Groups `masquerading as do-gooders are actually economic saboteurs and manipulators’
An indigenous Subanon community in Siocon, Zamboanga del Norte today announced that it will sue non-government organizations, among them a church-based anti-mining organization led by a Roman Catholic Bishop, for allegedly violating their human rights “for decades” by “resorting to all kinds of activities to stop mining operations” in the Subanon ancestral domain.
The Siocon Subano Association Inc. (SSAI), through its legal counsel, Atty. Pablo Bernardo, a Subanon himself, said the IPs are going to file cases against the DIOPIM Committee on Mining Issues, a Dipolog social action group headed by Bishop Jose Manguiran, the Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center (LRC), an NGO known for its strong opposition to the Philippine Mining Act of 1995; as well as their funders. 
Bernardo said the activities of these groups are depriving the Subanons “the right to work, to have our community improved, to receive royalty, and to pursue sustainable livelihood projects.
“We are victims of oppression by groups masquerading as do-gooders but are actually economic saboteurs and manipulators,” he said. “For years we have suppressed our legal options, but enough is enough. We must now assert what is due and right for as an indigenous people, even against those who claim as saviors of our souls.”
SSAI is the legal representative of the Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title holders of Canatuan, a sitio of Barangay Tabayo in Siocon town. It forged a Memorandum of Agreement with TVI Resource Development Phils. Inc. (TVIRD), the Philippine affiliate of Canadian mining company TVI Pacific, Inc., to develop Canatuan.
Bernardo said DCMI, LRC and their funders “have been continuously harassing SSAI by agitating a small group (of anti-mining advocates) in filing baseless complaints against the IPs and TVIRD.
“They pretend to protect us IPs and save our souls when the truth is, they have been selling our lives as fodder for their fund-raising campaigns in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere,” he pointed out.
“The Subanons of Siocon are reaping the dividends of their bold decision when they allowed TVI(RD) to mine within their ancestral domain, a positive enforcement of their right in the use of their natural resources,” Bernardo continued. “To name a few (Subanon benefits derived from the mine operation), they receive monthly royalty fees. More than 300 of them were employed, bridges were built, roads were improved, schools and medical facilities were provided, and an IP community site is to be developed.
“They are now planting abaca in addition to their rubber plantation, which will prepare them to be economically sustainable in the years to come,” he said. “But more than anything else, the IPs are now preparing for their future socially and economically. They are no setting up, with the help of TVI, their Ancestral Domain Social Development and Protection Plan – a master plan for the development of their homeland.”
SSAI will also file cases against non-IPs “who have illegally and continuously occupied our ancestral domain and, despite repeated demands to leave have continuously failed and refused.” Bernardo said these people came as illegal small-scale miners who “stole our natural resources, polluted our lands with mercury and wantonly discharged cyanide in our rivers, cut our trees, employed our children and women as laborers in extremely hazardous and inhuman working conditions for a daily wage of 50 pesos.
Recently, SSAI acted to dismantle the unoccupied shanty of a couple who had refused to leave the ancestral domain and the Canatual Project of TVIRD despite lengthy negotiations (two and a half years), safety concerns (the shanty was below the expanding mine operations), and repeated requests for the couple to vacate the area they were unlawfully occupying.
According to Ely Comisas, the Subanon Council of Elders member who led the dismantling, the couple are being encouraged and supported by DCMI to continue an anti-TVIRD campaign.
The company had offered the couple over 13 times the officially assessed value of their shanty and what they claimed as their plants, based on the fair market value of real property in Zamboanga del Norte. While the assessed value was only P13,000, the couple were asking for P1.5 million – a price all observers believed was a deliberately unreasonable figure. SSAI had likewise offered the couple the opportunity to join the IP community.
DCMI, however, was quick to accuse TVIRD and the Special CAFGU Active Auxillary (SCAA) of human rights violations, stating in news releases that the company’s “private security force harassed” and physically harmed the couple.
The SCAA is actually a military unit under the Armed Forces of the Philippines. It was established under the auspices of the 1987 Philippine Constitution, following then President Corazon Aquino’s Executive Order 264 and its subsequent Implementing Rules and Regulations.
Eugene Mateo, TVIRD President, stressed that the company “s trying its best to be a responsible miner. “What we’re asking is for NGOs like DCMI to become responsible NGOs.”
Mateo had earlier requested the Philippines’ National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) and the Commission on Human Rights to conduct an inquiry into the recent events in Canatuan related to SSAI’s dismantling of the non-IP shanty.
“It’s not in anyone’s interest – not ours, not even the NGOs’, and certainly not the public’s – for such erroneous information (indicated in DCMI’s news releases) to be published, without due diligence on the part of the NGO or without `the other side of the story’,” said Mateo. “Advocacy groups play an important role in our society, in order to ensure that the public is fully informed. But democracy depends on NGOs being responsible just as mining companies must be responsible.”