Bukidnon village chief makes good on threat to shut down lumad school

From InterAksyon (Oct 23): Bukidnon village chief makes good on threat to shut down lumad school



The Fr. Fausto Tentorio Memorial School in Sitio Dao, Barangay White Culaman, Kitaotao, Bukidnon.

Felipe Cabugnason, the barangay captain of White Culaman in Kitaotao town, Bukidnon made good on his threat to shut down a tribal school in the village, leading around a hundred residents who broke down the fence and ordered the staff and students to leave Friday morning.

A photograph posted on the Facebook page of the school shows Bgy Captain Cabugnason delivering a speech in apparently agreeable mood at the Moving-Up ceremony just this April.



Junance Magbanua, a member of the administrative staff of the Mindanao Interfaith Services Foundation Inc., belied the version of events earlier narrated by a man who answered the phone of Evelyn Cabangal, one of the teachers at the Fr. Fausto Tentorio Memorial School in Sitio Dao, claiming to be Juan Canotan, the father of a student.

Another photograph, below, shows Bagy Captain Cabugnason (second from left, in shade) taking part in the April 2015 Moving Up ceremony of the school.



InterAksyon.com managed to briefly interview Magbanua by phone as she, 15 students, three teachers and a child of one of the tutors fled Dao on a three-hour trek to Arakan, Cotabato to seek sanctuary in the parish church there.

She said they also took with them the livestock kept at the school.

Ironically, the attack on the school in White Culaman is taking place even as more than 700 lumad and human rights activists are making their way to Metro Manila on the third annual Manilakbayan ng Mindanao in a bid to get the national government to act on the atrocities that have driven thousands of indigenous people and settlers from their communities.

Magbanua said when they left Dao around 1 p.m., “the school was still standing but I’m afraid they will demolish or burn it down now that we have left.”

The school, set up and run by MISFI, is named after the Italian missionary who was murdered by militiamen in the Arkan parish compound in October 2011.

In happier times, just this last April, students perform at the school's Moving Up ceremony, below.



Magbanua, who said she had been sent to check on the school, which White Culaman barangay captain Felipe Cabugnason has been threatening to shut down for allegedly teaching support for communist rebels, recounted that she arrived around 10 a.m. just as the village chief and members of the council led villagers armed with crowbars and other tools were breaking down the fence.

Among them, she said, were men in the crowd who, although in civilian clothes, looked to be soldiers from their build and haircuts.

The Army has encamped in White Culaman after some 200 troops mounted an operation in the village, arresting 13 leaders of lumad organizations and charged them as communist rebels. However, a Bukidnon trial court threw out the charges and ordered them released last month.

It was during that operation, said villagers who later fled, that soldiers threatened to burn down the school.

Earlier this month, Cabugnason wrote MISFI ordering to shut the school down or he would lead villagers in demolishing it but he was thwarted when the Kitaotao local government and the Department of Education said he had no authority to do so.

Until Friday, that is.

Magbanua said after breaking down the school fence, Cabugnason and the other men ordered the teachers and students of the free boarding school for Grade 7 and 8 lumad students “to get out saying, ‘We don’t want you to be victims’.”

As the teachers and students emerged, “they confiscated their phones, taking out the sim and memory cards to prevent what they were doing from being documented.”

However, she said, there were those in the mob who took pictures and video with their own cell phones.

The man who called himself "Canotan" had earlier claimed that a standoff ensued after the fence was breached with Cabangal supposedly confronting the villagers. He claimed he was hiding in a school toilet to prevent the teacher’s phone from being seized.

He also claimed that there were no barangay officials or soldiers accompanying the mob.

This was the same account he gave to other journalists who called up Cabangal’s number, a check by InterAksyon.com showed.

InterAksyon.com tried ringing up Cabangal’s phone again to ask “Canotan” who he really was and why he lied but the number could no longer be reached.

The accusation against the Fr. Fausto Tentorio Memorial School and other tribal schools set up and run by MISFI and other nongovernmental organizations in lumad communities throughout Mindanao is one the military has openly made throughout the years.

The school in White Culaman used to have more than 60 students but this had dwindled to 42 last month because, Cabangal earlier said, some had dropped out because of the threats. Magbanua said some students also went home earlier in the week on hearing word of the impending attack.

Many of the schools have been repeatedly forced to suspend operations because of threats and the outright occupation of the learning centers by soldiers or military-backed militias.

The worst attack on a tribal school so far was the September 1 murder of Emerito Samarca, executive director of the award-winning Alternative Learning Center for Agricultural and Livelihood Development in Lianga, Surigao del Sur, by the Magahat militia who also executed on the same day Manobo leaders Dionel Campos and Datu Bello Sinzo in front of hundreds of tribesfolk, including children, triggering the mass evacuation of thousands of residents from five towns in the province.

Earlier, MISFI administrator Milagros Maglunsod-Tan said she was surprised by Cabugnason's hostility to the White Culaman school, recalling how the village chief actually supported the institution when it began operating last year.

In fact, Cabugnason was a guest at the school's moving up ceremony in April this year.

Arakan assistant parish priest, Fr. Peter Geremia, who, like the slain Tentorio, is a missionary of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions, and has himself been threatened several times by militias, told InterAksyon.com on Friday he was "very, very saddened" by the attack on the school.

Geremia called it an "insult" to the memory of Tentorio, "who was the first to serve the lumad of White Culaman" and "all the people from different countries who have been helping" the indigenous people of Mindanao.

Geremia said he was awaiting the arrival of the teachers and students from the school, and would house them at the parish's Tribal Filipino Center.

This is where more than 150 White Culaman residents were also housed after they fled their community following the earlier arrest of their leaders by the military.

They have since moved to Davao City to join hundreds of other Manobo refugees at the Haran Mission House of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines.

The missionary lamented what he called the "breakdown" of civilian authority in Cabugnason's defiance of DepEd and the Kitaotao local government.

Like Maglunsod-Tan, Geremia said he was surprised at the village chief's hostility towards the school, recalling how he was once "very, very grateful when the school was inaugurated."

Geremia urged officials of Bukidnon and Kitaotao to assert their authority over Cabugnason.

http://www.interaksyon.com/article/119327/bukidnon-village-chief-makes-good-on-threat-to-shut-down-lumad-school