MAKATI CITY (MindaNews / 10 December) — December 10 again.
International Human Rights Day.
And again, I find myself asking: Whose rights are we really remembering today?
While the world posts ready-made templates about “dignity” and “freedom,” my mind drifts, unexpectedly yet inevitably, to the southern tip of Palawan, to the Balabac Islands, to a people many of us only encounter in footnotes of textbooks: the Molbog.
More than a year ago, I first wrote about them in a post I titled “Molbog and BCOBAR” (July 20, 2024). The story already felt heavy then. Today, it feels unbearable.
The first time I learned the word “Molbog” was not from a news article, but in one of my classes.
It was 1990. I was a college student in Mindanao State University–Main Campus, Marawi City, taking up a general subject entitled “The History of the Muslims in the Philippines.” That was the first time I’d ever heard of the 13 Moro ethnolinguistic groups, and tucked among them, stated gently, as if just a whisper from the fringes: the Molbog of the Balabac Islands in what is poetically referred to as “the last frontier of the last frontier.”
Romantic labels, I’ve learned, often hide brutal truths.
It was more than a year ago, too, when a GMA Network documentary unexpectedly found me on YouTube, and not the other way around. That documentary showed armed men violently threatening Molbog families, ordering them to leave their 38-hectare home island. The armed men, according to on-site accounts, were allegedly linked to a giant corporation claiming corporate ownership of the land. That was the very video that compelled me to write “Molbog and BCOBAR.”
Corporate paper versus ancestral flesh.
What struck me instantly were not only the trembling voices in the interviews but also the names:
Nasiron. Tarhata. Imam. Hatib. Isa. Talmala. Samina. Kamlong/Kamlon. Tarajalla. Jumdatol. Jayna.
Moro names. Familiar names. Names that echo across our mosques, our genealogies, our du‘ā’.
Then the camera panned to the grave markers, wooden markers shaped like swords, quietly declaring what documents now contest: “Our dead are buried here.”
This is not just a land dispute. This is the ancient story of distant power versus rooted people retold again, and again, and again.
Then just yesterday, December 9, as reported by 104.7 XFM Palawan Radio, cases were formally filed against the indigenous residents, including minors, on the ground of ownership. The news surfaced in my Facebook feed only this afternoon. One detail pierced through all the legal jargon: a woman reportedly turned unconscious upon learning that even her late PWD child was among those sued!
Let that sink in.
Children being sued for standing on the soil their ancestors walked before corporations learned how to spell “title.”
Even the dead are not spared.
And as if court cases were not enough, reports also speak of harassment and pressure: sweet offers to sell the land on one hand, and fear on the other. A familiar colonial choreography, only now dressed in corporate suits.
Thus, I ask, quietly but insistently:
Where are we in all of this?
We have a Muslim senator, many congressmen, the NCMF, the Bangsamoro Human Rights Commission (BHRC), the Office for Other Bangsamoro Communities (OOBC), and, not to mention our brilliant lawyers, human rights defenders, civil society warriors, and most importantly, consumers who could boycott products and services that such corporations represent.
We have institutions. We have titles. We have positions.
But tonight, the Molbog still have guns pointed at their doorsteps and lawsuits laid at their feet, filed even against their children and their dead.
In the Qur’an, oppression is not a political issue; it is a theological crime. God says in a Sacred Narration (Ḥadīth Qudsī):
“O My servants, I have forbidden oppression for Myself, and I have forbidden it among you.” (Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, ḥadīth 2577)
While describing the ummah like a single body, the Prophet (ṣ) said, “When one part is in pain, the whole body responds with fever and sleeplessness.” (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, ḥadīth 6011; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, ḥadīth 2586)
If this is true, and it is, then the Molbog are not “Palawan’s problem.” They are our pain.
And a body that ignores its pain is already halfway to paralysis.
#JusticeForMolbog #StopLandGrabbing #ProtectIndigenousPeoples #HumanRightsDay #SaveBalabac #Bangsamoro #UmmahAsOneBody #AgainstOppression
[MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Mansoor L. Limba, PhD in International Relations and Shari‘ah Counselor-at-Law (SCL), is a publisher-writer, university professor, vlogger, chess trainer, and translator (from Persian into English and Filipino) with tens of written and translation works to his credit on such subjects as international politics, history, political philosophy, intra-faith and interfaith relations, cultural heritage, Islamic finance, jurisprudence (fiqh), theology (‘ilm al-kalam), Qur’anic sciences and exegesis (tafsir), hadith, ethics, and mysticism. He can be reached at mlimba@diplomats.com and www.youtube.com/@WayfaringWithMansoor, and his books can be purchased at www.elzistyle.com and www.amazon.com/author/mansoorlimba.]