0DQDJLQJWKH0RUR3UREOHP)UDFWXUHG1DWLRQ1DUUDWLRQ

LQ%DJRQJ%XZDQ
*ODG\V1XEOD

positions: east asia cultures critique, Volume 19, Number 2, Fall 2011,
pp. 393-420 (Article)
3XEOLVKHGE\'XNH8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pos/summary/v019/19.2.nubla.html

Access provided by Ateneo de Manila University (27 Jan 2015 05:32 GMT)

Managing the Moro Problem: Fractured Nation/Narration in Bagong Buwan

Gladys Nubla

When Bagong buwan (New Moon), Marilou Diaz-Abayas controversial film

about Muslims in the Philippines, was released in late 2001, it caused a critical stir and became a box-office hit. It made the rounds of international film
festivals and won several significant awards: while it didnt win the best picture award in the December 2001 Metro Manila Film Festival, it did win the
equivalent honor as well as the best director award at the Filipino Academy
of Movie Arts and Sciences Awards (the Philippine counterpart to the U.S.
Academy Awards).1 One film review called the film an eye-opener, the
first serious Filipino movie about the Mindanao conflict, and the most
widely discussed, most analyzed and most talked-about Filipino movie that
season. This is all to the good, the review continues, because the controversy over the film also promotes a general awareness of the decades-old
Mindanao problem.2
positions 19:2 doi 10.1215/10679847-1331769
Copyright 2011 by Duke University Press

positions 19:2 Fall 2011

394

The Mindanao problem is a telling way to describe the larger issue

with which the film is concerned, specifically the long history in the southern Philippines of Moro dissent from and rebellion against the central government.3 The phrase brings to mind the way various racialized minority
groups in the United States, for example, have been described during at
least one point in their histories, such as the Negro Problem or the Oriental Problem. This politically and culturally charged way of staging the
claims of minorities on the nation as a problem already suggests a specific
perspectivethat of the majority Filipino Christians in Manila.
According to Moro filmmaker and writer Gutierrez Mangansakan II,
Philippine cinema and media in general have painted and reinforced a
negative image of the Moro people.4 Given such a history, Bagong buwan,
written, directed, and produced by Christian Filipinos, seems to break the
mold of deliberately negative representations of Muslims in feature films
produced for the consumption of the Christian majority by taking a sympathetic look at the early twenty-first-century plight of Muslims in the southern Philippines. The film presents the situation from the mouths of different
characters who sometimes argue with and sometimes lecture each other on
the relative merits of Moros taking up armed struggle against the Philippine
government versus relinquishing their separatist/secessionist movement. The
didacticism of the films narrative strategy, which at least one critic argues is
at the expense of character and plot development,5 reveals the filmmakers
awkwardly conflicting desires to advocate an end to the violence, to validate
the Moro struggle for self-determination, and yet not to take sides.
Attentive to the history of Muslim disenfranchisement in the Philippines,
this article attempts to analyze the politics of representation brought up by
Bagong buwan, particularly looking at its modes of representation and the
discourse surrounding the film (i.e., film reviews and statements made by
the director and producers about the making of the film). Because the film,
pitched mostly toward a Christian, middle-class, and Tagalog-speaking
Manileo audience, is ultimately an attempt to suture Muslims into the
(already imagined whole) Philippine nation, the film raises but subsequently
obscures the important discourse of social, political, and economic justice
inextricable from contemporary discussions of Moro insurgency in the
southern Philippines, which point to socioeconomic and geopolitical oppres-

Nubla Managing the Moro Problem

395

sion as much as religious and cultural difference as the causes of Moro separatist nationalism. That this particular discourse is sublimated is suggested
by the sublimation of another important discourse in the filmthat of the
rape of Muslim women, existing only as a haunting at the edge of the frame.
I argue that the films intermittent deployment of the now-commonplace
trope of woman-as-nation produces competing representations of gendered
nationalisms that the film must in due course contain within a nationalist framework that reinscribes the authority of the center, in this case the
Manila-based central government. Moreover, while the pro-peace rhetoric
embedded in the films narrative strategy is understandable given the stated
political aims of the director, writers, and producers, it unfortunately obfuscates an understanding of the difficult history and daily political and social
situation of Muslim lives in the Philippines.
I argue that the discourse of Moro separatist nationalism is precisely
what a film like Bagong buwan is trying (and failing) to forestall through
its controlling pro-peace discourse. My interpretation of the film is largely
symptomatic and reads the fissures of the narrative, namely the contradictions between the discourse surrounding the film and the films modes of
representation. In particular, I interrogate the containment of specific kinds
of discourses that the film itself brings up but in the end sublimates into a
pro-peace Philippine nationalist discourse. From its ethnographic mode of
representation to its use of the woman-as-nation trope, what emerges is a
film operating under the austerity of neoliberalism; Moro separatism must
be elided in order to reduce the historical, political, cultural, and ethnoreligious conflict to a family squabble on scriptural semantics (the meaning
of jihad), because the films pro-peace logic dictates that Muslims consolidate
under the patriarchal and heteronormative frame of Philippine nationalism. Unfortunately, the belatedness of this ideological suturing of the nation
does more harm than good, for it is a type of empowerment of the Other
that reifies a State-Christian normativity on which Philippine citizenship is
based and that shunts Moros desires for self-determination further into the
margins, even as the film claims to support such desires.
According to Cesar Majul, the Philippine Senate as early as 1954 was concerned about what they called the Moro Problem, referring to the increase
of tensions and a breakdown of law and order in some Muslim areas in the

positions 19:2 Fall 2011

396

early 1950s.6 While Muslims in the Philippines have a long-standing, often

venerated history of violent resistance against Spanish and U.S. colonizers
who desired to take control over their lands, their feelings of national unbelonging to the Philippines were rooted in the failure of the [1898 Philippine] revolution to incorporate the Muslim south7 and further solidified
during the U.S. colonial period and the Philippine Commonwealth period
(193546), when President Manuel L. Quezon denied the special provinces of Muslims and Indigenous Peoples full suffrage and equal representation in the Filipino-run government.8 During these years, the Manilabased government encouraged the internal migration of non-Muslims into
southern Philippines. Thus the increase of unrest among Muslims in the
1950s resulted from the continued displacement of their communities from
their traditional lands, their disenfranchisement, and their worsening living conditions. In addition to these issues, the stark contrast between their
material conditions and those of their Christian neighborsChristiandominated areas enjoyed better roads, schools, irrigation projects, and civic
centerswas visible proof that the Philippine government did not truly
consider them a part of the nation.9 The Moro Problem, therefore, stems
from a complicated history of territorial and class conflict as well as ethnic
and religious differences, all of which challenge the notion of a unified Philippine nation.
These oppressive conditions led to the rise of Moro liberation movements
in the 1970s. A broad-based revolutionary organization, the Moro National
Liberation Front (MNLF) gained a wider reputation during the early years
of martial law in its struggle against the Marcos dictatorships systematic
offensive against Muslim solidarity in the Philippines.10 However, by the late
1970s, internal dissent within the MNLF brought about splinter groups, the
most prominent of which was the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF),
an organization that seeks an independent Islamic state in Mindanao and
is still active today. In the early 1990s, another faction emerged, the now
infamous Abu Sayyaf, which became labeled terrorist for its bombings,
assassinations, and ransom-kidnappings and hostage-taking, even before the
current U.S.-led global war on terror. 11
Violent conflict ensued again in March 2000, when President Joseph
Estrada declared an all-out war against the MILF that eventually dis-

Nubla Managing the Moro Problem

397

placed an estimated six hundred to nine hundred thousand people in Mindanao before Estradas successor, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, called
off military operations against the MILF in February 2001.12 So when
Bagong buwan came out in late 2001, it was likely with the memory of this
recent war, linked to a long history of violent clashes between the Moros and
the government, that Filipino moviegoers came to see the film.
Fractured Narrative:
The Philippine Nationalist Framework of Pro-peace Discourse

According to the filmmakers, Bagong buwan foregrounds the perspective

of the much-misunderstood Muslims in the Philippines in order to promote
peace and reconciliation between the two warring sidesthe national government and the Moro rebels in Mindanao. In many of the film reviews of
Bagong buwan published in Philippine and Asian newspapers, pro-peace
was one of the privileged terms.13 The narrative method through which
the filmmakers argue for peace is telling, however, of the cultural logic of
neoliberalismparticularly the logic of privatizationoperating in the
film. The discourse of national division and civil war is displaced cinematically onto a more personal narrative, that of the rift in one particular Muslim family: two brothers, Ahmad and Musa, disagree fundamentally about
the proper way to conduct their struggle as Moros. Musa is a rebel fighter
in Mindanao, whereas we first see Ahmad as a doctor in a Manila hospital.
While the focus on one Muslim family makes practical sense for the filmmakers,14 and perhaps appeals to a middle-class, Manila-based consumerist
audience, it unfortunately reduces the divisive issues between the warring
parties as an issue of the Muslim individuals choice to believe in a militant,
politicized jihad (represented by Musa) or a more personal, spiritual jihad
(represented by Ahmad). This deemphasizes not only the fact that it was
the government who declared war on the Moros in 2000 but also the continuing socioeconomic oppression and territorial marginalizationa more
gradual displacement rather than the violent displacements depicted in the
film15of Muslims by Christian Filipinos, who make up the majority of
the national government and now constitute the majority of the population
in the historically Muslim region of Mindanao. Moreover, the film portrays

positions 19:2 Fall 2011

398

the choice to become an insurgent as a strictly masculine one, denying womens roles in insurgency. This reinforces not only the perception of Muslim
societies as absolutely patriarchal but also the centrality of masculinity and
maleness in competing nationalist discourses, in which Philippine nationalism and Moro self-determination are seen as inherently the domain of men
and masculinity.
From an unsettling discontinuity in the primary narrative viewpoint and
the suggestion that the Philippine government is as much a foreign invader
as the Spanish and U.S. colonizers, to the depiction of the uncertain prospects of the fragmented and homeless Muslim family, the film features a
series of fractures in narrative that leave the viewer with a conflicted notion
of what peace and reconciliation between Christian and Muslim Filipinos
might look like. The films determination not to take sides raises the question of narrative viewpoint: with which character is the viewer supposed to
identify the most? While one could argue that the viewer identifies with
all of the characters onscreen who get caught in the crossfire, the hybrid
character of Ahmad ibn Ismael seems to be the likely choice for primary
audience identification; besides the fact that the character is played by the
first-billed Cesar Montano (a Christian Filipino who also played Philippine
national hero Jos Rizal, the title character in another critically acclaimed
film by Diaz-Abaya in 1998), he is the first sympathetic character to appear
onscreen in clothing that does not mark him as Muslim. We first see him
in a white lab coat in a hospital setting, walking quickly down a brightly lit,
white-walled hallway toward the audience while Dr. Ismael is heard being
paged on the PA system. The fact that he is heading toward the audience in
this scene already invites identification with him. It is only later that we find
out that he is a Muslim originally from Maguindanao Province in southern
Philippines. Thus he is hybrid in the sense that he is a Muslim who has been
educated and trained as a doctor in Manila; indeed, he is working in Manila
when the film opens. Ahmad also seems to be the one character who undergoes a significant transformation. Throughout the film, the basic question
that seems to crop up in his case is whether he should fight alongside the
Moro rebels. A pacifist who considers himself foremost a healer, Ahmad at
first advocates for young Muslims to leave the south for their education and
is thus at odds with his older brother Musa who is a rebel fighter. But the

Nubla Managing the Moro Problem

399

death of Ahmads son at the hands of unknown vigilantes at the start of the
film forces him to return to the south where he eventually is drawn into the
fighting and killing. He dies during one of the battles against government
soldiers, and because Musa also disappears from the narrative (ostensibly to
regroup and deal with his grief), the narratives primary perspective shifts
elsewhere, toward a young Christian boy named Francis.
Francis is part of a secondary story line of a growing intercultural friendship between a Muslim boy, Rashid (Ahmads nephew and Musas son), and
a Christian boy (Francis) who gets caught in the crossfire and must be protected by Muslims who are also trying to escape the violence. This relationship provides another bridge for the Christian audience to enter into the
supposed Muslim perspective. Through the curious and nave child character of Francis, the audience is allowed to ask and have answered innocently
ignorant questions about what makes Muslims different from Christians
and why the Moros are taking up arms in rebellion against the Philippine
government. After Ahmads death, Francis seems to inherit the audiences
primary identification, especially since he is figured as a representative of
the next generation who, having been told the stories of the Muslims, is now
expected to share their stories with the rest of the Christian Filipino community. In effect, he comes to mirror the meta-narrative trajectory of the
film, as the story is told from a supposed Muslim perspective to Christian
viewers, just as the Muslim characters tell Francis their stories. When Bae
Farida, Ahmads mother and the matriarch of the family, implores Francis
on her deathbed to tell the Christian world of the stories of the Muslims
in order to further better intercultural relationships, the scene can also be
understood as authorizing the Christian filmmakers to speak for Muslims
for the same purpose. Franciss character, whose perspective is most closely
affiliated with that of the filmmaker, has in fact always contained the ideological standpoint of the film. This becomes even clearer when Ahmad dies
and the rest of the Ismael family is shattered.
In two key death scenes, the film employs flashbacks of the long-ago past,
the first with Datu Ali, the Muslim community leader who uses his home
to give safe haven to fleeing refugees, and the second with Ahmad. Both
flashback scenes occur right before their deaths. In Datu Alis scene, just as
he is yelling and raising his weapon against unspecified assailants,16 the film

positions 19:2 Fall 2011

400

cuts to several head-and-shoulder shots of different men in similar Muslim

garb and in the same fighting stance. Given the context of the film, we are
led to understand that these other men are his ancestors fighting against the
Spanish colonizers, and then the U.S. colonizers. Now he is fighting against
Filipinos who are going to raze his home and take over his land. Such a correlation reinforces the heroic frame in which Datu Ali, as a representative
of Muslim (aristocratic) leadership, is portrayed. Similarly in Ahmads scene,
which furnishes the climax of the film, after getting fatally shot during a
guerrilla battle between government soldiers and Moro rebels, he raises his
weapon one last time and yells a war chant (for he has now become an insurgent), and the scene cuts to his ancestors yelling the same fighting words. To
my mind, these two scenes deeply implicate the Philippine government and
Christian Filipinos as a colonizing force and ultimately cannot be contained
by the films larger discourse of reconciliation and peace. This failure constitutes another aspect of the fractured nature of the films narration. The
ideological work accomplished by these flashback scenes follows a common
but narrow nationalist framework that imagines Muslim resistance against
the Spanish and later against the Americans as an organic part of Filipino
nationalism.17 Yet this nationalist framework effaces the separatist ethos
of Moro movements like the MILF, which is heavily depicted in the film
through Ahmads family.
The film ends ambivalently about what can be done about the conflict
between Moros and the largely Christian state; it seems to suggest the inevitability of violence but also seems determinedly optimistic about the possibility that Christian-Muslim friendships can heal the rift (i.e., Christians and
Muslims only need to get rid of their individual prejudices of each other in
order to get along), thus reducing larger geopolitical and institutional issues
to problems of interpersonal, intrafamilial relationships. The filmmakers
further suggest that mutual storytelling between Muslims and Christians is
a significant way to create (metaphysical) zones of peace, which could be
a first step to lasting peace in the region.18 However, the attempt to create a
pro-peace discourse for the Moro Problem leads to an ending that seems
almost forced, in which the children playing in the seeming peace and safety
that blankets the evacuation center in the Mindanao capital (Davao) does
not quite reconcile us to the tragedies that brought them there. Despite the

Nubla Managing the Moro Problem

401

filmmakers overarching attempt to suture national division through a propeace filmic narrative, it seems that they created a narrative that is actually
more complicated and symptomatically representative of the national division itself, full of unresolved and probably inadvertent ruptures in character,
narrative viewpoint, and plot. Their focus on the emotional aspect of how
war is bad for everyone involved still leaves the very real social problems
untoucheda history of colonization and the deployment of neoliberal
government policies that have led to Muslim disenfranchisement, displacement from traditional lands, destitution, and discrimination.19
Ethnography and Nationalism in the Filmic Representation
of Difference

The films ethnographic mode of representing Muslim communities belies

its much-touted break from earlier cinematic representations of Muslims
and instead highlights their difference from normal people,20 that is, the
majority Christian population of the Philippine state. Franciss specific role
as observer/outsider is analogous to the filmmakers role, and his experience/
position as a Christian living among Muslims resonates with Diaz-Abayas
years of fieldwork when researching for the film. This point of view then
situates the viewers gaze in the same way. The directors account of making
the filmshe spent years immersing herself in Islamic scripture and doing
fieldwork in Mindanao21leads one to think of the film as a kind of ethnographic project that attempts to portray how Muslim Filipinos in Mindanao
really live. Not all anthropological projects are unaware of the danger of
what Johannes Fabian calls the denial of coevalness in the representation of ethnic groups, in which the Otherthe object of anthropology
is placed in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.22 But this film seems to fall into this trap mostly because it
hangs much of the weight of the narrative on the characters most influenced
by middle-class and/or Christian valuesFrancis, Ahmad, the Christian
peace worker Jason, and the leader of the government forces, Lieutenant
Ricarte (all of whom, not incidentally, are male). Even though the filmmakers claimed not to favor one side or the other, one can read in Bagong buwan
a Philippine nationalist framework that imagines the normative Filipino

positions 19:2 Fall 2011

402

citizen as Christian. Despite the films stated motivation to present the perspective of much-misunderstood Muslims in the Philippines in order to promote peace, this particular pro-peace discourse surrounding the film seems
to veil the rather imperialist impulses of a Christian nationalist discourse
that one finds in the film itself.
The most important example of ethnographic temporal distancing in the
film is its portrayal of the landscape of Mindanao as gardenlike, suggesting
that what should reign over this land is peace. In order to create a sense of
the wrongness of war, the film first presents everyday Muslim life as almost
unnaturally peaceful, the small communities nestled in pristine green meadows surrounded by hills, with the requisite mosque alerting the audience
to the communities religious affiliation/identification. The slide show of
panoramic landscapes that constitutes the films first sequence supports the
notion that the film approaches the subject of Muslim Filipinos in an ethnographic way. The panoramas of natural beautymountains, rivers, and
oceanbring to mind an earlier or premodern time, that is, before industrialization and urbanization. In this first sequence, we see Muslims praying
and singing solemnly on a hilltop overlooking a grassy, unoccupied meadow.
The scene is shot from behind so that we are not distracted by their faces; it
is almost as if they have blended into the scenery, suggesting the symbiosis
between the untouched, natural world and Islam. This untouched nature
is also a feminized space, foreshadowing the eventual violence as a kind of
rape of the land and of Islam.23 The landscapes set the Muslim world in a
natural outdoor space of the primitive or indigenous that contrasts with the
hospital in which we first see Ahmad, provoking in us, the urban audience,
a kind of nostalgic modernity and a desire to protect this feminized space.
At the same time, there is no focus on the Muslims who live in the more
urban areas of Mindanao. This may be for the reason that those Muslims
most adversely affected by the fighting are those who do not live in the city,
but the presentation of rural Muslim life is so markedly, almost overwhelmingly, different from the lived experiences of the intended audience of this
filmmiddle-class moviegoers in Manilathat one cannot help but comment on the films uncritical representation of Muslims.
In her investigation of Muslim representations in Philippine cinema,
Aileen Toohey argues that national cinema often depicts cultural or ethnic

Nubla Managing the Moro Problem

403

difference to delineate alterities and legitimize [national] selfhood.24 In

earlier Philippine films, representations of Muslims often fell into this category of alterity, against which the Westernized Filipino could be defined,
depending very much on Orientalist, stereotypical representations of Muslims that drew from moro-moro plays, which reproduced anti-Muslim and
authoritarian values in a traditional and conventionalized form.25 Furthermore, earlier representations of the ethnic Other in Philippine film also
often betrayed a type of nostalgic modernity within a nationalist framework. Citing film scholar Bienvenido Lumbera, Toohey writes that the
appeal of the ethnic was its association with exotic societies untouched by
Spanish and American colonial rule. Creative artists such as film producers
turned to the ethnic when they wanted to imagine a pure people that
could be portrayed to contrast with Westernized Filipinos who have been
corrupted by materialist greed and commercializing urbanization.26
While Bagong buwan does not follow the conventions of Muslim representation as established in the moro-moro plays (arrogance, supercilious
and haughty manner, strong and despotic27), it nevertheless overemphasizes Muslim alterity through the use of Franciss ethnographic gaze and the
evocation of nostalgia for the modern Manila audience.
Because this ethnographic gaze is so often turned on Muslims, the film,
despite its overarching attempt to show Muslims as just like Filipinos, runs
the risk of being considered more as an authentic ethnographic representation of Muslimsas suggested by the insistence of producer MoranFloirendo on the truth-value of the films representations, for instance.28
Moreover, in the attempt to counter the stereotypes about Moros as outlaws
and cold-blooded killers of Christians, the film goes to the other extreme
by making the Moro civilians almost supernaturally generous to Christians,
especially to Francis: for instance, Franciss selfishness directly causes the
death of Ahmad, yet his wife Fatima forgives Francis seemingly with no
qualms. In the end, these contradictory impulses reveal not only the Philippine nationalist logic under which the film and filmmakers operate, a logic
that necessitates the sublimation of Moro desires to found a separate nation,
but also its continuation of a tradition of ethnographic representations of
Muslims in Philippine cinema.

positions 19:2 Fall 2011

404

A Haunting at the Edge of the Frame: Gendered Tropes of Nation

Despite the filmmakers insistence on the pro-peace intent of the project,

the film itself deploys a more complicated set of competing representations
of gendered nationalism that I would argue symptomatically (rather than
deliberately) replicate the national division that the film attempts to suture.
In addition to representing the nation through the trope of the family, the
film employs the commonplace trope of woman-as-nation. But rather than
a clear-cut notion of the Philippines as symbolized by a particular woman
or group of women, what we have in the film are competing representations of the nation through different womens bodies. According to Nira
Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, women are understood as participating in
nationalist processes in several ways: (a) as biological reproducers of members of ethnic collectivities; (b) as reproducers of the boundaries of ethnic/
national groups; (c) as participating centrally in the ideological reproduction
of the collectivity and as transmitters of its culture; (d) as signifiers of ethnic/
national differenceas a focus and symbol in ideological discourses used
in the construction, reproduction, and transformation of ethnic/national
categories; (e) as participants in national, economic, political and military
struggles.29
With the exception of the last category, Bagong buwan is peopled with
female characters that would fall in at least one or two of these categories.
For instance, the women in Ahmads family, his wife Fatima and his mother
Bae Farida, would serve as biological reproducers (mothers) and caregivers, as transmitters of culture through storytelling, and as symbols of Moro
ethnic/national identity.
The construction of women as signifiers/symbols of the nation is of critical importance here. Bagong buwan scrupulously tries to avoid depicting
sexual violence against women, particularly sexual violence perpetrated on
Muslim women. The displacement of the meanings of the war onto the narrative of family division more than just reduces a long history of geopolitical
conflict to a debate about different conceptions of jihad; it also preempts any
other way of conceiving of the brothers relationship outside the metaphor
of the (heteronormative) national Filipino family. This use of a Muslim
family to represent the national Filipino family is probably the films most

Nubla Managing the Moro Problem

405

ground-breaking act in the context of previous cinematic treatments of Muslims, yet the ramifications of this depiction are seriously limited not only by
the series of narrative fractures discussed earlier but also by a form of selfcensorship that speaks to the gendered Philippine nationalist framework in
which the film operates: because Moro womens bodies are understood as
first and foremost Muslim bodies, they cannot, or rather are not allowed to,
represent the Philippine nation that is the privileged optic in this filmfor
the Moro identity has historically been set against Philippine national identity socially, politically, and culturally, and it could be argued that Philippine
nationalism was actually founded on this very marginalization, exclusion,
and criminalization of Muslim and Indigenous peoples.
A film review suggests that the reason for Ahmads transformation from
pacifist doctor to armed rebel and for his climactic execution of two soldiers
in an abandoned and despoiled Muslim village is an accumulation of rude
awakening[s], starting with the death of his son, Ibrahim, and on to the
death of his mother, and then witnessing a soldier urinating on the outside
wall of a village mosque.30 However, what precedes this latter scene of desecration is a sequence of brief shots showing the destruction of the whole village. One particularly haunting shot is that of a dead Muslim woman lying
on the dirt ground at a slight decline (i.e., her legs are elevated above her
head) with her long skirt bunched at the tops of her bare thighs. The shot
is unique in the film because it is the most explicit suggestion of sexual violence perpetrated on Muslim women, and yet it is almost a passing glance:
the woman is not in the close foreground of the shot, and the shot is on the
screen very briefly, almost as if it slipped in by accident. Yet this haunting
image at the edge of the frame inflects with sexual valence the later scene of
the mosque desecration, so that the soldier urinating on the wall is seen to
be raping Islam, though the equation here is between Muslim women, the
religion of Islam, and Muslim culture rather than between Muslim women
and the Philippine nation. This gives us an even fuller understanding of the
rage that causes the earnest, peace-loving Ahmad to execute the two soldiers
who stayed in the village after razing it: by killing them, Ahmad defends
not only Islam but also Muslim women, who are, in the patriarchal logic
of the film, carriers of the culture and Moro nationalism, both literally and
symbolically.

positions 19:2 Fall 2011

406

Thus the film, in an effort to suture Philippine national identity, represses

a particularly feminist critique of war and the sexual exploitation often
attendant to war. The explicit portrayal of rape would in any case create a
different kind of dynamic in the film, but it is the rape of Muslim women in
particular that is unspeakable in this film. The repression of this discourse
of rape suggests the limits of the narrative ability of Muslims to stand in
for the Philippine nation, because the nation represented through such a
rape would be either a particularly Moro one distinct from the Philippine
nation or a radically reconfigured Philippine nation no longer founded on
the disenfranchisement and exclusion of its minority groups. Neither of
these would sustain the nationalist framework of the normatively Christian
Philippine nation. In addition, by precluding a public discourse about Moro
separatism in general, the allusion to and eventual elision of the rape of
Muslim women privatize specifically Muslim (womens) trauma and grief.
Yet the brief image of the raped Muslim woman nevertheless haunts us
and deploys the trope of woman-as-Moro nation that competes with the
privileged representative of the Philippine nation in the filmthe character
of the pregnant Christian woman with a Muslim husband, who gives birth
to a baby boy whom she names Ibrahim after Ahmad and Fatimas slain
son. Rather than the sexually violated bodies of Moro women, the pregnant
body of a Christian woman carrying a hybrid baby is portrayed as being
the literal carrier of the next generation. The hybridity of the child in some
ways replicates and perfects upon the hybridity of Ahmad as the films protagonist, given that the child is the physical embodiment of a melding of
Muslim and Christian Filipino ethno-religious cultures.
It is also significant that the child, who has been orphaned by the presumed death of his rebel father and the death of his Christian mother in
childbirth, will be raised by Fatima. The scene in which we learn this is the
same scene near the end of the film in which Fatima tells Francis that she
will be his friend for life, essentially forgiving him for his role in the death
of Ahmad. In a shot redolent of the quintessentially Christian Madonnaand-Child image, Fatima holds the baby and exudes a sad but calm and
loving mien while forgiving Francis. The scene is emblematic of the filmmakers ultimate message to the viewer: let Christians and Muslims forgive
each other and learn to live with each other peacefully. As well, this focus

Nubla Managing the Moro Problem

407

on Ibrahim and his passing between Christian and Muslim hands further
naturalizes the family as the site for the dissolution of global, national, and
local violence.
Symbolically, the scene is ambiguous. It is here that the woman-as-nation
trope is most strongly suggested in the film, with Fatima representing the
nationbut which nation? As discussed earlier, the Philippine nationalist
framework of the film also restricts the ability of the Moro/Muslim woman
to represent the Philippine nation. We could thus read the scene as a forgiving Moro/Muslim people fostering a peaceful coexistent future as embodied
by the baby Ibrahim. Or, because the Madonna-and-Child resonance of the
scene attributes a mythic Christian quality to Fatima and the baby Ibrahim,
the nation represented here could be read as particularly hybrid and liberal
yet still predominantly based on a Christian ethos. Either way, the discourse
of Moro secessionism is repressed.
Thus the film ends with the child, and indeed all the other children in
the evacuation center, as the hope for a peaceful future for Muslims and
Christians alike. But by ending with such images, the film represses both
the discourse of a secessionist Moro nationalism and the discourse of the
rape of Muslim women that (via patriarchal logic) would give charge to
Moro nationalism and secessionist desires, sublimating them into a propeace discourse that is ultimately Philippine nationalist. While the hybrid
Muslim-and-Christian baby represents a liberal future in which Christians
and Muslims get along (or in which there is liberal tolerance toward the
minority of Muslims in the nation, rather like the way a personal, spiritual jihad as represented by Ahmad is far more palatable to Christians than
a Moro nationalist jihad), the film offers a different type of reproduction
for its Muslim charactersthat of terrorist reproduction via the male line,
as represented by the relationship between Rashid and his father, Musa.
According to Jasbir Puar,
Although feminist postcolonial studies have typically theorized women as
the bearers of cultural continuity, tradition, and national lineage, in the
case of terrorism, the line of transmission seems always to revert to the
male body. The locus of reproductive capacity is, momentarily, expanded
from the female body to include the male body. This expansion does

positions 19:2 Fall 2011

408

not mark a shift away from women as the victims of rape and pawns
between men during wartime. But the principal and overriding emphasis on rape of women as a weapon of war can displace the importance of
castrating the reproductive capacities of men; furthermore, this line of
inquiry almost always returns us to an uninterrogated heteronormative
frame of penetration and conduction. In this particular case, it is precisely
masculinity, the masculinity of the terrorist, that threatens to reproduce
itself.31
The Moro mothers in this film either die (Bae Farida) or essentially become
barren (the widowed Fatima whose son died at the beginning of the film),
therefore ending the line of transmission via the female Moro body.
Indeed, the films sublimation of the rape of women in wartime foregrounds
the reproduction of the Moro as such through the transmission of rebel/
terrorist identity from male to male, from father to son, as when Rashid
chooses to join his father and become a rebel. This representation of Moros
as self-reproducing terrorists further evinces the films alignment with a
Philippine nationalist framework that is normatively State-Christian in
ethos and that currently feeds the cultural climate produced by the global
war on terror.
Violence and the Management of Collective Trauma

Bagong buwan is also in some ways a filmic response to the periodic acts of
large-scale violence in Christian-populated sites in Mindanao bearing the
hallmarks of terrorist attacks (such as bombings of buses) that are usually
attributed to the Muslim extremist group Abu Sayyaf. In the film, a street
bombing is perpetrated instead by Musa and Rashid, who are members of
the MILF rebel forces. These types of attacks receive major press coverage,
and as Charles Frake notes, the fact that the Abu Sayyaf is based primarily
in a small region of the Philippines (Basilan Island and surrounding islands
to the southwest of Mindanao) has not . . . prevented the press from blaming them for attacks all across the breadth of Mindanao, as far as the city of
Davao in the southeast end of the island. The Philippine military has linked
them to a worldwide Muslim terrorist network.32

Nubla Managing the Moro Problem

409

The widespread dissemination of accounts of Muslim terrorism in the

Philippines through the press has certainly added to the sense of public
trauma regarding the Moro Problem. Yet in the film itself, some of the
most traumatizing violence is perpetrated by mysterious vigilantes, such as
in the early scene when Ahmad and Fatimas son, Ibrahim, dies from a stray
bullet. The all-out war waged by President Estrada caused the emergence
of anti-Muslim vigilante groups in Mindanao. Estradas stance fueled antiMuslim sentiments in Mindanao not seen even during the height of the Moro
secessionist war in the 70s, with some of the vigilante groups demanding a
Muslim-free Mindanao.33 In the film, however, there is a lack of certainty
about who is responsible for the raid in this scene. One review article on the
film misleadingly suggests that the war in Mindanao is not really a battle
between Christians and Muslims . . . [because] the film tells us that many
have been killed by internal strife among Muslims.34 In fact, it is unclear
in the film whether the bandits who kill Ibrahim are Muslim or Christian.
This uncertainty has two purposes: on the one hand, it shows that innocent
civilians such as women and children are often tragically caught in crossfire,
but on the other, it diffuses the reasons for conflict to random acts of violence,
and this diffusion makes violence the ultimate villain.
In her examination of 1990s Philippine true story films or film biographies (biopics) depicting womens issues, Bliss Cua Lim offers a valuable reading of the production of coherent narratives in the representation,
management, and ultimate containment of national collective trauma. Lim
argues that there is a particularly national need to create filmic representations of difficult historical events, to narrativize in a coherent way the
trauma of historical violence in order to work through it. Films such as the
biopics portraying the victimization of women, she maintains, can be read
as social responses to lived violence. In the face of events so inordinate as to
exceed understanding, the filmic recounting of historical violence constitutes
a prevalent means of responding to and experiencing traumatic occurrences
in the public sphere.35 Moreover, the violence endured by the individual,
once it has been made public [as through filmic representation], becomes
a collective social experience.36 Lim links this collective social experience
specifically to the nation, drawing on Kai Eriksons notion of collective
trauma, denoting

positions 19:2 Fall 2011

410

a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality.
The collective trauma works its way slowly and even insidiously into the
awareness of those who suffer from it, so it does not have the quality of
suddenness normally associated with trauma. But it is a form of shock
all the same, a gradual realization that the community no longer exists . . .
and that an important part of self has disappeared.37
The collective trauma of the Philippine nation in Bagong buwan is the
collective trauma of civil war, the national trauma of prospective secession and a divided country that stems from the four-hundred-year history
of Moro insurgency in the South against all colonizersSpanish, U.S., and
now Philippine. The opening intertitles even indicate this series, adding
the Japanese occupation of the Philippines during World War II. The film
seems to say that the real tragedy is that the Moro people are now ranged
against their own nation, the Philippines. This rhetorical move by the filmmakers is an act of appropriation of the Moros long history of anticolonial
resistance for (Christian-normative) Philippine nationalist purposes. Indeed,
despite their continual territorial, social, and economic marginalization,
the Moro peoples historic anticolonial resistance has been mythologized in
the foundation story of the Philippine nation. Such appropriation is not a
new phenomenon. Barbara Gaerlan, in her study of representations of the
Muslim Philippines through dance in Filipino American cultural shows
on U.S. college campuses, notes that these dances were created and staged
by a Christian Filipino for international consumption at the request of the
Philippine government under President Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s,
during the exact same period that Marcos was fighting a vicious civil war
against Moro separatists. Gaerlan argues that the creation of the Muslim
dances for Marcos entailed Orientalist stereotypes that diminished Muslims
while appropriating their history of anticolonial resistance to the Spanish for
(Christian) Philippine nationalist purposes.38
The voice-over reading the films intertitles starts to sob a little when
describing the civilians caught in the crossfire of the 2000 Estrada war:
Countless civiliansChristians, Muslims, and tribal peoplewere caught
in the crossfire between soldiers and rebels. Their story is an unending cycle

Nubla Managing the Moro Problem

411

of suffering, faith, hope, and redemption. With the invocation of Christians

suffering as much as Muslims, however, as well as the focus on civilians, a
nationalist framework edges out the discourse of Muslim separatism.
The irony, of course, is that this notion of collective trauma sounds just
as appropriate to Moros as it does to the Christian Filipino director and
producers whose film is an attempt to deal with the collective trauma of the
Philippine nation. Accounts of the situation of Moros in the Philippines in
the last thirty to forty yearsif not the last centurymore than suggest
that the basic tissues of [Muslim] social life and their sense of communality have been damaged by their gradual displacement from their territories
and that they have opted to unify over this collective trauma through a separatist nationalism based on their shared indigeneity and religion as well as
their collective oppression by Spain, the United States, and the Philippine
government.39 In other words, Moro nationalism is a way to deal with this
collective trauma, in the same way that Philippine nationalism is implicitly
promoted by Bagong buwan to deal with the collective trauma of civil war.
The multiple forms of Muslim violence represented in the film signify the
Christian Filipino publics desire to experience and make coherent the kinds
of publicized violence that Muslims represent for them, particularly the first
three types outlined aboveinternal strife, terrorism, and guerrilla war.
The fourth and fifth types operate on different, more widely accepted registers of violence and are more easily recognizable within the generic conventions of Philippine cinematic melodrama, that is, the anticolonial/nationalist
and the privatized forms of violence. The filtering of the first three types
of unruly, terrorizing violence through the melodramatic mode of the film
makes them seem futile and unnecessarily destructive. For instance, because
of his good looks and kindness to Muslims as well as the fact that he is one
of the few Christian Filipino characters in the story, the audience identifies
with the character of Lieutenant Ricarte, the young, inexperienced, and still
optimistic leader of the government forces deployed in this area of Mindanao. When he is shot in the leg during the major guerrilla battle in the
forest (in which Ahmad also dies) and realizes that he will lose his leg and
never be able to fulfill his childhood dream of being a life-long soldier, it is a
poignant moment in the melodramatic logic of the film and allows the film
to unrealistically argue for peace in Mindanao; in other words, if there were

positions 19:2 Fall 2011

412

no fighting, Ricarte would not have lost his leg and he would have been able
to remain a soldier (but if there were no fighting at all, he would perhaps
not have a job). In this scene, while Ahmad, despite having become a rebel,
takes care of Ricartes leg, the two men talk about the implications of the
loss of the leg, with Ricarte trying to keep his good humor after the shock
of his figurative castration:
ricarte: Cant you save my leg?
[Ahmad looks away]
ricarte: [smiling tremblingly] It doesnt matter. Maybe this is for the
best. . . . If my leg gets amputated, I will be disqualified from going to
war.
ahmad: Lieutenant, if only all men had one leg, then everyone would be
disqualified from going to war. There would be no war.
ricarte: What do you say . . . we suggest that to the Peace Panel?
[Ahmad gives him a direct, sympathetic look]
[lamenting music starts; scene cuts to head shot of Musa, who turns away
as if mourning]
Despite the feminist critique of war in their conversation, the melodrama of
the scene (the lamenting music and the mourning over the leg) represents
this critique as a nonviable option, thus further drawing the audience to
sympathize with the beautiful but now castrated Christian lieutenant and
casting the fighting between government soldiers and Moros as unnecessarily destructive.
However, the character of Ricarte, who represents the Philippine government, contrasts markedly with President Estradas personal and behavior
during the conflict in 2000. Many were critical of his unilateral approach to
the conflict, which included an ultimatum to the MILF just a week before
a negotiation/peace talk meeting that did more than raise hackles; Estrada
declared in January that, if the peace talks were not concluded by the following June, he would wage an all-out war against the MILF (and by
extension all other Moro separatists like the Abu Sayyaf): I am giving
them until June this year to make them realise that there is only one government and one armed forces in the Philippines, Estrada told a forum of
the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines.40 His conduct

Nubla Managing the Moro Problem

413

was seen as a show of machismo41 and callously indifferent to the long and
difficult history of conflict that fuels current Moro secessionisma problem with historical roots, said one MILF peace negotiator who asked the
president for more understanding of the situation.42 Instead, while calling
for an end to the hostilities in May of that year, Estrada contradicted overwhelmingly the call with words and acts that clearly showed he was determined to press ahead with the all-out war on the Moro Islamic Liberation
Front by appearing in combat fatigue uniform during a visit to Philippine
troops in central Mindanao, whereas he did not wear such a uniform during visits to other parts of the country.43 The contradictory image of the
president dressed for battle and yet calling for peace is strikingly similar
to a scene in Bagong buwan in which Ricarte pleads with the Muslims in
Datu Alis camp to convince the MILF-affiliated members of their families
to surrender their arms and return to a peaceful life. Peace, he says, cannot be achieved with MILF rebels who violently oppose our government,
demanding autonomy. Is this what we want to happen? For the Philippines
to be divided? I hope not. We are all Filipinos. We have one flag. We have
one future. So lets help each other. Let us be united in our goal. For peace,
for our countrys future! This scene, however, is evacuated of any hint of
doublespeak. The film, through its sympathetic depiction of government
soldiers through Ricartes character, does not interrogate the governments
decision to wage an all-out war against the Muslims; in fact, the government, represented by Ricarte, is literally hobbled here.
The film instead places the decision to put down arms solely in the Muslims hands, thereby aligning itself with Estradas pronouncement that there
is only one government and one armed forces in the Philippines and that
MILF rebels are ultimately the transgressors. Ricartes words in this scene, I
would argue, stand in for the filmmakers pro-peace discourse. Here, Ricarte
raises the specter of a divided Philippines that assumes a whole, undivided
Philippines in which Muslims figure prominently. Yet it is the very history
of their marginalization, displacement, and oppression that has led groups
like the MILF to demand an independent state in their ancestral lands and
that belies this imagined unified Philippine nation.

positions 19:2 Fall 2011

414

Conclusion: The Moro Problem Gone Global

Scholars generally agree that [Christian] Filipinos are aware . . . that their
historic relations with the Moros have been overwhelmingly unfriendly
and that the widespread armed rebellion in Mindanao and Sulu during
the last several decades of the twentieth century is an unmistakable indication of Muslim objections to their inclusion in the state.44 I would suggest that the irreconcilable fragmentation of the narrative in Bagong buwan
stems in large part from the fact that the film is struggling to fit the Muslim
story inside the national narrative where it historically has never beenand
even less so today, when the current U.S.-led war on terror is (re)criminalizing Muslims, wholesale, as terrorists all over the world. According to
Soliman M. Santos Jr., at least one result of the war on terror in the Philippines has been the terrorist profiling of Muslims in general and Moros
in particular: The negative impact on the Mindanao peace process is . . .
not only on the vertical peace negotiations at the top but also on the horizontal Christian-Muslim relations at the community level. There has been
a discernable increase in discrimination against Muslims in Mindanao and
in other parts of the Philippines.45 Indeed, President Arroyos quickness to
jump onto the bandwagon of U.S. President George W. Bushs global war
on terror has led to further persecution and displacement of Muslims in the
Philippines.46 Since early 2002, there has been an increase in the number of
Muslims arrested without warrants, detained incommunicado for indefinite
periods of time, and allegedly tortured by the Philippine National Police
and Philippine soldiers.47 With Arroyos cooperation but in violation of the
existing Visiting Forces Agreement, in January 2002 the largest deployment of U.S. military forces engaged in actual combat since the Moros
fought the Americans from 19011913 began military operations in the
southern Philippines to train Philippine elite forces in counter-terrorism,
owing to a supposed link between Osama bin Ladens Al-Qaeda network
and the Abu Sayyaf.48 It is ironic, then, that the Philippine governments
aggression against Moro separatisman attempt to strengthen Philippine
nationalismnecessitates reforging the countrys neocolonial relationship
with the United States.
The Philippine governments approach to the Muslim South, however, is

Nubla Managing the Moro Problem

415

part of the countrys almost forty-year history of neoliberal development policies, during which the privatization of Philippine resources and trade liberalization that benefit foreign investors (particularly multinational corporations) led to the displacement of people from their lands and the destruction
of the local economy resulting in higher unemployment, increased poverty,
and peoples inadequate access to basic resources and services.49 Such a
volatile social situationwhich has, since the 1970s, given rise to underground liberation movements such as the National Democratic Front and
the New Peoples Army as well as Moro separatismhas been contained by
the militarization of the Philippines with the support of U.S. money, military training, and military bases. The Philippines current role in the war
on terror as training ground for Iraq and Afghanistan is part of this history
of U.S.-backed militarization of the country. Indeed, the war on terror is
now the new justification for the extrajudicial executions and kidnappings
of leftist leaders and laborers as well as Muslims in the Philippines.
Praised as an eye-opening film, Bagong buwan has had the salutary
effect of publicizing, and perhaps humanizing,50 the conflicts in the
southern Philippines through its relatively large national and international
circulation, thanks mostly to the mainstream Philippine institutions that
backed the people who wrote, directed, starred, produced, and distributed
the film. At the same time, however, its story line is not as bold as has been
touted in various film reviews. Starring Christian Filipinos in the primary
roles (probably in the hopes of drawing as many Christian Filipino filmgoers as possible) and promoting a doggedly optimistic pro-peace agenda, the
film ultimately envisions a sutured Philippine nation that must, perforce,
divert the audience from the painful reality of a long history of repression,
militarization, discriminatory government policies, and territorial displacement that have impelled the Moros to fight for secession. Using gendered
tropes of family and womens bodies to stand in for the nation, the film
attempts to interpellate Muslims back into the nation through its pro-peace
discourse. Yet despite the efforts to include Muslims in the national narrative, the film ultimately does not disrupt the shift in government rhetoric
that has branded Moros, previously perceived as insurgents,51 as terrorists
in their own land even as President Arroyo allowed the United States to

positions 19:2 Fall 2011

416

deploy military forces to use Mindanao (and its Muslim people) as a training
ground for war in the Middle East.
The film does present different perspectives on the issue of the conflicts
in Mindanao, and it even mentions the term self-determinationwhich
is inextricably linked to the discourse of Moro separatismin the opening
intertitles. But the concept is never brought up again in the film except as
voiced by the angry teenage boy Rashid, who himself eventually becomes
conflicted about his role as a rebel. Aside from the Ismael familys flight
from refuge to refuge, the film is dominated by images of injured children
whom Ahmad and his nurse-wife Fatima try to heal, by the sounds of crying women and children making a counterpoint to gunfire in the night, and
by stories from displaced Moro refugees who do not specify which group
has persecuted themvigilantes, government soldiers, or even the MILF.
The end result is that violence itself becomes the dehistoricized villain, and
the audience forgets that the insurgents are fighting for something very
specific.
In the end, despite its purported desire to empower Moros and humanize
them by making them seem just like other Filipinos, the film reinscribes a
State-Christian normativity on which the normalcy of Philippine citizenship is based. Most early reviewers of the film believed that Bagong buwan
presents a strong case for understanding Muslim Filipinos and viewing
them as normal people.52 But we must ask how this national normalcy is
defined, who defines it, what is both excluded and forcibly included in the
notion, and when. Bagong buwans attempt to ideologically suture Moros
into the Philippine nation has now become harmful, given the separatist
strategy laid out by groups like the MILF. To a certain extent, we can characterize the filmmakers effort to dismantle the stereotypes and prejudices
against Moros in the Philippines that sustain Muslim difference as too
little, and too late. The current rise in worldwide liberation movements
based on Muslim identity and shared oppression, highlighted by the Israeli
governments missile attacks on Palestinians in Gaza in late 2008, makes this
attempt even more obsolete.

Nubla Managing the Moro Problem

417

Notes

I would like to thank Chris Berry, Roland Tolentino, Jih-Fei Cheng, Mary Talusan Lacanlale, JoAnna Poblete-Cross, and Fritzie De Mata for generously commenting on earlier
versions of this article.
1. Alex. Y. Vergara, FAMAS Honors Filmfest Loser Bagong Buwan, Philippine Daily
Inquirer, April 15, 2002.
2. Eye-Opener, Philippine Daily Inquirer, January 15, 2002.
3. Regarding the term Moro, the Spanish colonizers called the Muslims Moros (from the
word Moor) as a derogatory term, but in the 1970s, Muslims in the Philippines reclaimed the
term in an act of self-naming, as a political designation of nationality rather than religion.
When the terms Moro and Moros appear, I use them in the latter respect to indicate a politicized view. See Charles O. Frake, Displays of Violence and the Proliferation of Contested
Identities among Philippine Muslims, American Anthropologist 100 (1998): 43, 47.
4. Gutierrez Mangansakan II, Reimagining Moroland: A Tale of Accidental Filmmaking,
Criticine, April 25, 2006, www.criticine.com/feature_article.php?id=29.
5. Mike Rapatan, Caught in the Crossfire of Its Own Rhetoric, Philippine Daily Inquirer,
January 8, 2002. See also Noel Vera, Weekender: Two Films, BusinessWorld, December
28, 2001, 31.
6. Cesar A. Majul, The Contemporary Muslim Movement in the Philippines (Berkeley, CA:
Mizan Press, 1985), 32.
7. Reynaldo C. Ileto, Philippine Wars and the Politics of Memory, positions: east asia cultures
critique 13 (2005): 233.
8. Patricio N. Abinales, Making Mindanao: Cotabato and Davao in the Formation of the Philippine Nation-State (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000), 17, 65.
9. Majul, Contemporary Muslim Movement, 32.
10. Abinales, Making Mindanao, 2.
11. Who Are the Abu Sayyaf? BBC News, December 30, 2000, www.news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/
asia-pacific/719623.stm. Moreover, the Abu Sayyaf, according to Charles Frake, is a notorious identity label throughout the Philippines that refers to an extremist splinter group
from the MILF that is militantly Islamicist [whose] leadership comes from neither the
Western-educated elite nor the traditional local elites. Its heavy recruitment from the displaced, unaffiliated youth of refugee communities, as well as it geographical base in traditional outlaw areas of Basilan and neighboring islands, frees it to some extent from the
stigma of a dominating ethnic identification [unlike the older groups MILF and MNLF].
See Frake, Displays of Violence, 41, 47, 48.
12. Armand Nocum, GMA Stops Military Operations vs MILF, Philippine Daily Inquirer,
February 21, 2001. President Arroyo, however, switched back to all-out war again in
20022003; see Soliman M. Santos Jr., Evolution of the Armed Conflict on the Moro

positions 19:2 Fall 2011

418

Front (background paper submitted to the Human Development Network Foundation,

Inc., for the Philippine Human Development Report 2005), www.hdn.org.ph/wp-content/
uploads/2005_PHDR/2005%20Evolution_Moro_Conflict.pdf (accessed March 17, 2011).
13. Eye-Opener, 8. See also Armand Nocum, Bagong Buwan Gets Bishops Nod, Philippine Daily Inquirer, December 29, 2001.
14. Margie Moran-Floirendo, Journey to Peace Began on Grandmas Lap, Philippine Daily
Inquirer, January 13, 2002.
15. I would suggest that this gradual displacement is more insidious because it is easier to naturalize than violent displacement from war. The film focuses solely on this latter, more
explicitly violent kind of displacement while glossing over the first.
16. They are (1) MILF rebels who have just come from ambushing government soldiers yet
inexplicably go after Muslim civilians as well, (2) the remaining government soldiers who
feel that Datu Ali has betrayed them, or (3) vigilantes who seem to be on no ones side.
17. Abinales, Making Mindanao, 45.
18. Marilou Diaz-Abaya, Dreaming of a Zone of Peace, Philippine Daily Inquirer, January 2,
2002.
19. Kim Scipes, Global Economic Crisis, Neoliberal Solutions, and the Philippines, Monthly
Review 51 (1999), www.monthlyreview.org/1299scip.htm.
20. Eye-Opener, 8.
21. See Diaz-Abaya, Dreaming, 21; and Masaki Kuwabara, WorldNow: Filipino Film
Director Examines Mindanao Strife, Japan Economic Newswire, June 7, 2002.
22. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983), 31, italics in original.
23. On the metaphorical connection between untouched land (Nature) and womens bodies, both ready for the taking and plundering, see Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land:
Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1975).
24. Aileen Toohey, Badjao: Cinematic Representations of Difference in the Philippines, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 36 (2005): 287.
25. Ibid., 297.
26. Ibid., 287.
27. Ibid., 297.
28. Moran-Floirendo, Journey to Peace, 1.
29. Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, Introduction, in Woman-Nation-State, ed. YuvalDavis and Anthias (New York: Saint Martins Press, 1989), 7.
30. Rapatan, Caught in the Crossfire, 16.
31. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2007), 98.
32. Frake, Displays of Violence, 48.

Nubla Managing the Moro Problem

419

33. Anti-Muslim Passions Give Rise to Vigilantes, Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 12, 2000.
34. Nestor U. Torre, Fukuokas Film Festival Highlights Bagong Buwan, Philippine Daily
Inquirer, October 12, 2002.
35. Bliss Cua Lim, True Fictions, Womens Narratives, and Historical Traumas, in Geopolitics of the Visible: Essays on Philippine Film Cultures, ed. Rolando B. Tolentino (Quezon City:
Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000), 148.
36. Ibid., 151.
37. Erikson quoted in Lim, True Fictions, 15152; italics and ellipses in Lims text.
38. Barbara Gaerlan, In the Court of the Sultan: Orientalism, Nationalism, and Modernity
in Philippine and Filipino American Dance, Journal of Asian American Studies 2 (1999):
26872.
39. See Majul, Contemporary Muslim Movement; Ileto, Philippine Wars; and Jacqueline
Siapno, Gender Relations and Islamic Resurgence in Mindanao, Southern Philippines, in
Muslim Womens Choices: Religious Belief and Social Reality, ed. Camillia Fawzi El-Solh and
Judy Mabro (Providence, RI: Berg, 1994), 184201.
40. Philippine President Sets Deadline for Talks with Moslem Rebels, Deutsche Presse-Agentur,
January 13, 2000.
41. Narzalina Z. Lim, To Take a Stand: The Women of Mindanao Speak Out, BusinessWorld, April 18, 2000, 4.
42. Anti-Muslim Passions.
43. Amando Doronila, Conflicting Signals, Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 10, 2000.
44. Gaerlan, In the Court of the Sultan, 269.
45. Santos, Evolution of the Armed Conflict, 20.
46. On persecution, see Jonathan Miller and Rob Lemkin, Innocent Muslims Killed as Bush
Allies Crusade, Observer, February 3, 2002, www.observer.guardian.co.uk/international/
story/0,6903,644045,00.html; Nymia Pimentel Simbulan, The Philippine Human Rights
Situation: Threats and Challenges, July 20, 2005, Philippine Human Rights Information
Center (PHILRIGHTS), www.asienhaus.de/public/archiv/simbulan-hrsituation-complete
.pdf; and Ethan Vesely-Flad, Do We Look Like TERRORISTS? Fellowship 71 (2005):
21. On displacement due to militarization, see Madge Kho, US Advisors in the PhilippinesWar Games or Precursors to the Real Thing? Peacework 29 (2002): 10; and Jeanette Heinrichs, GABRIELA in the Philippines: Let Our Voices Be Heard, Against the
Current 17 (2003): 24.
47. See Miller and Lemkin, Innocent Muslims Killed; Simbulan, Philippine Human Rights;
and Philippines, Amnesty International Report 2004, Amnesty International, www.web
.amnesty.org/report2004/phl-summary-eng (accessed July 12, 2006).
48. Moreover, since September 11, 2001, the case of the Abu Sayyaf has been blown out of proportion for several reasons. For the Philippine government, it provides an excuse to secure
more money from the U.S., which has promised to aid allies in its war against terrorism. . . .

positions 19:2 Fall 2011

420

For the U.S., this is a pretext for unfolding new operations against Muslim insurgencies in
Southeast Asia, Al Qaeda-linked or not. See Kho, US Advisors in the Philippines, 10.
Later that year, the MILF was linked to the Indonesian organization Jemaah Islamiyah suspected of the October 2002 Bali bombings; see Philippine Military Links Bali Blast Suspect
with Moro Islamist Militants, Philippine Star, November 13, 2002. However, others have
accused both the Arroyo and the previous Estrada administrations of using the military to
bomb certain areas and blame it on Moro insurgents in order to distract from critical failures of the government in domestic issues or from corruption allegations; see James Petras
and Robin Eastman-Abaya, Philippines: The Killing Fields of Asia, CounterPunch, March
17, 2006, www.counterpunch.org/petras03172006.html; and Anthony Spaeth, Deadly Politics, TIME Asia, January 15, 2001, www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/2001/0115/manila.
bombs.html.
49. Ligaya Lindio-McGovern, Neo-liberal Globalization in the Philippines: Its Impact on Filipino Women, Journal of Developing Societies 23 (2007): 30.
50. Johanna Son, Film Humanizes Conflict in the Muslim South, Asia Times, January 17,
2002, www.atimes.com/se-asia/DA17Ae02.html.
51. See Aziz Choudry, William Pomeroy, and See Seng Tan and Kumar Ramakrishna,
who mark the change from the perception of the Abu Sayyaf and MILF as insurgents
to terrorists when President Macapagal-Arroyo yoked Bushs rhetoric to the Philippine
governments stance on these Muslim groups. Tan and Ramakrishna specifically express
skepticism that the Philippines is facing a problem of terrorism as opposed to insurgency.
Choudry, Crackdown [Post-9 /11 Chill], New Internationalist 376 (2005): 1617; Pomeroy,
War on Terrorism Spreads to Philippines, Peoples Weekly World, March 9, 2002, 15; Tan
and Ramakrishna, Interstate and Intrastate Dynamics in Southeast Asias War on Terror,
SAIS Review 24 (2004): 91105.
52. Eye-Opener, 8.