Municipal Elections in Cotabato City: The Limits to Islamic Unity

The 1988 elections for municipal offices in Cotabato City differed notably in character and outcome from those held at the provincial level. For one, the city elections were held among an electorate fairly evenly divided between Muslims and Christians while the provincial electorate was overwhelmingly Muslim.^[13] Second, while the provincial elections were, for all practical purposes, quite narrowly focused on two principal candidates, two parties, and two opposed political ideologies, the city elections were remarkably unconfined in the number of variously affiliated candidates running for office. Twenty candidates ran for city mayor and 133 candidates competed for ten city council seats—an unprecedented array of contenders and parties reflecting a complete reopening of the political process after years of effective one-party rule under martial law.

Muslims comprised about half of those running for office: 8 of the 20 mayoral candidates, 6 of II vice-mayoral candidates, and somewhat less than 50 percent of the huge field of city council candidates. They represented an exceedingly wide range of political opinion and experience. Mayoral aspirants ranged from the former vice-mayor Angka Biruar—a member of the Muslim counterelite and an experienced politician—to Zamin Unti, one of the young Islamic activists in Campo Muslim, who was poor and unemployed, made his own campaign handbills, and ran on an independent Islamic platform. Between them were contenders such as Peping Candao, the brother of Governor Candao and the man who as a rebel defector protected the people of Campo Muslim from the army during the rebellion; and Bai Fatima Sinsuat, the head of the Progressive Labor Union, which controlled laborers on the main city pier.

The two leading Muslim candidates for mayor were Angka Biruar and Peping Candao. While both could count themselves among the Muslim counterelite, in their attributes and personal histories they differed markedly, both from one another and from Zacaria Candao, the consolidator of that counterelite. Angka Biruar embodied the indistinct boundaries between the old and new Muslim elite of Cotabato. He was a prominent member of the foremost family of the coastal smuggler elite. The Biruars had operated (and some said still ran) the most successful smuggling operation on the Cotabato coast. They had become quite wealthy from it—sufficiently wealthy to purchase from its

Christian owners a coconut plantation covering most of Bongo Island. They had also diversified into politics, sea transportation, and commercial fishing and had done well at all three. In addition, the Biruars were widely known for their concentrated efforts to purchase maratabat (status honor). Purchasing maratabat (in Magindanaon, pamasa sa maratabat ) entails offering large amounts of bridewealth in exchange for access through marriage to traditional status honor. The amount of bridewealth paid by their father to acquire aristocratic wives for Angka Biruar and his brothers was said by some to be single-handedly responsible for much of the bridewealth inflation that had occurred in Cotabato since the 1950s. In age and political inclination, Angka Biruar was closer to the generation of Zacaria Candao's father, Datu Liwa, than to Candao himself. Like Datu Liwa, he had previously served in city government as a city councilor and vice-mayor. The Biruar family had controlled the coastal municipality of Parang for twenty-five years. As an Iranun, a member of the smuggler elite, and a (low-profile) supporter of the Bangsamoro Rebellion, Angka Biruar qualified as a member of the Muslim counterelite. As a former government official and member of a wealthy and politically powerful family concerned with traditional status-honor, he also resembled the members of the datu elite. Biruar was quite popular among certain Muslim voters (mostly Iranun), but he campaigned in a traditional style and lacked the charisma and clearly articulated political message of Zacaria Candao.

Peping Candao would seem to have had a ready-made advantage in his mayoral bid because of his kin connection to the most popular political figure in the province. Also in his favor was his personal history as a protector of city Muslims during the rebellion. Working against him, however, was his ten-year absence from the city. Peping had left Cotabato City in 1977, shortly after the start of the cease-fire, to pursue a career in the Philippine Army. By 1988, he was in many ways a stranger to the Muslims of the city, even to the residents of Campo Muslim. He in fact received a surprisingly small number of votes from the urban community that had once viewed him as a savior.

Radio messages also played an important role in the city campaigns, but because of the great size of the field and the character of the electioneering, radio messages consisted almost exclusively of short paid advertisements rather than speeches or debates. The 1988 campaign period was notable for the tremendous number of jingles, slogans, and pronouncements in Magindanaon, Tagalog, and English asserting that

a particular candidate was the "representative," "voice," "friend," or "hope" of the "urban poor." As noted above, 1988 saw unparalleled attention paid to the urban poor electorate.^[14] As the great majority of poor people in the city were Muslims, many appeals were made directly to the Muslim urban poor by both Muslim and Christian candidates. One Muslim city council candidate hired a popular rebel singer to write and perform a song for him in Magindanaon that proclaimed in part: "Prepare yourselves because the savior of the people has arrived. It is none other than the son of Attorni Paki [referring to the father of the young candidate, a well-known former provincial officeholder] . . . He is here to help the poor of the city."

An especially enterprising Christian city council candidate established an organization of poor people, the Kilusang ng Urban Poor (Urban Poor Movement), as part of his campaign.^[15] He promised prospective members land and houses, the funding for which, he claimed publicly, would come from his "friends" abroad. He distributed membership cards for his organization in the public market neighborhood. The cards could be had for a one-peso fee to defray "office expenses." Poor city residents reportedly bought the membership cards as they would lottery tickets. The newfound concern by political candidates for the urban poor likely stemmed from two factors: the populist example set by Governor Candao since prior to his assumption of power in 1986, and the emergence in the previous few years of a number of genuine organizations of urban poor established by community organizers such as Kasan Kamid.

Despite its very impressive showing in the congressional and provincial elections, and the fact that IPP candidates captured a number of mayoral and other offices in municipalities throughout Maguindanao Province, the IPP was unexpectedly ineffective as a political force in the city polling. Their best showing was a third-place finish by their vice-mayoral candidate. None of the ten IPP candidates for the city council won seats, and only two placed among the top thirty finishers. Various factors may explain the IPP's poor performance in the city election. One very likely reason was that, unlike virtually every other participating political party, the IPP failed to field a mayoral candidate. As a consequence, the party was unable to present a complete slate to voters, and IPP city council candidates lacked a central popular figure with whom they could associate themselves. The IPP did not officially endorse a candidate for mayor because no name was offered that the IPP nomination panel could agree upon. Peping Candao presented the

most probable choice, but he chose to run as an independent candidate for mayor as part of a slate that included Muslim and Christian candidates. IPP representatives explained that he did so for fear of alienating potential Christian votes by his identification with an "Islamic" party. At least two other widely known political figures and supporters of Zacaria Candao—individuals who would also have been probable IPP candidates—chose, apparently for the same reason, not to run as official candidates of the IPP. The IPP was left with candidates most of whom were neither widely known nor politically experienced. On the whole, they exhibited no special "Islamic" characteristics, though almost all were members of counterelite families. Two of the IPP's city council candidates lived in Campo Muslim. One was a fish wholesaler and the other a provincial livestock inspector.

A second, more general cause for the lack of success of the IPP in city elections—one glimpsed already in the political calculations of Peping Candao—was the problem of divided loyalties and conflicting interests among Muslim candidates in the city. Knowledgeable political observers in the city—both Muslims and Christians—agreed before election day that Muslims had a unique opportunity to recapture the mayor's office for the first time since 1967 and to win a significant share of city council seats as well. This assessment was based on an assumption and a surmise. Observers shared the assumption that Muslim voters would vote for Muslim candidates. One zealous IPP campaign worker went farther and informed me that it was "compulsory" for Muslims to vote for the IPP or, at the very least, for Muslim candidates, noting that it was their "religious obligation." Most observers, however, simply expected that, because of personal ties, Muslim nationalist ideals, or ethnoreligious affinities, Muslims would choose to elect Muslims to city office. The surmise stemmed from the fact that the city electorate was fairly evenly divided between Muslims and Christians. It held that, because there were four strong Christian candidates for mayor and only two dominant Muslim candidates, the leading Muslim candidate, Angka Biruar, had a strong chance of winning if, as expected and rumored, the other Muslim candidates would "throw their votes" to him at some point before election day.

Contrary to expectations, Muslims not only failed to regain the mayor's office but did quite poorly in the city council race as well. In that contest, the top ten vote-getters gained city council seats. The only Muslim to be elected—an incumbent who ran and won in 1980—re-

ceived the least number of votes of the winning candidates. Neither of the suppositions of political observers proved true. For one, Muslim candidates did not unite at the last moment to consolidate candidacies and outpoll divided Christian opponents. The only point at which Muslim mayoral candidates united to any extent was after the election, to protest their loss and accuse the winning Christian candidate of massive cheating.^[16] The city election campaign engendered not unity but predictable divisiveness among contending Muslim candidates and their supporters. That disunity extended to the ranks of the ulama. During the campaign, a meeting was called at the Mahad in Campo Muslim to decide which of the mayoral candidates should be supported. It was attended by ustadzes, imams, elders, community leaders, and supporters of the IPP. Those in attendance were divided in their allegiances to various candidates, and a consensus was never reached. The fact that the ustadzes were not unified in their political choices was widely known and commented upon in Campo Muslim. When it was announced at a seminar held for imams that Ustadz Pasigan, the founder of the Mahad, favored the candidacy of Peping Candao for mayor, the assembled imams paid little heed because it was common knowledge that the founder's second in command, Ustadz Ali Abdul Ajiz Naga, supported Angka Biruar.

That the city elections prompted competition rather than cooperation among Muslim politicians and their elite supporters is not a surprising fact. Nevertheless, the very poor showing of Muslim candidates on the whole during a period when Muslim political awareness in Cotabato seemed to be peaking was rather astonishing. As illustration, in the race for mayor, Christian mayoral candidates gained over 71 percent of the vote although Christians comprised only about 52 percent of the city electorate. Voter turnout was relatively low, with less than 59 percent of registered voters casting their ballots; and it is not likely that Muslim turnout was much more than 10 percent below that of Christians.^[17] This suggests that at least some Muslims contradicted the assumptions of Muslim and Christian political observers and voted for Christian candidates. Vote tallies obtained from six Muslim precincts appear to confirm that suspicion. Some Muslim politicians took the fact that Christian politicians received votes in Muslim precincts as prima facie evidence for ballot box tampering on the part of certain Christian politicians. My evidence suggests, to the contrary, that these were genuine votes. To understand this voting behavior it is

necessary to observe the city elections from the perspective of poor Muslims, focusing particularly on the economics of vote-buying and-selling.

Local Elections and the Muslim Urban Poor

For the poor Muslims of Cotabato City, many of whom could rarely afford the six-peso (thirty-cent) price of admission to a movie theater, the 1988 elections were a marvelous source of free entertainment. The unusually large field of candidates ensured that during the six-week campaign period, marches and rallies by various candidates and parties were held almost daily. Many, if not most of the rallies included dayunday performances. In the four weeks I spent in Campo Muslim prior to the election, three campaign rallies took place there, all with dayundays—the same number of public performances that might otherwise be held in a six- to eight-month period in the community. Audiences at the Campo Muslim rallies shouted for the dayunday to begin when they determined that the speeches of the candidates (all Muslims) had continued for too long. For their part, Christian candidates in advertising their campaign rallies, routinely announced the inclusion of dayunday performances "for our Muslim brothers." In addition to (or in lieu of) dayundays there were often other forms of entertainment, usually one or more singers performing popular tunes. The candidates themselves would sometimes sing as well after some playful badgering from the audience. The rallies and their associated parades, as well as the special nightly radio programs related above and the general air of excitement associated with political campaigning, combined to create a rare festive atmosphere for the city's poor.

Election campaigns generated more than just free entertainment. They were also a potential source of material resources, especially for those who actively sought them—usually younger males. Resources gained directly or indirectly from candidates took various forms. The most rudimentary sorts of benefits were those obtained by youngsters—usually young men—who marched (or sometimes rode) in the parades around the city held by various candidates. After watching one of these cavalcades pass by, with pedicabs and jeeps filled with riders and more than two hundred young people marching, I asked a friend who was with me how the candidate—who was not very widely known—acquired so many young supporters. He replied that bata -

bata (youngsters or young followers) such as those in the parade were easily obtained: "It is easy to find young unmarried men [mga binata ] to join a campaign caravan. They are standbys [unemployed or underemployed school leavers]—they have nothing to do. They enjoy riding around the city in a truck and are happy to parade in exchange for meryenda [a snack]." He also noted that the young men marching in that particular parade were probably organized by their friends and also paid a small amount of cash each from "gas money" given to the organizers by the candidate.

More substantial material benefits were also available from candidates. These were sometimes directly solicited from candidates by individuals who might offer just their own vote—often euphemized as "assistance" (tabang )—but more commonly also the votes of others they claimed to represent. Two entries from my field notes illustrate this sort of solicitation. The first entry records the words of Zamin Unti, the Islamic activist from Campo Muslim who ran for mayor:

A kapatas [labor foreman] offered me more than two hundred votes. He said, "I and my men will vote for you if you give us electricity." He knew that I did electrical work and he wanted me to provide the electricity first, before the election. A karate teacher with many students also came to me with a problem. He had a relative who needed an operation. He offered votes in return for my assistance. He did not ask me for money. He knew that I had worked with Zacaria Candao. He wanted a letter of introduction to Candao. He felt that Candao was the one person who could help him. I accepted neither of these offers.

The second excerpt concerns a story told to me by a Campo Muslim resident about the endeavors of some young men in Kalanganan, the rural area to the west of Campo Muslim:

The elders in Bokhana [a purok , or small community, in Kalanganan] had decided to support Angka Biruar for mayor. Some young men from Bokhana went to Angka Biruar to "assist" him. The candidate said he had already given money to their purok leader [a member of the barangay council who represents a purok] and they should see him to obtain the money. The money was never forthcoming from the purok leader so they went to other candidates to offer their votes. They received money from a Christian candidate and voted for him because he had paid them, but also to defy their purok leader. When the purok leader, embarrassed to find that votes had been cast for a Christian candidate in his precinct, confronted the young men, they cited him a proverb: "If the hen obtains food but keeps it all to herself, her chicks will find food elsewhere."

Both excerpts point to the fairly common phenomenon of small-scale, freelance liders, or vote brokers.^[18] These individuals approach various candidates claiming to have followers of some sort and offering votes in return for favors, not always in the form of money. Some very small-time liders taken on by a candidate will work for cigarettes, meryenda, and the promise of a job if the candidate wins.

Most transactions involving the exchange of votes for material benefits do not, however, occur as the result of freelance approaches from below. The greatest amount of vote buying and selling takes place within multilayered social networks that may long predate the campaign period. Such networks are important primarily as a means to assure that money channeled from the candidate will have the greatest likelihood of returning votes in his or her favor. Because voting is conducted secretly, this may be accomplished only indirectly, through personal ties and the desire of individuals to protect their reputations. Nur Miskin was the informal leader of a number of young men in Campo Muslim. He told me that he had been approached by two Muslim liders—both of them working for Christian candidates—and been offered money to provide votes. He expressed his view of the ethics and etiquette of vote-selling: "It is better not to accept money in exchange for votes, but if you take the money you should, as a Muslim, vote for the candidate whose money you were given . . . If I had taken money from [a certain lider] I would have told my followers to vote and at least have voted for his candidate myself because my reputation could be destroyed if the candidate received no votes in my precinct. His [the lider's] reputation would not be destroyed, but mine would. That is, of course, only if the candidate himself had met me or knew who I was."

Approaches to those with direct access to votes were usually made by the principal lider of a particular candidate. Targeted individuals—who would become subliders if they accepted the offer—tended to be those who possessed both influence and a good reputation in a particular community. Ideally, but by no means always, they also had some preexisting personal connection to the lider. Several such approaches were made to prominent community figures in Campo Muslim. The Muslim lider of a Christian mayoral candidate offered a popular purok leader in Campo Muslim one thousand pesos for his initial support and ten pesos for every vote he was able to recruit at fifty pesos apiece.^[19] Nur Miskin was offered a significant amount of money by the Muslim lider of another Christian candidate for mayor in exchange

for "gathering his men" and displaying them to the candidate.^[20] Even the municipal chairman of the MILF shadow government was rumored to be operating as a lider for a Christian mayoral candidate and distributing one hundred-peso notes to Campo Muslim residents connected with the shadow government as a token of the candidate's "sincerity."^[21]

Vote-buying networks could nevertheless malfunction in a number of ways, most likely at their lowest levels. As evidenced in the story from Kalanganan, money intended to purchase votes may never be distributed by subliders overconfident of their ability to recruit sufficient votes without direct payments.^[22] On the other hand, money was occasionally distributed by subliders to voters without any clear instructions given for voting. That sort of breakdown was to be expected under circumstances such as those found in the 1988 elections, where a great many candidates were seeking to obtain votes with money, and vote-buying networks were 'hurriedly constructed and often weakly connected. I witnessed an example of this sort of vote-buying malfunction in Campo Muslim. One evening shortly before the election, Kasan Kamid was requested by the wife of a local purok leader to gather his relatives and followers from his neighborhood for a distribution of free rice given by a candidate. The woman was a sublider and had been given a fifty-kilo sack of rice to be distributed to registered voters. She informed Kasan because she was aware that he knew many people. The lider who recruited her and provided her the rice, was a Muslim middle-level government employee living in Campo Muslim. He worked for a Christian candidate and may have been a sublider himself. Kasan quickly relayed news of the distribution to his relatives and neighbors who hurried to the distribution site with plastic bags. Fifty one-kilo bags of rice were soon disbursed, with the name of each recipient relayed by Kasan and carefully recorded by the sublider. At no time during the distribution were recipients told whom to vote for or even informed which candidate had provided the rice. The list of recipients merely documented that the rice had actually been distributed; the list was delivered to the Campo Muslim lider immediately after the giveaway was completed. Some recipients approached Kasan the following day to ask which candidate had donated the rice. He told them that they were free to vote for whomever they wished.

The most efficient vote-buying networks were those that were well integrated from top to bottom. One such network conducted part of

its operations in Campo Muslim. It existed to support the Christian candidate who eventually won the mayorship. The primary lider in the network was a prominent and well-regarded Muslim businessman in the city. This lider had a secondary lider—his first cousin—who was also well-respected, with numerous ties to Campo Muslim. The secondary lider contacted an individual in Campo Muslim to act as a community-level lider. This tertiary lider had, until recently, been underground as a Muslim separatist insurgent. He possessed a number of followers in the community and elsewhere and a wide reputation based on stories of his exploits as a rebel fighter. The three liders were also tied together by utang na loob , or debts of gratitude (literally, debts of the inner self). The two subliders had fought together in the armed rebellion. The primary lider had provided support to both of these men for some time. He had supplied them with guns and money while they were fighting, and had arranged to have his cousin, the secondary lider, freed from prison after the cousin had served two years of a much longer murder sentence. The Campo Muslim lider had been working to organize his followers since his return from "inside" in late 1986. On election day he stationed himself at the polling place used by most of his followers and quietly paid them after they had voted. The vote-buying network to which he belonged incorporated all of the features required by a candidate seeking to convert material resources into votes; its members were distinguished by their mutual trust, their competence, and their confidentiality.

Table 2 shows the votes gained by each of the eight mayoral candidates who garnered the most votes in the six precincts at the polling place used by most Campo Muslim voters. Checks of voter registration lists indicated that these precincts were used almost exclusively by Muslims. The table is incomplete in that it neither lists all the precincts used by Campo Muslim voters nor all the mayoral candidates. It does, however, give a general indication of the extent to which Christian candidates were able to capture the votes of poor Muslims. Candidates are listed only by ethnoreligious affiliation. Three Christians finished among the top eight candidates, garnering more than 19 percent of the votes cast for the leading vote-getters.^[23] In one of the precincts (number 4) they received almost 30 percent of the votes cast for the leading candidates. All three of the top-finishing Christian candidates had liders operating in Campo Muslim. It should be noted that none of the precincts listed in table 2 were located at the polling place targeted by the efficient Campo Muslim lider described above. For various rea-

sons, Campo Muslim residents who migrated to the community from rural areas within the city limits tend to register at their places of birth. As most of the followers of this lider hailed from Kalanganan, he stationed himself at that polling place on election day. There is reason to believe, therefore, that the percentage of votes garnered by Christian candidates from Campo Muslim residents at the Kalanganan polling place (which also had multiple precincts) was just as great, if not greater than that recorded for the precincts in table 2.

Qualitative data, gathered mostly in Campo Muslim, indicate that vote-buying conducted on behalf of candidates in poor Muslim communities was fairly widespread. They also indicate that Christian candidates relied more heavily on vote-buying to capture Muslim votes than did their Muslim counterparts. Most of the Muslim candidates for city office had far smaller resource bases for campaign expenditures than did the leading Christian candidates. It is also likely that, as with so many other observers of the political scene in the city, Muslim candidates assumed that Muslims would not vote for non-Muslim candidates and so spent too few resources to counter that possibility. In the absence of the clearly defined issues and charismatic candidate found in the provincial race, some of the Muslim urban poor ignored the vague promises and ethnic presumptions of Muslim candidates and responded to concrete offers for their votes, whatever their source.

Very often, the proximate sources of those offers were other, well-respected Muslims, most of them not so poor, who had, for their own reasons, decided that they preferred individual economic or political gain to whatever shared political benefits might accrue to them from a Muslim political reascension in Cotabato City.