A Brainy Road Map to Mindanao Peace

Saturday, 21 November 2009 06:10

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THE Western Mindanao State University (WMSU) is leading the charge of a new initiative to involve all of Mindanao’s State universities to chart an academically-driven communal road map to achieve durable peace for our southern region. As a first step, all of the presidents of Mindanao’s SUC’s are being invited to attend a “peace summit” to be hosted by the Universiti Sains Malaysia and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in Penang, Malaysia in January, next year. The Malaysian university has established a reputation as an international center for peace studies, with a special focus on Mindanao.

According to WMSU President Dr. Grace Rebollos, Mindanao’s government institutions of higher learning have through all these 40 years of local internecine conflict failed thus far to articulate workable, effective solutions to the regime of war and structural violence afflicting Mindanaoans.   In contrast, she said, private schools like Mindanao’s Ateneos have been blazing trails in pushing the peace envelope, exemplified by the consortium taking the lead in the just concluded Konsult Mindanao project.

The forthcoming Penang conference, Dr. Rebollos hopes, will shatter this ivory tower inertia of Mindanao’s SUCs and so unleash their latent vigor and capacities to rally behind our society in the slippery pursuit of peace-making.

Today’s modern communal peace ideal has acquired a complexity far greater than man’s immemorial, checkered search for an utopian existence.   That very few nations today enjoy sustained social harmony, that adverse social, economic and environmental problems pose further threats and challenges to peace, stability and security, make the peace-making job especially and increasingly daunting.   Consequently, the achievement this aspiration will require no less than collective genius, but where else would society find such preternatural wisdom but in our universities, like WMSU?

We know that unpeace and conflict have many root causes, that Mindanao’s war is only one aspect of the structural violence and reasons that have held us back for many generations from achieving our full socio-economic potentials, and in fact devastated entire communities. Education, more than any other means, holds the best and greatest promise to overcome these conflict issues - of governmental corruption and mismanagement, poverty, environmental degradation, inter-ethnic misunderstanding and rivalries, gender disparity, public health miasma, and so forth.   It is a big task by any measure, but which with their mandate WMSU and other Mindanao SUCs can ignore only on peril of history’s harsh judgment. (WMSU Bulleting Editorial, October 2009 Issue)