefully and without obvious irregularities or alleged incidents of voter fraud. The problem-free city polling was due in great measure to the work of volunteer poll-watchers from the provincial chapter of the National Citizen's Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL), a nongovernmental organization established to monitor elections. NAMFREL first appeared in the Philippines in the early 1950s but was dissolved with the enactment of martial law in 1972. It reformed after the assassination of Benigno Aquino in 1983, with the assistance of unacknowledged American funding (Bonner 1987), and fielded an unusually effective nationwide force of volunteers in 1986 to monitor the presidential election in every province in the country. The NAMFREL volunteers at the large
polling place near Campo Muslim consisted entirely of young Campo Muslim residents recruited by Kasan Kamid, a community organizer. They helped ensure that the 1986 election was conducted more freely than any other in the memory of Campo Muslim residents.
Election day conditions in the rest of the province differed dramatically from those in the city, in part because NAMFREL managed to place poll-watchers at only a small percentage of precincts. For most municipalities in the province, the 1986 election procedures differed little from those found in Muslim municipalities since the beginning of the republic. In a number of municipalities, polling places reported 100 percent voter turnouts with all ballots cast in favor of President Marcos. In some precincts Ferdinand Marcos received more votes than the number of registered voters. In at least one municipality—Barira—NAMFREL volunteers reported that all available ballots were cast the night before the election by barangay captains. In these municipalities, President Marcos led his opponent by margins as great as sixteen to one. In other municipalities voting went on with little interference, but local officials appropriated ballot boxes when they arrived at the municipal hall and conducted the vote count in secret. All seventeen municipalities in the province recorded that Ferdinand Marcos had received many more votes than Corazon Aquino.
This well-organized voting fraud represented the last major endeavor of the KBL political machine in the province—part of a highly integrated national system for channeling significant amounts of money to political officials down to the barangay level to ensure a Marcos victory.[4] Despite the success of the machine in appropriating votes throughout the province, the 1986 election also saw the first significant challenges to the autocratic grip of traditional leaders on the election process. Those challenges most often came from young, urban-educated Muslims anxious for change. The following account presents the voice of Salik, a young member of a Muslim counterelite family, who returned to his birthplace from the city to monitor the election there for the opposition coalition, United Nationalist Democratic Organizations (UNIDO—see below). It is typical of three or four similar stories I heard following the election: "I was the UNIDO representative in my home barangay in Sulun. I spoke strongly there. The barangay captain almost cried when I opposed him. He told me: 'If we let people decide for themselves this year, Marcos will receive no votes and I'll be in trouble. Let's negotiate and make the results an even split.' I agreed to the 50–50 arrangement because the barangay
captain is my relative. At the counting, the barangay captain wanted the results to show that Marcos had won by three votes but I insisted that there be an exactly even distribution as we had agreed."
A major impetus behind these new challenges was Zacaria Candao, the provincial chairman—for Maguindanao Province and Cotabato City—of UNIDO, the national opposition coalition that backed the candidacy of Corazon Aquino. Candao approached that difficult job with alacrity, relishing a direct electoral confrontation with establishment elites. He successfully associated the UNIDO platform with Muslim aspirations, even reconciling the nonparticipatory stand of the MILF—with whom he remained closely associated—with his own obvious electoral activism. He also arranged the defection to UNIDO of some Muslim KBL politicians, adding to the momentum of the UNIDO campaign in the city and province. Candao drew on his aboveground support network, as well as some assistance from the officially neutral MILF, to counter coercive moves by the KBL and to reduce somewhat the incidence of election fraud in the province.
Aquino supporters in the city and province watched intensely the unfolding post-election drama in Manila, expressing first hope, then frustration, and finally outrage, as Aquino, who had outpolled Marcos by a large margin in Cotabato City and a number of other provincial urban areas, was unaccountably falling behind in the official tallying in Manila. The three main political groups active in Aquino's Cotabato City victory met to organize a mass rally, coordinated with similar events nationwide, to protest the regime's increasingly conspicuous efforts to thwart the popular will by tampering with the national vote tabulation. The provincial chapter of UNIDO was composed largely of the Muslim counterelite under the leadership of Zacaria Candao. Members of the local chapter of Lakas ng Bayan (LABAN), the People's Power Party—a component of the UNIDO coalition and the specific party of Corazon Aquino—were almost entirely Christian and middle class, many of the most active of them women. There was also the Cotabato affiliate of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN), the New Nationalist Alliance—a federation of aboveground progressive nationalist organizations. Although BAYAN officially boycotted the presidential election, the (mostly Christian) members of its local chapter were active in the local NAMFREL chapter and almost all them had volunteered as NAMFREL poll-watchers or coordinators.
Although the rally as originally planned was to have equal participation from each of the three groups, it acquired a very different struc-
ture with the news of Marcos's departure. Anger gave way to exhilaration as citizens celebrated the toppling of the dictatorship. The rally transformed itself into a victory ceremony for the Muslim counterelite and an occasion to acclaim its leader, Zacaria Candao: a man who, overnight, had become the most powerful political figure—Muslim or Christian—in the province.
Although Muslims comprised less than half of the registered voters in Cotabato City, they formed the large majority of the crowd of more than fifteen thousand that overflowed the city plaza. Zacaria Candao, the featured speaker at the rally, addressed the crowd in untranslated Magindanaon—a language understood by almost none of the Christians present.[5] He spoke first of the new hope for the genuine implementation of the Tripoli Agreement under the Aquino government. He called for continued cooperation between Muslims and Christians, and for reconciliation, as well as wholehearted support for the new president. Among the numerous other speakers was a prominent ustadz, who may have been the first independent Muslim cleric ever to have spoken at a political rally from the stage of the city plaza.
Kasan Kamid and a group of Campo Muslim residents also shared the plaza stage with Zacaria Candao and other newly important politicians. They had marched to the rally with Candao at his request and stood on the stage that, just two weeks before, had been occupied by Sultan Ali Dimaporo and the leading Muslim KBL politicians of Mindanao. The world as viewed from that platform for a few exhilarating minutes seemed indeed to have been turned upside down.
While it is not clear to what extent Zacaria Candao planned his own sudden victory celebration, he did organize the highly symbolic march that preceded it. The plan for the original rally called for participants to march from different parts of the city to the central plaza. Candao chose to march from Campo Muslim. Early on the day before the rally he contacted Kasan Kamid as well as two young Islamic activists from the community who had helped to organize the student demonstration at the da'wah parade in 1985. He asked them to gather their "people" to participate in the march and rally. It was decided that one of the Islamic activists would give a speech at the rally representing the "Muslim Youth," and that Kasan would speak on behalf of the "Urban Poor."
The next day, thirty or so Campo Muslim marchers, more than a third of them women, assembled in the main road of the community. They wore yellow or green headbands—the colors of Corazon
Aquino's campaign and Islam, respectively—and carried banners and placards, some of them recycled from the da'wah parade. One of the new banners read in translation: "Forget the Old Politics and Confront the [Economic] Crisis."[6] When assembled, the Campo Muslim contingent filed to the intersection of the main community road and the riverside road. There they were joined by groups from the neighboring Muslim areas of Lugay-lugay and Kalanganan. When Candao arrived with his bodyguard, the parade commenced and streamed jubilantly through the city streets to the sound of drums and shouted slogans and the cheers of onlookers. It was the largest and most joyous of all the processions to the plaza.
When Zacaria Candao mounted the stairs to the large stage in the center of the Plaza, a number of his fellow paraders from Campo Muslim climbed with him. As the afternoon's speeches continued one after the other, however, a surprisingly familiar pattern emerged. The microphone was dominated by establishment politicians, almost all of them datus and many of them KBL stalwarts one or two months earlier. The podium was given over, time and again, to datu politicians who were recent defectors from the KBL to UNIDO. In a uniform fashion they called for genuine autonomy for Philippine Muslims, congratulated themselves for having been part of the UNIDO opposition, and attempted to excuse or obscure their activities during the rebellion. As the rally wore on, and the crowd waited for Candao to speak, the Campo Muslim group drifted down from the stage. When I rejoined them they were sitting off to the side, in the shade. I asked them why they had moved down and they grumbled that they were tired and it was hot up above. It was clear from their faces, however (an impression confirmed in later conversations), that they had also begun to feel discouraged and out of place, and so left the stage. The rally ended before either Kasan or Nur Miskin, the Islamic activist, was able to deliver his speech. By the end of the day it was unmistakably evident to the Campo Muslim marchers that many in the new UNIDO ascendancy had not forgotten "the old politics."
The favoring of recently defected datus over ordinary urban supporters suggests that as the purpose of the rally changed from protest to victory proclamation, Candao's political needs shifted accordingly. The rally, as originally conceived, was to have been the first mass protest in a series of urban actions—including general strikes—called by the national opposition to denounce the theft of the election. Candao needed to mobilize his mass urban base to carry out such popular
protests, and had done so. When it was learned that the objective had been achieved, the protest became a victory rally and an occasion for Candao to begin to repay his datu allies.
In a conversation with him a short while after the victory rally, Candao indicated the reason for his reliance on the support of formerly establishment datus: "There is a problem finding new political leaders. My contemporaries all joined the KBL. In the election campaign I had a difficult time recruiting municipal UNIDO campaign chairmen. I was not afraid myself because I had the support of the MILF, but I cannot really blame others for hesitating. Other than the powerful families there were no organizations to protect people." Although there was ample political support for UNIDO in the city, for the difficult and dangerous electoral campaign in the countryside there were few available political allies other than those traditional elite politicians who took calculated risks based on personal political ambition and switched their allegiance from the KBL to UNIDO. As a result, the first public manifestation of the new, post-Marcos politics in the province was difficult to distinguish from the old.
Notwithstanding the remarkable persistence of datu politicians in Cotabato, there were to be two very significant innovations in Muslim politics—both prefigured in Candao's victory rally—in the post-Marcos period. The first was the self-conscious political use made of ordinary Muslims (and especially the "urban poor"), and the second was the introduction, for the first time in the modern era, of specifically Islamic elements—from green headbands to speechmaking by ustadzes—in public political discourse. Those two new features were combined in a most original form in the next major political event in Cotabato.