by Howie G. Severino

(photos taken from video footage shot by Severino and Egay Navarro)

KABACAN, Cotabato—Last time I was here, in 1997, a body was dumped by the Army in front of the municipal hall, while nearly a dozen truckloads of troops rumbled by. A battle with Moro fighters had flared along the highway, creating smaller skirmishes in the fields and marshes around this town. One of them claimed the life of the man before me, wrapped in a malong awaiting his relatives, his bare farmer's feet hanging out.

A crowd of usiseros eventually parted for family members, picking up the latest casualty in an unrecorded count. Since Islamic practice mandates Muslim burials within 24 hours of death, it is difficult to verify Muslim fatalities. The Christian dead you could easily find at wakes that lasted days. I had never before then seen a Muslim fatality.

I followed the relatives as they carried the body through the onlookers. I got the name and age of the dead man—Musa Lampukan, 30—but that was nearly all I could find out before the relatives turned away, loaded him onto a jeepney and drove off. Did he have children? Was he also a rebel? Did he have ambitions?

Like other Christian-born reporters covering Mindanao, I always felt I had limited access to Muslim communities. Almost all Muslims I interviewed were either evacuees or rebels. I never got the stories of anyone trying to live normal lives in ordinary Muslim communities, including casualties. But I'd always wondered what a Muslim journalist could have found out about Musa Lampukan. I had long wanted to see Muslim Mindanao as a society, and not just as a "critical area."

So when I had a chance to direct a documentary on "the other side of war" in Mindanao, I recruited a Muslim cultural guide and on-cam host, the Maranao journalist Samira Ali Gutoc. She called herself a "peace journalist," covering efforts to restore harmony, as opposed to war reporters who focus on conflict. Samira, just 27, had a been a Philippine Daily Inquirer correspondent based in Marawi City, where she reported on Muslims involved in conducting orderly elections, Christians learning about Islamic practices, and other subjects that had little to do with making war and much to do with building a peaceful, democratic society. She developed a following, especially among Muslim readers, across the country. "There is already so much negative imagery of Muslims in the media," Samira said. "I just want to counter that."

That's how we found ourselves with a camera crew this January in this town's dusty rural interior, in Barangay Molao, a Maguindanao community controlled by a former MNLF commander. Located near the heart of Mindanao's fertile rice-growing plains, Molao's poblacion is a bumpy, hour-long jeepney ride from Kabacan's town center. Christian settlement in areas along the highway had long pushed Muslim communities toward the outskirts of town like this place, which few government services have ever reached.

With Samira doing most of the talking, we got the cooperation of the commander and his constituents in the town, where we recorded the work of two Maguindanao community organizers, Mona and Ismael, young Muslims who had graduated from Notre Dame University, a Catholic-run institution in Cotabato City that is respected as well by the Muslim community.

Mona had been a Montessori teacher before she decided she wanted to work with communities; Ismael aspired to be a radio broadcaster and would practice by interviewing us, their guests, on his mini-cassette recorder. They were among the Muslims we met on this journey who did not fit the stereotypes of Muslims—the rebels, bandits and victims—that dominate the Manila-based media.

MORE THAN a year after the Philippine military assaults in central Mindanao displaced hundreds of thousands by mid-2000, there have been some efforts at rebuilding Muslim communities. Samira helped us gain access to a few of these areas, so we could document Muslims helping each other. Working with a Mindanao-based NGO, Mona and Ismael were teaching the community how to determine their needs and develop plans to meet them.

Gathering women in a nipa hut for a focus-group discussion, the veiled Mona began by leading the group in Islamic prayer, their hands outstretched, palms facing upward, like my own veiled Roman Catholic mother in church. Then the women discussed, among other things, their coping strategies for times when the men in their communities would be absent for days or weeks at a time.

Many here were evacuees from a neighboring barangay that had become a grassy battleground. They have now resettled in this community where they had fled. I had been told that evacuees often could not return to their original homes even after the end of the violence because new occupants had moved into their land. These were usually people from even more marginalized and war-torn communities who were willing to take the risks of living in another dangerous place.

But here in Barangay Molao, the new settlers came under the wing of Datu Valentino Mantawil, a former commander of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF). After many years in Jolo and elsewhere battling government forces, he was semi-retired from fighting following the 1996 peace agreement between the government and the MNLF. Modest and soft-spoken, Datu Mantawil offered the evacuees the use of some of the idle land he had inherited from his father, so his new constituents could grow food. The datu shrugged off the importance of what he was doing. "I'm willing to help anyone, Muslim or Christian," he said.

There are, however, some returns for this generosity. Our documentary team accompanied an evacuee couple as they paid a visit to the site of their former home, near the boundary with a rival MNLF commander. Datu Mantawil came along for the walk over rolling terrain with three armed escorts, one of them the evacuee husband who had now apparently become part of the datu's forces.

The couple's home had been burned down in mid-2000 by Army soldiers after they fled, presumably to prevent it from being used as a hiding place for guerrillas of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The site was now overgrown with cogon, and a rock was the only evidence of what was once a home.

Along the way, we chatted with other new settlers tending beds of rice seedlings and preparing fields for planting. Aside from land, there was little else in these parts to help people with the hazards of living. "When we were in the evacuation center, we had some health care from the government. Here there are no services," said Keybutsa Pataru, as he watched his young son Anji fetch dirty drinking water from a shallow well. Three of his other children died of measles and tetanus, both preventable through a government immunization program that had not yet reached his community.

After our chat, he went to his land, on loan from the datu, where he started uprooting bright green rice seedlings from their bed for transferring to a nearby field. Finally, I had reached a "critical area" in Muslim Mindanao and saw what real people did aside from flee or fight a war. They helped each other, focused on growing food, and worried about the future of their children. And sometimes they made peace.