One group that is terribly affected by it is the INDIGENOUS PEOPLE. When we speak about indigenous people, we mean those minority groups that we care less upon. They are the ones who receive less from our government. The more our countries become poor, the more they become impecunious. In Cordillera, the indigenous people are popularly known as IGOROTS. They feel that they are being oppressed by the worsening economic and political situation in our country.
As I have said earlier, the more the government pretends that they are doing something for the betterment of the majority, the more they cause damage to the few minorities. These indigenous people are faced with a terrible condition which involves national oppression. This is called ETHNOCIDE. The term means, a systematic disintegration of the indigenous sociopolitical and cultural systems and the break-up of social order in indigenous communities as well as the loss of economic base of indigenous people.
To further explain it, I will set the current election campaign as an example. For almost three months now, we have been hearing various and numerous platforms that the political parties wish to give the Filipino People. They have presented projects which involves the promotion of education, eradication of crimes at all aspects, the provision for the further employment of thousand of Filipinos and the like. But never at any point did we hear that they will do something to preserve the minority groups in our country. We may come to think about why aren’t they doing anything about it? This is what ETHNOCIDE means.
Since the government does not have any programs for them, these minority groups feel that they are very much oppressed. They do not just experience oppression through the national government as a whole but also among those explosive classes and coercive states.
As always the case, the government invokes destructive projects because they believe that minorities should sacrifice for the good of the majority or for national interest. But in reality, the imperialists and the reactionary ruling classes promote national oppression. They use the notion on “majority” as a scapegoat and hide behind a cloak of speaking for national development to perpetuate the oppression and exploitation of national minorities.
It was said that national oppression is not a contradiction between the minority and the rest of the Filipino people but a contradiction of the classes in Philippine society. It is evident in the project of the government in Cordillera. Military deployment and operations in the area, are designed to protect the economic interest of monopoly capitalists and local elite.
Usually, at whatever situation, militarization serves to intimidate and terrorize organized communities asserting their rights against large-scale mining, dams, logging, and other projects that violate their collective rights to their ancestral lands and resources. And given the fascist and repressive character of the Armed forces and the police, massive human rights violations continue without the government stopping it.
Due to the ruthless behavior of the Armed forces, the indigenous people tends to fight for their survival as people and to protect their culture, even if it meant waging an armed struggle.
Another issue about indigenous people is that which concerns development. When we say development, we mean, something that brings in change for the better. However, we disregard that the ideas of development is accompanied by the destruction of the environment, displacement and dislocation of indigenous people from their ancestral lands. This is when development leads to DEVELOPMENT AGGRESSION.
Taking the Cordillera case, we see that this region has been treated by the State and foreign capitalists as a resource-base for extraction. The state has become so obsessed with squeezing the remaining resources of indigenous peoples so that it uses the brute military force to coerce, intimidate and kill members and leaders of communities protesting against anti-people projects like mining and energy.
In spite of protests and outstanding issues continuously being raised, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo inaugurated the San Roque Dam project even as its tremendous destructive impact and financial burden have already been felt by the people. Not even promises of compensation have been realized up to the present.
Indigenous peasants are further plunged into poverty as the government aggressively promotes the liberalization of agriculture that lead to the flooding of the domestic market with cheap imported agricultural products. Traditional subsistence production in indigenous territories is aggressively eroded and disintegrated as driven by imperialist globalization leading to the unprecedented misery of indigenous people.
Even if the government knows that the ancestral land is the social base of the existence of indigenous national minorities, they are still pushing through to their projects because of the reason of development. The destruction, plunder, and forcible dislocation of indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands would also mean the loss of their distinct identities.
The dilemma faced by these indigenous people is their fight against ethnocide is to struggle against national oppression. They dare to struggle for self determination and national democracy. They are deeply involved in heir fight to show the government that despite their minimal population as minority groups, they are still going to fight for the land that their ancestors have bestowed upon then
With the above given details, we see that the government materializes their projects at the expense of others. Although they are the minority groups, they should still be taken care of because they are the ones who preserve our nations past.
The Ethnocide problem is just one issue that our government neglects to solve. Instead of doing soothing about it, they just neglect it and force it out of the people’s attention. The issue on modernization often time affects those people in the rural areas. Their agricultural lands are converted into industrial sites.
Although the projects are for the betterment of the country’s economic growth, it is still somehow disadvantageous. The lesser the productive land we have, the lesser the sources we have for production which we may use for exports.
I think the indigenous people have the rights towards their land because they are the ones who nurtured it in their own way. Now, the government cannot blame them for fighting for what they want because the indigenous people are not seeing any efforts for the government to help them preserve what they have.
