[Video] Displaced women in two villages on Mindanao Island find an unconventional way to stop their menfolk fighting, clear roads and start rebuilding amid a separatist rebellion.
Source: Daily Picks And Flicks
Tired of the violence and war, the women of warring villages banded together to offer the men an uncoventional ultimatum and stopped the further slaughter.
Mindanao has been the scene of an ongoing conflict that has now lasted for more than 35 years.
To date the conflict has claimed 120,000 lives, many of them civilians. More than a million people have been made homeless and destitute.
An estimated 200,000 to 300,000 refugees have taken refuge in neighbouring Sabah, Malaysia and many other have moved to Manila or other parts of the Philippines in search of security.
The United Nations refugee agency helped settle these villagers by providing the necessary resources for self-sufficiency, but fighting continued to flare up when residents of one village, Dado, had to pass through two others to get to a regional market.
“If our husbands wanted to fight, we’d tell them not to. If they still went, we’d say okay, it’s up to you. But you will not be accepted at home,” said Hasna Kandatu, a Dado villager.
More fearful of what he’d miss out on at home than the men of the neighbouring villages, Kandatu’s husband Lengs Kupong, a key village leader, implored the other men of the village to bring an end to the fighting, reports NineMSN.
Info about the Mindanao wars via: International View Point
