Hadji Yusop Amella flashed a toothless smile as he showed off several bunches of freshly harvested bananas from his farm in a remote village in the southern Philippines.
“We harvest twice a month and we sell them to a company that supplies to exporters,” he said proudly as he presided over a meeting of a farming cooperative in Manili village in North Cotabato province’s Carmen town, 930km south of Manila.
Like 61-year-old Amella, most members of the cooperative are former fighters of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), a Muslim rebel group that signed a peace agreement with the Philippine government in September 1996.
They set up the cooperative in 1999 with the assistance of the US Agency for International Development under its Growth for Equity in Mindanao program, which provided seedlings, farm implements and training to get them started.
Members of the cooperative now plant bananas, coconut, corn, rubber, sugarcane and mango on about 200 hectares of farmland. They are planning to build a warehouse where they could store their harvests for better marketing.
While their income is sometimes not enough for their families’ needs, Amella said he and the other former rebels in the cooperative do not regret giving up their firearms in exchange for the livelihood assistance.
“We’ve already experienced the result of war,” he said. “We’ve lost many family members to the war. There are really no winners in a war, we’re all losers. Development is better.”
Amella said that because of the income he earned from farming, he was able to send four of his six children to college. Two of them have already graduated and are now teaching at a university in nearby Kabacan town.
“It is our hope that in the future our farms will be more prosperous,” he said.
The father of six turned pensive as he recalled how he joined the MNLF after June 1971, when a group of armed men attacked Manili and killed 72 men, women and children inside a mosque.
“The gunmen called the people into the mosque allegedly for a peace conference,” he said. “But they threw grenades at the people, then gunned down and stabbed those who were not killed in the explosion. All those killed were my relatives.”
Amella said the massacre convinced him to be active in the MNLF after authorities failed to go after the perpetrators, who were suspected to be members of a Christian militia group that the military used to fight Muslim rebels.
Manili Village Captain Ting Nagli, a former MNLF fighter himself, was a survivor of the massacre.
“I was only five years old then,” he said. “I still remember everything. The gunmen told everyone to start praying, then the grenades exploded. They shot and stabbed people, even children. I saw my mother and father killed.”
Nagli, who is Amella’s nephew, said Manili has come a long way since the 1971 massacre and has now become a productive village of more than 2,000 people.
“The people here don’t want war, they want a livelihood,” Amella’s nephew said.
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