A Filipino tribe fights to stay as a ‘Smart City’ rises on a former US base

The Philippine government is working toward a multibillion-dollar “smart city” that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. hopes will become a “magnet for investors” and a “mecca for tourists” two hours north of the capital, Manila, on the vast grounds of a former US military base.

The New Clark City, which is being built on the former Clark Air Base, is central to the government’s effort to attract foreign investment and ease congestion in Manila, where nearly 15 million people live.

To accompany the city’s development, the government has also laid out an ambitious slate of projects at a nearby airport complex — new train lines, expanded airport runways, and a $515m stadium that officials hope will be enticing enough to draw the global pop singer Taylor Swift.

The indigenous Aeta village of Sapang Kawayan is wedged between the proposed stadium’s site and the new city’s expanding new city. The developments spell disaster for the roughly 500 families who reside there in rattan and nipa grass homes.

“We were here before the Americans, even before the Spanish”, said Petronila Capiz, 60, the chieftain of the Aeta Hungey tribe in Sapang Kawayan. The land is still being taken from us, according to the statement.

According to historians, American colonisers, who seized the Philippines from Spain in 1898, seized the 32, 000-hectare (80, 000-acre) tract that became Clark Air Base in the 1920s, dispossing the Aetas, a semi-district with dark skinned people thought to be one of the archipelago’s earliest inhabitants.

Many were displaced, though some moved deeper into the jungle inside the base and were employed as labourers.

In 1991, roughly four decades after granting the country its independence, the US handed the base to the Philippine government. The complex has been managed by the Bases Conversion and Development Authority, or BCDA. Some 20, 000 Aetas are thought to remain in the Clark area today, spread across 32 villages.

However, the majority of their land claims are unrecognised.

Residents of Sapang Kawayan fear that their claims could be pushed out before the government’s boom in development results in their expulsion. The community – along with other Aeta villages in Clark – is working with researchers from the University of the Philippines to expedite a long-pending application for a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title, or CADT — the only legal mechanism that would allow them to assert rights to their territory and its resources.

Aetas young and old gathered in Sapang Kawayan in January, July, and September to assemble family trees and share photos and stories. In an effort to demonstrate that the community there predates colonial rule, volunteers documented every detail.

Their 17, 000-hectare claim overlaps with nearly all of the 9, 450 hectares designated for New Clark City, while 14 kilometres to the south is the airport complex where the new railway line, runway and stadium are slated to rise.

According to Capiz, the new city and airport complex “will eat up the fields where we farm, the rivers where we fish, and the mountains where we get our herbs” together.

‘ Taylor Swift-ready ‘

Under then-President Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippine government first made plans for New Clark City and promoted it as a solution to the crippling traffic in the city. The development is described as a “green, smart, and disaster-resilient metropolis,” according to the BCDA.

Construction began in 2018 with major roads and a sports complex that hosted the Southeast Asian Games in 2019.

The city’s completion, which is expected to take at least 30 years, is expected to take 1.2 million people.

The “Taylor Swift-ready” stadium is planned for New Clark City, but the BCDA is currently constructing three highways connecting the airport complex. Officials have hyped that the stadium, to be built by 2028, will lure Swift after she skipped the Philippines during the South Asian leg of her Eras tour last year.

According to Joshua Bingcang, president of the BCDA, “One of the main things that makes Clark so appealing to investors is its unmatched connectivity,” the airport, a nearby seaport, and significant expressways are just a few examples. However, we must increase our investment in infrastructure and expand this connectivity.

That expansion has come at a cost for Aeta communities.

According to Counter-Mapping PH, a research institute and campaigners, hundreds of Aeta families have been displaced since the city’s construction started, including dozens of families who were given a week to “voluntarily” to leave just before the Southeast Asian Games in 2019.

They warn that as the development progresses, thousands more could be displaced.

The BCDA has offered financial compensation of $0.51 per square metre as well as resettlement for affected families. Although it’s not clear whether 840 housing units will be built for displaced Aetas, it officially opened in July.

Aetas has no established legal claim to the area, so the organization claims that no displacement has occurred. In a statement to Al Jazeera, the BCDA said it “upholds the welfare and rights of Indigenous peoples” and acknowledges their “long historical presence” in central Luzon, where Clark is located. However, it was pointed out that Clark’s boundaries are consistent with “long-established government ownership” dating to the US military base and that no recognized ancestral domains are ascribed to the New Clark City.

The BCDA also argued that the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) handles requests for a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title, and that it adhered to the “lands awarded to Indigenous peoples” rule.

The Clark International Airport Corporation, which oversees the airport complex, offered similar assurances, stating that “there are no households or communities existing in the said location”. Aeta communities are present in the extended Clark area, but none are present in the airport complex itself, according to the group.

‘ Since time immemorial ‘

CADTs are only awarded to a select few Aeta tribes.

While Sapang Kawayan and other nearby communities have filed applications since 1986, two certificates have been issued on the outskirts of Clark.

Marcial Lengao, head of NCIP’s Tarlac office, told Al Jazeera that to grant Aetas in Clark a CADT they must “prove that they have been there since time immemorial”, meaning, during or before the arrival of the Spanish colonisers to the archipelago 400 years ago.

According to him, the commission specifies the minimum requirements for a CADT: a map of the domain, a census of the population, and at least five clans that date back at least three generations or the precolonial period.

Lengao claimed Sapang Kawayan’s application has not yet finished these.

But even if the application is granted, the village faces another unique hurdle. Any CADT approved by the commission in the area must then be deliberated by the executive branch or the president’s office because the BCDA owns the land rights to Clark.

Lengao said, “They will be in charge of finding a win-win solution.”

Activists, however, denounced the NCIP’s requirements as onerous and warned that the longer&nbsp, Aetas remain without a CADT, the more vulnerable they are to losing their lands.

The Aetas will continue to be treated like squatters on their own land, according to local rights activist Pia Montalban of Karapatan-Central Luzon.

Among the most abused indigenous Filipinos

The Aetas, who rely on small-scale subsistence farming, are among the most historically disenfranchised Indigenous peoples in the Philippines. The Aeta population is not officially known, but the government considers them to be a small minority of the country’s indigenous peoples, numbering in the thousands.

According to The Aeta Tribe Foundation, they are among the “poorest and least educated” populations in the country.

“They are among the most abused Indigenous Filipinos”, said Jeremiah Silvestre, an Indigenous psychology expert who worked closely with Aeta communities until 2022 while teaching at the Tarlac State University. Many people have abused Aetas, partly as a result of their good-natured culture. Worse, they rely on land that has been systematically taken from them.

Silvestre, too, described the CADT process as “unnecessarily academic”, saying it required Indigenous elders to present complete genealogies and detailed maps to government officials in what he likened to “defending your dissertation”.

He noted that any changes to government personnel could restart the process.

In a report released last year by the World Bank, it was discovered that “indigenous Filipinos frequently face insurmountable bureaucratic challenges” when processing CADTs. The report called recognising and protecting Indigenous land rights a “crucial step in addressing poverty and conflict”.

Experts worry that Sapang Kawayan’s families may experience displacement and homelessness due to the absence of formal recognition.

Silvestre remarked, “There is no safety net.” “We may see more Aetas begging on the street if this continues. An indigenous culture will also be lost due to systemic poverty.

The territory for the Aetas in the former base is shrinking as the new projects grow, says Victor Valantin, an Indigenous Peoples Mandatory Representative for Tarlac Province, which includes parts of Clark.

“We’ll have to move and move”, he said. Shopping centers “will not move for us.”

Valantin continued to lament what he believed to be a well-known imbalance.

Source: Aljazeera