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Chapter 10 Muslim Nationalism after Marcos
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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 -


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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."


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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


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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


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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-


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TABLE 2
top EIGHT VOTE-GETTERS FOR MAYOR
IN SIX CAMPO MUSLIM PRECINCTS,
1988 MUNICIPAL ELECTION

Candidate

Precinct number

Total votes

   

1

2

3

4

5

6

 

1.

Muslim

34

62

38

34

33

34

235

2.

Muslim

39

31

40

26

19

51

206

3.

Muslim

27

21

26

10

8

14

106

4.

Christian

11

9

10

13

7

6

56

5.

Christian

11

3

9

8

8

12

51

6.

Christian

5

1

4

15

7

4

36

7.

Muslim

1

4

2

13

4

10

34

8.

Muslim

7

2

2

2

3

6

22

 

Total

135

133

131

121

89

137

746

Cotabato City Registrar of Voters

       

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.


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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.


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Chapter 10 Muslim Nationalism after Marcos
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