What if MILF files for ancestral title?

Hermogenes Esperon advises Mindanao separatists to explore other ways to gain a Moro homeland. The fierce general-turned-peace negotiator offers alternatives in light of Malacañang’s scrapping of the initialed Memo on Ancestral Domain. Two bills in Congress — to expand the Muslim autonomous region and to shift to federal form — offer home rule, he says. With the executive lies a third option: to disarm and rejoin society.

Esperon missed a fourth way that does not require lobbying long months for bicameral passage or shame of surrender. All the Moro Islamic Liberation Front has to do is apply its desired territory for a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title. Chances are Malacañang will concede, as it has parceled off millions of hectares to supposed “indigenous peoples”. As icing on the cake, the MILF under the 1997 Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA) legally will be freed from government agencies like the police or military or prosecutors. The law bars state offices from meddling in ancestral domains — which is what the separatists want anyway. In fact, mere application for ancestral title gives the applicant absolute control over the area.

What more can separatists ask?

The IPRA defines ancestral domains as all areas — soil, inland waters, coasts and natural resources — historically belonging to indigenous peoples. Soil includes ancestral lands, forests, pastures, hunting and burial grounds. Indigenous peoples refer to homogenous societies sharing common tongue, customs and history different from majority of Filipinos.

Ancestral domains are private but communal property. To formalize ownership, the ethnic group must apply with the National Commission on Indigenous People (NCIP) for Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title (CADT). As an executive agency, the NCIP began in 1997 under supervision of the Office of the President. After which, it was moved in 2004 to the Dept. of Agrarian Reform, then in May 2008 to the Dept. of Environment & Natural Resources, and less than three months later in Aug. 2008 back to the OP. As of Nov. 2006 the NCIP had issued 50 CADTS covering 986,797 hectares to 228,673 tribes folk, aside from 1,105,766 hectares to individuals. Another 101 applications are pending, covering 2,216,175 hectares.

 An odd feature of the IPRA is that once an ancestral domain has been titled, certain government agencies lose legal jurisdiction over it. Listed are: Depts. of Justice, Interior & Local Governments, Environment & Natural Resources, Agrarian Reform, and National Development Company. The Implementing Rules and Regulations added more banned agencies: Depts. of National Defense, Education, Trade & Industry, Energy, Tourism, and Health. Since the DOJ, DILG and DND are forbidden from prying into ancestral affairs, so are their operating bureaus: the NBI, National Police, and Armed Forces. Upon application for title, the applicant already can veto state meddling.

Enter the MILF. If the secessionists opt to exploit the legal process, including Manila’s hazy notion of ancestral domain, it can gain its Moro territory. No need to insist on the initialed but unsigned MOA-AD. That pact automatically would have annexed six towns of Lanao del Sur into the Muslim region, but requires plebiscites in 737 barangays in dozen others across Mindanao, Sulu and Palawan. The MILF can take a short cut thru Malacañang’s NCIP to a titled homeland.

There’s a bonus to boot. The MILF can even gain title to erstwhile inalienable forests. A recent ruling of a Supreme Court division considers forestlands to now be parts of ancestral domains. The precedent arose from a case involving Mt. Diwalwal in Compostela, ironically where MILF rebels took two cops captive this week. The gold rush hilltop sits in center of a 166,000-hectare tree farm of Picop (Paper Industries Corporation of the Philippines), leased as forest reserve since 1963. Generals and politicos had taken immoderate interest in the gold mine in 2002, so began pressuring the publicly listed firm to give up its forest concession. Picop sued, winning in the lower and Appellate Court, but losing by technicality in the SC division. The latter opined that Picop failed to secure clearance from NCIP in seeking to extend its forest claim. Picop argued that there was no such requirement because NCIP does not keep records of forestlands. Besides, the SC en banc has ruled time and again that forestlands, unlike ancestral lands, can never become private.

The MOA-AD that Malacañang nearly signed with the MILF applied the division’s legal twist. The Moro ancestral domain would have included “old growth or natural forests and all watersheds (declared) as forest reserves.” With the MOA-AD in limbo, separatists can still use the IPRA and division ruling to wangle territory. Would-be ethnic groups can also lay claim to once inalienable forests, two-fifths of RP land or 12 million hectares.

There’s a caveat, though. Once the MILF and other bands each get hold of hundreds of thousands or even millions of hectares, they can build viable armies. From resulting civil strife, RP can qualify as the next failed state after Somalia.

* * *

E-mail: [email protected]