Stop Mission Schools for Tribals in South Palawan!

Friends of Peoples Close to Nature, 14 June 1999

Will Christian arrogancy and aggression never end? Why to evict tribal peoles from their forest homelands and force them into mission schools?

Life in the forest was perfectly adapted to the natural environment over thousands of generations, and this harmony between man and nature is now being destroyed for progress and development. But progress and development for what?

Tribal people, once culturally uprooted by civilization, become the underdogs within the civilized society after a short while. This is the result of a UN recent study.

The Palawan Tropical Forestry Protection Programme (PTFPP) together with Seventh Day Adventists (SDA) recently inaugurated the Iskulan et Kamantian, a school built for the Palawan tribal community who lived in the upland forests of the Brooke4s Point Valley near Mount Mantalingahan.

The costly Palawan Tropical Forestry Protection Programme (PTFPP) is initiated, financed and widely run by EU Europeans seeking for control over the Palawan forest land, which is worth still Billions of US Dollars. Instead of protection PTFPP has got a vital role in the destruction of the forests, e.g. by their extended roar constructions.

SDA is notorious for conditioning of evicted tribal forest peoles, e.g. pygmees in Africa.

The school was built through the help of the Community Environment Natural Resources Office (CENRO) in Brooke4s point who donated salvaged timber for the construction while PTFPP provided the construction materials.

It started in 1993, when the US governmental development agency USAID donated some four Million US$ to get the Palawan tribal people around Mount Mantalingahan out of the forest and educated to serve the money society.

Then in 1993 SDA missionaries established a Learning Center in Kamantian village, propagating the impression that the upland tribal forest dwellers had no knowledge and need to be taught. Students came, of course, from the upland forests, which had been degraded under the same development syndrom as PTFPP, USAID and SDA show. These student have been promised a bright future after school. A deceptive hope for most of them, a wedge driven into the tribal community.

Subito, one of the first graduates of the Learning Center, related how his aquired math skill comes handy whenever he sells his handicraft and the one from his non-educated tribal fellows in the town market. With the modest profit he will now buy, what he formerly never needed.

The people in Kamantian village also learned to record the significant events in their community such as birthdays which enabled them to aquire birth certificates and other so-called legal documents, which they also formerly never needed and which brings them under strict control by outsiders.

Meanwhile, CO-Director Ricky Sandalo of PTFPP said that they will also work for the construction of water systems, toilet facilities, nursery and health station in the village. All these former unnecessary equipping will give PTFPP and other officials a solid background to force the remaining forest dwellers down to village life, in order to get complete control over the financially extremely attractive timber in the rainforest.

The missionaries are now aiming for the establishment of a multi-grade elemantary education under the Department of Education and Science (DECS) wherein livelihood skills could be enhaced for the Palawan tribal people, whos livelihood had been destroyed by the same power that want to give them livelihood skills now, under their strict control. Predominant aim of the US-American SDA missionaries is: control. Their media are schools and churches.

The inauguration was attended by Brooke4s Point Vice Mayor Ariston Arzaga, Crisauro Baltazar of PCSDS, Barangay Samariniana, Barangay Captain Leo Alsaga, PTFPP Co-Directors Ricky Sandalo and Graham Bell, other PTFPP personnel and the oldest living tribal leader in the village Panglima Taktarik, now totally deprived of power and certainly without any information given to him, that this inauguration sybolized a desaster for his peoples and a milestone in the ongoing ethnocide.

The Palawan NGOs Network (PNNI) and all the other christian and development-oriented so-called support organizations for tribal peoples on Palawan island remained remarkably quiet.