SUMMARY
Historically, the Southern Filipino indigenous peoples’ strong attachment to their land and resources led to intermittent tribal wars and vendetta killings with other kin groups that violated their territory. Reportedly these types of conflict among the Lumad and the Moro in the southern Philippines have not been unusual, lasting some times for years, until a pact is reached or blood money is paid by either side. In the past however, at varying levels, these communities had developed social and political structures to regulate their relations within their communities as well as with outsiders and intercommunity relations ranged from cooperation to conflict.
The conflict between the Lumad and the Moro is thus often referred to as both a historical creation, originating from the process of Islamisation in Mindanao and in modern times, the result of the series of disadvantageous land laws and policies from the political center which dispossessed both indigenous groups of their traditional territories and increased competition between them for land and resources.
Under US colonial administration, several laws were passed which provided for registration of land ownership through land titles and set limits on hectarage that individuals and corporations could acquire. Unregistered land automatically became open for exploration, occupation and purchase by citizens of the Philippines and the United States. In Mindanao, large areas of arable land occupied by the Lumad and the Moro were sold or leased to settlers and plantation companies. At that time, very few Moros and Lumads were sufficiently literate in English to understand the bureaucratic intricacies of land registration. Many did not register the lands they had been cultivating. However, several Moro rulers took advantage of the new law to register large territories in their own names. They became the ancestors of today’s Moro landed elite.
Upon independence, Filipino administrations encouraged the landless poor of Luzon and the Visayas to settle in Mindanao. The massive influx of immigrants led to the ‘minorisation’ of the Lumad and the Moro in Mindanao and political- and economical marginalisation of these groups followed, as did an even more heightened competition for land as the most productive agricultural lands were taken over by the settlers. To rectify some of these misguided government policies, then-President Fidel Ramos signed into law the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA) in 1997. Among other things, the IPRA restored the rights of indigenous peoples over their ancestral domains (defined as natural resources and lands, which no longer are exclusively occupied by the indigenous, but to which they had traditional access) and allowed them to take out Certificate of Ancestral Domain Titles. However, analysts note that the promulgation of the IPRA has also caused new communal conflicts and exacerbated old ones, also between the Lumad and the Moro.
The non-state conflict between the Lumad and the Moro is first included in UCDP data in 2006. In June of that year, members of a Lumad group launched a retaliatory attack on Moro villagers in the Bukidnon province which resulted in more than 25 battle-related deaths.
