 Okay, I have one hour now. I'll talk fast. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. First of all, I wish to thank, I don't have PowerPoint, I lost it. First of all, I wish to thank Christina Juan, and the SOAS Philippines Studies Program for inviting me here. I was not actually sure if I had something worthy to share with you. After all in the last five years or so, several young scholars have come out with exceptional works that have in a way superseded what I've written. Let me mention a few. Nathaniel de Manila's university's history department, Patricia da Kudau, who has wrote a Mordok dissertation at Mordok University on the socio-economic and cultural transformation of frontier Davao from 1898 to 1941, which when she has corrected much of making Mindanao, the book I wrote, while broadening the focus of Professor Shinzo Hayase, the Wasila University's work on Japanese and Okinawan's in colonial Davao. But that's a book I think is coming out in Nathaniel de Manila University Press. Oliver Charbonneau? Oliver is. Ah, there he is. Okay. Oliver was just hired by the University of Glasgow to teach his foreign policy, right? Yeah. And his book Civilizational Imperatives, Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World will be coming out of Cornell University Press in Davao. Next year. Oh, next year, okay. Then there is Anthony Medrano, who studied under Alfred McCoy, who's, this is usually fascinating. The title of his dissertation is Following Fish, Science, Industry, and the Asian Marine Environment from 1822 to 1941, where he has a couple of chapters in the tuna industry in southern Mindanao. And it's history in what he called the protein boom that fed and fueled the rise of urban society, plantation agriculture, and imperial expansion in the interwar period. Anthony's book, I think, is coming out with Harvard University Press. Then a few months ago, I met Alisa Perez at Yale University, who is completing her dissertation on plantation agriculture and the making of the Philippine-Japan trade. She has quietly put back political economy in the discussion of Mindanao studies. She's fluent in Tagalog, English, and Japanese. And her project is to look at the new connections within East and Southeast Asia through Sweet Banana. So the Japanese have discovered Sweet Banana, you know, Michiko-san. And so she's studying the connections between that from communities in Mount Apo up to shopping centers in Japan. Then finally, while he was a few years younger than me at the University of the Philippines, Francisco Lara's decision to enter grad school it saw us. A decade after decades as a communist cadre, Rojas led to the production of publication of insurgents, class, and states, political legitimacy, and resurgent conflict in Muslim Mindanao Philippines. It's a first ever comparative study on the relationship between strongman rule, the Islamic rebellion, and Mindanao's illicit economy. Pancino hits international alert and has formed a multi-talented research, Mindanao-based research, a field work centered researchers, academic and NGO researchers that produce out of the shadows, violent conflict, and the real economy of Mindanao. An edited volume based on various case studies of illicit trade in Mindanao from castle wrestling to gun smuggling, both books were published by Atineo Press. Then we have our Japanese scholars who are working in Mindanao. Two weeks ago was in a conference of young scholars in the Philippines in Nagoya, where we came up with a preliminary list of 178 Japanese faculty, graduate students, and independent researchers working on the Philippines, the biggest, the largest group globally. 12 of these are working on Mindanao. We have Taniguchi-san, who is an expert on the, you take sides, no? More Islamic Liberation Front and the Moro National Liberation Front. She goes to Mindanao frequently, and we have Midori-sensei, our expert on Nanao. So that said, though, so, you know, I feel relevant, although that said, I may be able to add, I think I may be able to add these special scholars perhaps as a last hurrah, but it's all far too, the works become antique and archived ready. So let me continue with this sort of, this organized speech by citing a couple of introduction about Mindanao. The first is geography. So we often refer to Mindanao as the second largest island of the archipelago, but in its land area of 37,675 square miles, it is far bigger than Ireland, Austria, Slovakia, Estonia, Denmark and the Netherlands, and Switzerland. In Southeast Asia, it's larger than Taiwan. East Timor in Singapore. Singapore is at 278.6 square miles only. And if you put it alongside the difference, the 50 states of the American Union, it is far larger than 13 other states. So the island is the eight most populous island in the world with a total population of 21.5. Yet if you think about how much has been written about these countries and these states, and you put them alongside the literature of Mindanao, this creep and see is quite palpable. Second, because of presidential authority and Islamic terrorism, Mindanao has become the most discussed conflict-ridden region in the country. It is also the least accessible as a subject of study. Global and Manila anxieties of prominent governments and families to prohibit or strongly warn their children's scholars to go to this turbulent frontier. Fulbright, for example, does not allow students to go down after Sibu. A student who was studying, working on the Akinauans in Davao, and he said, I'm going to go to Davao. No. So Fulbright said, no, he can't. So as we saw, we still know very little about the moral rebellion, that TGH George, Tom McKenna, Martius Bitoch, and Glenda Gloria, and Taniguchi San and her colleague from Osaka University, Masako Ishi, have written about the problem with Taniguchi San and Masako San's dissertations that are written in Japanese, so hopefully she'll translate it soon. But two topics, I think, cry out when it comes to the MNLF rebellion. First is that the Islam, Muslims have participated in international connection, notably in the 60s with Al-Azhar University, Muammar Gaddafi, Afghanistan, Pakistan in the 1980s, and also throughout the decades, Malaysia's intimate relationship within the multinational and more Islamic liberation front. One of these imams I interviewed in General Santos was this guy who was uprooted from his village in the middle of the night and said, do not open your mouth. We're going to Sabah. You be Bachaus, you're not Indonesian. Then another, he was then transported from Sandakan to Kuala Lumpur, and the next day he was on the flight to Pakistan. Then the day after from Pakistan he lands in Tripoli, Libya with five, I think, ten other Muslim, Filipino Muslims, driven into a desert scum. And then made to stand, and was given initial training by East German military specialists in anti-tank warfare with the Irish Republican Army, the Tamil Tigers, the Southern Thailand Separatist movement. There's another group. And this guy was just uprooted after an hour. He came back, but then his leaders stole the money. So he stayed a while in Sandakan for ten years before he was able to come back and become an imam. When I was doing research in 2008 in the war zones, the American USAID was building a mosque. And the funny thing is the American anthem is played, everybody stands up, and the Philippine anthem plays, why do you do this? Where did you get your education? They would mention Afghanistan. But again, resistance is not however exclusive to the Muslims up until the split in the 1990s. The communist party of the Philippines, largest and fastest growing regional organization was the Mindanao Commission. It had a particularly idiosyncratic leadership, consisting mainly of Cardis Carl, correct me on this again, Gustavo Gutierrez as the all of the liberation. In fact, the Commission's United Front Committee was composed of nuns and priests. And mainly of its legal apparatus were church bays. Its leaders were very experimental and prone to military experiments which was despised by the national leadership. But Mindanao Commission was the oldest society where 800 of the communist Cardis were killed and tortured from starting in 1987. There were victims of an internal clash that came out of the fear and paranoia of military infiltration. The story of the Commission remains unwritten, made more difficult by academic leftist Bacom saying that what the current party leadership describes as the deviation of the Mindanao Commission is the real truth. This is unfortunate because at the University of Philippines archives you have the eight microfilms of primary documents of the Mindanao Commission nobody has ever explored it yet. I was able, somebody helped me donated his box as to UP and then microfilmed it and sent it back so it's ready for research. There's also initial studies on anti-Muslim anti-communist militia groups especially after the fall of Marcos but the problem is they're all leader-centered so we have glimpses of Norberto Ramanero, the guy who killed the Italian priest. The Ilagas of South Cotabato my favorite militia anti-Muslim militia Fereziano Luzes alias Commander Toothpick and his brother Commander Toothbrush who operated the borders of La Nogil, so he's dead now but they say his spirit goes around and then of course the Parohino family from their own hometown who used to run the dreaded militia comes syndicate Coratón Baliling the mayoral skill last year which used to run the heroin and legal Vietnamese import, rice imports in the 1980s and 1990s so we have very few journalistic pieces about them and therefore we need more research. The other armed group actually that scholars of Mindanao have ignored is the Philippine military. After he declared martial law Marcos sent over 70% of the army to Mindanao to quell the MNF rebellion, they were all in the 18, 19 year olds. This was the second conventional war that the country suffered indeed. So we're not only talking of devastations of villages and towns the displacement of people but also the encounters of community for the first time in the national state. The image of the national state for many of these communities was not the teacher but it was a soldier shooting at them. But also ironically the Mindanao war created the first signs of national integration. Muslims were displaced from the communities ending up in different cities and towns in central and north Philippines and so now you have like 40 mosques in Manila alone and the Mindanao is running this wonderful illegal trade from Tawi Tawi to Baguio. The other thing is the round kernels we remember Gringo Honasan and his crazy kernels have tried to overthrow Marcos and actually earned their support as lieutenants during this war. They had brutalities and the Muslims but also refined torture techniques that they learned from the CIA during that war. They were politicized by the war and eventually thought that they could become Caudios and tried to overthrow President Marcos in 1986 and Mrs. Aquino from 1986 to 89. The war also helps explain and I think there's a panel on the 30 the glikes of the Ampatuan family and Rodrigo de 30 so there's a panel later we're looking forward to what they say. So we are aware of these changes but we have to prove their origins and resilience. The third area is political economy. So it stands on colonial economy like Professor Hayasi and Patakudao have studied the hemp plantation in Okinawa. Mike Hawkins who at Creighton University has studied the moral exchanges under American rule and in 1970s and 1980s Afrim and NGO in Davao people like Carl were studying the impact of land use, export crops, timber and the fishing industries on the economy and the role of Japanese and American capital in it. The impulse behind the letter was this research was the Marcos develop the partnerships frenetic type to open the island. I remember for the first time there were cement roads in 1974 1973 crossing and the Marcos were but also but then the kind of research that was focused here was developmental because if you say politics during the Marcos era you get arrested so the Marcos made a speech about the third world so everybody tapped on it to do research on the banana industries the fishing industries and the pineapple industries in Davao. It was thought in the way in 1986 ironically at a time when Davao's natural resources exploitation of his resources have been ramped up fishing bookings by Naples but also a lot of vegetables then there's a sign but there's a sign of revival on political economy albeit on the illicit side thinking of Pancho Lara studies in fact so these contradictions have yet to be explained and I think it must have something to do with the fact that the Marcos bias we have towards the island we treat Denmark, Ireland, Singapore as national states with complex histories but Mindanao is only a region of the Philippines in fact one professor in Australia referred to it condescendingly as a province so the island is always treated as local and not a center of its own to borrow a phrase from the famous historian of pre-colonial Southeast Asia so in a way we know very little about Mindanao even today now in one of our drinking sessions Ben Anderson once wondered why political scientists do not write funny things an example after was always there in many of the Philippines our political writing just recall the tremendous amounts of funny stuff you can find in results novels and in the essays of Nick Joaquin so as a result I have shifted after making Mindanao attention to studying two areas in Mindanao which I think would be funny but also might have implications in the advance of Mindanao studies one is the Darat Darat's which in 1950s was almost caused a lot of famine all over Mindanao and the other one is on smuggling I grew up with smuggling my brother had a favorite smuggler would bring Singaporean bananas Cadbury chocolates with the other one oh the Belgian rifle which my brother and themselves used to sell so I can tell you later the rats but what I'd like to do today is to sort of use the smuggling story by asking this hypothetical questions that I once asked in 2014 to graduate students in a workshop at the Atinae University and then in 2017 to members of the Philippine Political Science Association in Sibu so I never received any good answer from them so maybe this group will be able to yield something different so here goes my hypothetical question so what would Philippine history look like if you encounter a Muslim woman with the last name of Tan sitting in a hut in Sange Sapu Sange Sapu Island at the northern tip of Tawitawi province Bhaitan is sorting out not of iPhones and blackberries they're called blueberries in Sambuanga from South China Malong from Indonesia 5-in-1 coffees are chased from Malaysia copies of the digitized version of the famous Japanese porn film Ichiju's Wet Lust and bullets from the public National Carbacarabide the Belgian rifles stolen from the Indonesian Army now she's doing this by watching reruns of her favorite Indonesian drama Love in Paris featuring the Hang Dima Zangara on a rewired Japanese-made TV she bought cheaply from a Filipino crew of a Panamanian-owned cargo ship passing through the area occasionally she glances at her cell phone expecting a WhatsApp call from her Sibuano husband who is arranging the transport of the smuggle goods which is a stand for an underground shop in the capital church all these things you can buy there and also assassins she's also waiting for a text from her Saudi-based Saudi Arabia-based daughter who will tell her mother how much she will remit to the bank called the Oro branch in Tawitawi and she hopes to get the text at 1 p.m. because past that time the current shifts and if she takes her mother then she will most likely end up in Bukan Gorontalo province northern Sulawesi so here is a citizen a felon by livelihood a Filipino settler-holder whose mental world is national Sangat Shapo, Sambuanga Manila but also global, northern Sulawesi Saudi Arabia, Panamanian cargo ship Japanese television and porn Indonesian telenovelas Malaysian coffee, Indonesian Malong and China and most surely Singapore she is Muslim but comfortable with marketing the most Islamic goods Japanese pornography if you interview some of these Maranau's in Green Hills and ask them their favorite photographic movies they would always say Japanese of course and they would say well because there's a story before the sex there's a story Americans just straight to sex they go see the movie theater in Kya Po and you'll watch it but Japanese professor boy meets girl, girls meet with the park they complain about their parents and then they have sex so try to interview Maranau women in Green Hills they're so funny so she lives in the edge of a national territory Sangat Shapo Island east of Tawi Tawi a very beautiful island an area with government leaders with trepidation because this is where the political order is the most intense and the national state that's weakest but Baitan is Moro and Chinese she's a spawn of two minority groups the people in the center mistrust recall for example the racist rants of the national artist Eftian Iloze against the Chinese and in the 2004 Filipino Human Development Report Survey 48% of Filipinos still believe Muslims are terrorists and Gohama when you place her in the narrative first as a woman she may be challenging to study feminist politics back home focus mainly on the open struggle of women activists movements and organization but the South though everyday forms of female resistance and its hidden transcripts are still in return prompting for example a professor from Cali University of the Philippines to complain that when General Leonard Wood noted that the best leaders the Philippines were not the likes of the Spanish but they were the women he encountered Professor Fernandes said if this is true how come women in the Philippines are invisible in history books historian my lord is Karmaga he was aware of this defect and appealed to fellow historians to look for data in iconographic evidence such as pictures, literature, diaries letters and those that are derived from oral history but here's the problem the problem really is perhaps women prefer to be in the background because they don't want to show their power among Muslims for example even Angeles who teaches at University of Pennsylvania wrote a piece on this first wife of Normie who and she spoke about her quiet influence in the formation of the MNLF chairman's ideas and to go back father there was a wonderful data in the U.S. archives about the U.S. district officer Lieutenant Colonel Siddi Kloman who was watching in awe as Princess Piyando nodded her husband the Sultan of Sulu to wear a termite ravage tuxedo when facing the Americans because this is how they dressed up with trading in Singapore then there was by Piyando's knees the American educated Tarhat Akeram very wonderful who married the strongman Datu Tahili Dazan then convinced her husband to lead enough pricing against the Americans which of course failed but it has been praised by historians as another evidence of moral resistance but in fact the real story was Datu Karhat Akeram fell in love with another person and wanted to get rid of Datu Lidasan so he said go revolt and go to jail and I'm going to marry Datu Buyong after that the way back in 2008 Datu with Muslim feminist scholar Rufa Giam and her former MNF guerrilla friends I was like Kloman enthralled by the description of this of their commander Hassuatz as fools whose only talent was to assemble and dismantle and fire their weapons while they the wives raised family run the business and were the real administrators of local government and offices they were more than happy however to let their husband be the public face and the darlings of local international press because they know both of them and even their husband and the audience know that they have they do very repowered lives if you're familiar with Clan Wars Rideau for example Rideaus are resolved not by the husbands but by the wives so the biggest violation that the Ampatuan massacre did was the Ampatuan killing the wife of Mangun Datu and the constituted law of family how family clans fight together and the rumor was when Ampatuan asked how can we repay that Mangun Datu said you have to kill your three of your boys that doesn't happen now Bhaitan however she's not a woman she's also a moral so when you factor in this ethnic identity and figure out its relationship to national politics this will bring out the rebellion of the MNLF and the MILF there's a lot of literature in it but largely underappreciated and rallying parallel to this is this why we're resilient belief Oliver probably can talk about it more that Americans had consistently been the morose friend and ally historians are right in reminding us that Americans wage a bloody war against the Muslims however they made very little of the fact that after peace was established the American soldiers also became the morose public school teachers as well as a dogged defenders against the forced integration by Filipinos their datus ended up compromising with the colonial state and its republican successors but communities remain nostalgic of the days of what they called Americans what kept this family for the colonizer ally was the failure of course of the national state to establish legitimacy through a well run public education system the reason for example what the world making MNLF was I was interviewing a 91 year old man in in Wauu and when his granddaughter said oh this is Jojo Pinales he's America and he's from Osama city and he wants to study the rebellion and the old man said what a slave because we science a slave a slave in America what is a slave doing in America but the last the last question stumped him because he said well when is General Leonard Wood coming back to save us from the Filipinos he was six years old when the Americans promised if Leonard Wood becomes president we can come back separate America now and integrate it to Guam since his fund is even people like Michael Hawkins realize that in interviews in Lano he had a datus say hey when will we become the 51st state of the union so this failure this American popular colonial rule from the popular very helps explain such peculiar moves in the 1930 Danzaland declaration of Maranau Datus appealing to the U.S. the separate Mindenau before the establishment of the commonwealth or the MNLF's the demand that the United States Agency for International Development be involved in the post-war rehabilitation of Mindenau and then there is the enduring letter the warrior letter from W. Bush asking the Americans to be the fellow mediators with the emulations in reviving the peace process with the Ramos government and of course there was the survey in 2000 when Americans started coming back in Lano in Mindenau 60% of Muslims said yes that's something that has to be understood so but then war is really just a small part of Baitan's life because she was really very much a smuggler in the eyes again of the nation state she's a criminal who is a member of an underground trading network that subverts the national political economy for the economy because the commodities she sells are untaxed and cheaper compared to the legal high price taxable products of the competitors one of the funny things in Samuanga when they realize you're an old guy hey professor we have Viagra from China I'm like no I can buy that but we tested it who did you test it with the American soldiers there it worked so and the illicit sector today constitutes 50% of our gross domestic product the store rumor is you cannot run for a political office if you do not have 40% of your budget paid for and funded by gun dealers, smugglers number operators and in fact I found a document that says between 1960 and 2011 over a 52 year time the cumulative financial flows of smuggled commodities and monies into and out of the Philippines totaled 410 billion making the Philippines the sixth largest exporter of illicit capital from the developing nations and in fact Al Makoy when he wrote Policing America's empire is a very interesting book because he said well you know the real history of the Philippines is all these criminals running it now I think to a smuggler's power is a realm that cuts across several nation states it covers a swathe of land and sea from maritime to mainland Southeast Asia to southern China to Japan or even as far as Asia as well this is the world of Baitan a sprawling zone that has a history longer than that of the nation's state the smugglers of today belong to a long line of merchants that go back as far as the pre-colonial period they are thoroughly familiar with their terrain their forefathers crisscross treading routes across the region where the authority of charismatic Pugdeishas and business savvy strong men and strong women wax and wane according to their ability to train for example in the colonial era the colonial era began not with the British, the Dutch and Spanish armies conquering Southeast Asia in fact colonialism was an attempt by these Europeans to tap and insert themselves in this maritime trading network initially as minor players sometimes with fatal results as the case of Magellan and Maktan the British did this too in Malaya setting up training arrangement in the early years with the sultans of Johor and Perak before they started to make more state-like formations with the feather states of Malaya now this contrast then gives you an idea of how the political thinking is quite palpable and different from that of Manila so in the islands of Sulu for example it is said that for most part of the year the families imagine themselves as Malaysians Malaysian nationals and the only day they become Filipinos their data say hey you have to vote and then they switch back to their Malaysian nationalities and then how then with this perspective so that's another problem so finally Baitan's lineage is also Chinese she is the descendant of a Chinese merchant who settled in Holo in the evil colonial era and those of you familiar with Muslim trading history is one of the popular arrangements that strong men in port cities like Holo did was for the Chinese traders to deposit one of their members in the town so that he would be the guarantee that the guys would come back most often he gets married to the daughter of the sultan of Sulu and becomes the financial advisor of the sultan so think of Datu Pyong's father who was Chinese and who was apparently his father as minister they become members of the son in law and become members of the council of advisors and therefore are bestowed some authority by the sultan of the royal family their mestizo children and later on grandchildren and great grandchildren continue this role as the mediators between trading partners there is position strengthening because of their being Muslim and Chinese if there is one reason why Chinese are not kidnapped the local elites of Tawitawi and Holo are last names are Tan the other group that's not kidnapped are the Americans and the Lohanos so laying out this contradiction and describing this imaginary story of a Muslim Chinese smuggler is one thing but doing the research to find which explanation has the most substantive empirical grounding is another thing not only a hard place to conduct research but its people also do not really open themselves to the prying eyes of outsiders the war of course is a major obstacle with people dead in this place documents burned in this place long term fieldwork are those and dangerous and then the persistence of small arms terrorism by the Abu Sayyaf and other groups also make it this likely for many researchers to come for information across the war zones yet it is not likely impossible as Pancho Lara a sociologist his colleagues in the international Jameil Kamiyan is a historian Kiam is an anthropologist Keteras and Keterian are actors have done we took on Gloria were able to do that too so did Medrano and Paredes but there is also the fact that this anti-center sentiment in the last they can seem to spread the prime agents of integration in Medina now the settlers now today it's not only Muslims any more complain of the exploitation from the north children and grandchildren Christian migrants my friends from Davao have similarly appropriated the term Imperial Manila to define their position vis-a-vis the rest of the country now why this sentiment has persisted despite say the nationalization of Tagalog everybody speaks Tagalog now even the kidnappers speak Tagalog it's okay it's very one of the ironies in national language spread is the war on kidnapping because in part actually one group of Mindanaoans that have not been studied are the settler communities nobody have studied them that there but finally what I think keeps Mindanao difficult to study is its people's cosmopolitanism if you go to Tawi Tawi and hang out there for a couple of weeks you will notice that the war at Bhaitan's world is literally a tower of Babel but unlike where the people in this periphery understand each other quite well people who live in the French as I am in the now are polyglot by nature switching languages and identities with ease in a training zone where being multilingual is the norm so a lot of the smugglers for example can just switch to Baza Milayo Bahasa Indonesia and Hokkien and then Bisayan, Tagalog a little bit of English and a given day in places like Basilan and Tawi Tawi one can actually hear people effortlessly conversing in Bahasa Malaysia Bahasa Indonesia, Bisayan, Tagalog Tausug, Hokkien Maginda now, occasionally Mara now because in the north some Arabic and a little English this is a place difficult to monitor because the spice is the state only learn two languages English and Tagalog and this is where I think those of us who sincerely want to study Mindanao and also Sulu may want to seriously consider and that is to understand that the studying Mindanao entails that in a many ways trying to understand how Mindanao wants to talk to each other and to address the outside world we have to under memories ideas of national and community politics everyday lives and where they hope their children would be in the near future the study Mindanao is the privileged area studies once again for to do so it distinguishes us from scholars who see the island only as a step to tenure and promotion and those who study the island and its people because of our love for it thank you is that question oh ok ok I don't mind we have a little bit of time ok I'm very pleased of the emphasis on smuggling because as I always tell my students people see frontiers as a terrible imposition but actually they're a wonderful resource no frontiers, no smuggling so not training well you can have to train but smuggling the state calls it smuggling right then one like to kick off with any particular questions at the back there yes it's more like how you act I guess it can be done actually if you're familiar with one of three languages you can there's certain areas of course that you can go because the app will say yeah but the other thing is if you have sponsors they will protect you you going there it's a fun place going down the long path are very much integrated in the whole system so they don't stand up for it so what are the impact you see happening on society ten years, five years down the line so the warlords that are closer to the national government are the ones running in the dark trade and this government actually has continued its connection to this a lot of the smugglers actually are not involved in that they're very much involved in trading like there were 14,000 former moral national liberation for Kareela that shifted to the U.S. funded their economic life build project they're more interested in the market for his market now in China as a trade exchange state they rarely go into drugs because of the children there is that group that likes to prevent they like to prevent drugs from coming in the only problem is with the creation of methamphetamines you can now move your production site from Hong Kong to Marawi and it's easier to make and extremely profitable you can earn what, 2000 pesos in five hours met so that's a big fight now on kids to just participate in that network rather than do the traditional I don't know what will happen unless this warlords are killed Carlos Carlos Gaspar from I was like a college student when he was Carlos Gaspar I have no questions but a number of comments on some of the points you raised but I was very delighted because that too is our advocacy especially today there seems to be a lot of interest on Mindanao but you have like people flying from all over the place the problem is the Mindanao peoples themselves are not able to be effectively promoted to research as being conducted in Mindanao and there's some efforts at this particular time to help them because there's a lot of interest within Mindanao from the Maduras schools to the Lomad schools to the universities to really expand on Mindanao studies so thank you Jojo for getting that talk but there are four points I'd like to raise number one, certainly there should be a lot of interest regarding the Mindanao commission under the CDPN here and even until today introduced on that time and yet it is very difficult we would like to know that there's been this development of Mindanao's materials and the time to do that is now where some of the people are still willing to really share but as you know there are also a lot of visitation because the current situation political situation in the Philippines was to still create a lot of risk for researchers in this area because it can be easily misunderstood regarding where your loyalties your interests and your engagements are related to that the second point is specifically what you said regarding the rule of recent seminarians, lands, settlers around the Christian left political landscape which certainly played a very important role as you know peculiarity and there's been very little by way of trying to expand on what you've begun and there should be interest but yet because of the very risky situation which you are in right now it's also quite difficult in relation to the state but in relation to the institution of church because the irony in Mindanao church is the progressive element within the institution of church as we may be treated into very conservative mode and yet ironically the very same institution of church is very supportive of the moral people's struggle at least in terms of the PONL barn because the bishops are on direct or in our university have come out very openly in support of that and yet when it comes to the other rebellion, revolutionary agenda that for some people is even more legitimate in Mindanao there would be very strong participation. Third precisely in that particular terrain the challenge for research is also very urgent for the moment because in regard to that no one's seeing in each anthropology piece of development in the university and we try to expand our outreach in the whole discourse of revolution and so on and the counters to that as you mentioned took me all the way to your area where you were the late early the birth of the university tried to do something at least in terms of the visual exhibit and it was there I hope it's still there in the section of all the symbols that were used by the applied communist cult or social movements complete with all the cloth that they have produced the signs and symbols and so on which was their way to provoke scholars to move in this particular area and fortunately I do not even know what student interested to pursue the entire study which I think is very important because it expands the whole element of it's great to the point what you raised that we didn't try to scan the literature of as to all bring conquest until today the prevalence of research is still primarily dealing with the oral and the rheumatic there's a very very distinguished studies with Mike and Sanders and yet the construct today no longer cannot ignore the fact that what two generations already decided have lived there and considered their homeland and yet the research is not able to move in that particular direction all this I think creates all these challenges but for the moment in fact our problem is there's very little resources available generally they are promoting a lot of interest in the end of studies but where funds are concerned there's very little and within the local resources of course even a frame for the moment as you know was the change of research especially in terms of the political economy there's just one document there and all the papers you mentioned there's a danger of it but obviously you don't know they're in Cornell University they're in Cornell University yeah anyway thank you well two things Carl one is the millionaire commission stories in 2005 me a couple of us interviewed veterans of the first quarter the first generation and the only way they would open up you gotta tell our story we're not gonna tell you we're not gonna publish it we're telling this story of young children and they opened up so we have about 50 interviews like two hour interviews and we're depressing and transcribe you just have to ask permission from these people some of them are dead for example the family if you're willing to publish a transcription it's a new peanut copy the second one is the millionaire commission there's a friend of ours apparently was the librarian the nice thing about Filipino communists they were conscious about history so whatever they write they send it to the library or they send it to somebody so this guy, this professor has five boxes of primary documents I mean they love to mention some hundred and he's agreed with UP to transcribe to microfilm it initially he said I don't want you to read it so it's available now at the University of the Philippines I think I have a copy if you're interested it's a large file I'd be happy to share with you the third one is the 2008 mintana anthology that Albert Alejo and several others have published they don't know where the CD is now but I have I have I paintfully, that was my first paper actually to look at this anthology because it's so long it's like so long I'm finishing the section on history and culture and typing it down and those of you who are interested I'd be happy to share the data it's all these big dissertations research, MA thesis articles written by mintana ones in mintanao so if you ask yourself what the mintanao ones read it's very fascinating I get curious of it because my mother's MA thesis was there study of music, piano lessons what the heck is my mother doing here and then my next girlfriend was there too and she was a teach public school teacher so I have I'm almost finished with it and if you're interested I'd be happy to share with you send me your email the third thing is the settlement of Rachel Reyes she's not here yet I think I can think of something on the 30 that might be the start the biggest problem really is a lot of it is oral and in the US you can do oral because you have to ask the permission of the interviewee to sign it and say I smuggler so on so approve this and so because a lot of the newspapers are burned down as they put it recycled, we send it to the Chinese for recycling so the simpler stories actually have to be mainly oral one I discovered the ilagas in southern Cotabato because these guys were at the back and they said hey I have a church what for you they had a church and they had the ilagas and they were father of Manero and that's how I discovered it and you really have to go to the field the imam I discovered was just the with Kufa hanging around the market so it's really difficult to study but there are already sources and those of you who are interested in working on it I have some of them I'd be happy to share with you so that you can write about it I haven't had a question about rats yet you know Jonathan Sahai is studying rats in Burma really? yes so if you want to have a productive talk I mean it actually defined the ecology of Mindanao it's very important right, non rat questions what have we yes German German that's our trick record my trick record our trick record is not that good because of someone that went missing but what I wanted to ask you since you mentioned the contradictions in the very beginning of the talk based on now the few months of the BTA in place and it's a long standing expert in this color is it positive about the future or do you perceive early working science that you might hear that essentially is during the repeated session you can answer but I think the more Islamic liberation from what we learned from the more national liberation fund that for you to be able to take over as a state as a governing you have to have skilled people permanently not have that the Japanese government I think Neda and the Malaysian government have before the BTA have been working with the MLF training the catalyst on basics like how to do accounting how to prepare reports and they're very serious about it which makes them different from the MLF the MLF really more pragmatic so there's a hope for that the big problem is what to do with the private armies the MLF has 14,000 strong army will it go after private armies it's complicated by the fact because of Lido where everybody's official titles are overlapping on the name of the base of the family but I think it can also be done there were zones of peace I think that were established in 1996-97 maybe Carl later can talk about it on what the status is but there were early efforts to do that the fifth thing is very interesting I've been studying the USAID project in the now and unlike the Germans and the Japanese when you demobilize army you take their arms away the Americans kept their arms if that arms to farms it's farms with arms because the state was weak the police were weak the only way in which these could protect itself was to allow it to keep their arms and so one of the fascinating things when I was doing research on this that if you read USAID reports in Washington DC it's really bland and boring it's like human resources because and this is what localization has done because the first revenues of this library project $1000 MLF recipients of the 8th project do 4 things one is the buy a new boat or a new motorcycle in the USAID report in Washington DC it's just new equipment the second thing, the buy a new gun and thank God for the US Army there because after every military exercises general exercises the US Army leaves its guns to the Filipinos and the Filipinos sell it to them USAID report in DC it's new equipment the third thing is they connect I think it's over now but they connect illegally with Indonesian TV global TV you see it in Sandakan but you have all these channels to direct to the world and their argument was that we need our kids to learn about the world the fourth one is human resources but it's actually to get a new wife because you're allowed four wives in Islam so that sort of thing part of the reason why it's successful is this gray very grayness approach that the Americans have used we will raise we will donate 20 computers your PTA, you form a PTA and match that we don't care where your money comes from you can use your arms for example there's wonderful two towers we have machine guns guarding a 1000 marine safety zone and this the Americans build the tower the machine guns are there in the left to protect water zones so this grayness I think that can be the source of optimism but middle now it's all gray it's really gray there's no blackout right there so we're going to China to Thailand but we have very few local and I think that the next panel will give you a lot about that and to write this we'll reveal in 320th century which is more coming to Southeast Asia you might move into 21st because in Sandakan there's a section in Sandakan where it's all more on national liberation from guerrillas who never went back and they've really settled their family there there's a journalist I admit last in Japan luckily studies it but nobody has studied it from the perspective so you might want to do that go to Sabah there you go I can give you the name of the journalist quick last question yes you should do more than that you should do more than that you and George can play some more of the guns whatever I'm the academic I can be cynical you're the guys in the field but you have to really get rid of the guns and the guns is not only a project it's also this Indonesian some of the guns come from the Thai military you guys know that so that connection also has to be cut and I think Japan knows it the Germans know it they're running around you know those guns and yeah that's the only answer I can give otherwise it's all speculation political power comes from the barrel of the gun no man can run faster than a bullet from a gun as Idi Amin said well on that rather unfortunate note perhaps now thank you thank our speaker very much very stimulating work and we're breaking for coffee which is just outside excellent and please be back promptly because our next session starts at 10.30 on what Elsa has asked for looking back in time