I Love Pinoys

PIKIT - Nine-year-old Rakma Kasanuba sings lullabies to her baby sister here as the infant tries to sleep in a makeshift hammock under a guava tree as mortars explode without end in the distance.

Her three other younger sisters sit on the muddy ground guarding their meagre belongings while military attack helicopters thunder overhead searching for Muslim separatist rebels 400 metres (440 yards) away in a forested area.

At her tender age, Rakma is a veteran of evacuation camps as the Philippine government struggles to crush an insurgency that has claimed more than 120,000 lives in the past three decades.

“I don’t know why I am here,” she told AFP. “My family was told by the military to leave because they said Moros (Muslims) were advancing.”

“We left at dawn, but my father had to stay behind to protect our house,” Rakma said. “My mother took us here, but she is away to look for food and relatives who were also told to evacuate.”

Rakma and her sisters are among 6,000 people forced to flee their homes in Tacepan, a mixed Christian-Muslim farming hamlet that is one of 22 villages being illegally occupied by a renegade group from the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

MILF had won a deal with the government giving them control over so-called ancestral lands in the country’s south, but the Supreme Court last week delayed the pact following protests from fearful Christian towns in Mindanao island.

The deal would have paved the way for a final political settlement with the 120,000-strong MILF and allowed them to put down their arms. But the court order dashed that prospect, and with it, hopes for a lasting peace in the mineral-rich south.

Since the fighting began over the weekend, some 130,000 people have been displaced in North Cotabato, where troops and MILF fighters are locked in fierce combat that officials are desperately trying to contain.

In Tacepan, families are tightly packed in small classrooms in a school, with no bedding.

Latrines are overflowing, while goats, cows and other farm animals taken by the refugees crowd the school lawn in a feeding frenzy on what little grass is left.

Though soldiers have been sent to protect them, they are not safe from indiscriminate mortar fire from the enemy side.

Social welfare officer Imelda Balios said urgent appeals for supplies have been sent to the government in order to avert a bigger humanitarian crisis.

“Their lives are already at a standstill. Classes have been suspended, livelihoods abandoned and their lives in danger,” Balios said.

“This is the first time in years we’ve had a big evacuation, you can see that even the farm animals have been evacuated and we don’t know where to put them.”

Balios had to seek cover in an abandoned building with dozens of refugees after they were caught in the crossfire.

“The bullets were landing near where we were hiding. It’s frightening and sooner or later the bullets will hit those trying to escape.”

Rakma’s family has not known peace for years, and many of their relatives and friends have either left the area or have been killed in crossfire.

The small rice field her father ploughs is an area where mortars would occasionally fall. The girl said her family may again be forced to live a nomadic existence until relative peace returns.

For many others like Rakma, the fighting has once more suspended their daily lives.

Fields are now empty as families flee along the highway in caravans using water buffaloes to carry their belongings — from empty jerrycans used in the fields for water to palm fronds used for roofing.

“I don’t know when my mother will return. But maybe we’re safe here, since there are a lot of soldiers,” she said, while trying to calm down her sisters as she waited for noodles to boil in a hole in the ground.