Mennonite Central Committee

Filipino IVEP participant advocates for peace for his home island

Press Release, May 2002
by Rachel Beth Miller

Patrick Neri has traveled half-way around the world to advocate for peace in Mindanao, the island in the Philippines where he was born. Now spending a year in the U.S. capital through Mennonite Central Committee's (MCC) International Volunteer Exchange Program, Neri is encouraging U.S. citizens and policy makers to take a close look at Mindanao's complex problems - and to look for solutions that don't involve military aid.

Raw sewage. Bad roads. More basketball courts than clinics. These were Neri's impressions the first time he travel from the northern Mindanao, where he was born, to the mostly Muslim south.

He got the story behind the basketball courts later, but the lack of infrastructure was clear. Residents in this region feel abandoned by the central government, says Neri. Their frustration compounds longstanding religious and political divides, he says, and has helped allow several Muslim dissident groups to flourish. (For more on U.S. military involvement in Mindanao and neighboring Basilan, see "Filipinos Uneasy Over Arrival of U.S. Troops.")

The son of Christian parents active in humanitarian and church planting efforts, Neri grew up in the relatively more prosperous, stable northern part of Mindanao. He first traveled to southern Mindanao with a group of church friends.

"Above anything else, people there [in the south] want development," Neri observed.

The kind of development they have in mind involves more than token assistance. The region's abundant basketball courts, Neri learned, were the result of a government project to install large slabs of concrete for residents to use both for recreation and to sun-dry rice and corn. In many places, however, people had no rice and corn fields.

This disconnection with the central government has deep roots. Most of the other islands that now make up the Philippines were conquered by Spain and the inhabitants converted to Catholicism in the 1500s, but Mindanao remained independent until around 1900. The Moro people, as the Spaniards called Mindanao's Muslim inhabitants, resent the Christian settlers who have moved to the island in recent decades.

Neri himself is a walking microcosm of Mindanao's people groups, with Moro, Filipino settler, Chinese, Spanish, Arab and American ancestry. While his family has a comfortable life, Neri believes he cannot turn his back to the suffering of others on the island.

Before coming to the United States, he worked with a community development group in Mindanao. He has been involved in advocacy on a number of Asia-related issues during his time in Washington, first with the Asia Pacific Center for Justice and Peace and now with the MCC U.S. Washington Office.

Neri usually gets blank looks when he mentions the name of his home island, but he doesn't fault Americans for their lack of knowledge. He says even many Filipinos in the northern, more Westernized islands of the country are unaware of what's happening in Mindanao.

"In the Philippines, if you're not in the middle of the conflict [between Muslim rebels and government forces], you're often apathetic," he says.

Drawing on what he has learned about advocacy during his IVEP experience, Neri hopes to press for change on a national level when he returns to the Philippines. He would like to encourage government officials to introduce a peace curriculum into Filipino schools and to create a Philippines Institute for Peace.