Travels inside the bloody kingdom of Maguindanao

On Nov. 23, 2009, at least 57 people were killed in Ampatuan town in Maguindanao in the worst election-related violence in the country’s recent history. The following is an excerpt from a book about Mindanao that is scheduled for publication next year. The road to Maguindanao was my awakening to the mainland; like meeting a new love, you are excited, you can’t sleep, you are blind. From the Isulan highway I could go to other roads in Lanao, in Bukidnon, in Davao, in Cotabato, in Sarangani. I could travel the whole of Mindanao, I will pray to the mountains, I will understand voices from the wind. They were taking this road when they were stopped at a checkpoint at a crossing called Saniag. The police had been in place at several points on the length of the highway. They were not doing their job. They were going to be a party to the spasm of killings, according to investigations that were to follow after wards. Their unofficial payroll comes from the old man Ampatuan. The police and the other armed goons ‘escorted’ the Mangundadatu-led convoy onwards, stopped at the next crossing called Malating, where, it was said, Datu Unsay, the Ampatuan junior, the son following in the footsteps of the father, supposedly led them to the hill above the lush meadow for the ghastly ritual. Those who were there were to see nothing, hear nothing. Let the backhoe do the talking. From the highway going north, they turned left to a village called Salman, where a small inconspicuous warehouse for crops and a solar dryer stood by the roadside. There was a sign pointing an arrow to an MNLF camp one kilometer away, but there was no such camp; it led to an unpaved track snaking through a hamlet of huts far apart from each other. The village folks must have seen something but hid out of fear, and they will certainly not speak of what they heard. The victims must have sensed in their deep horror, turning to the interior, that there would be no escape. Their pleas for mercy were snuffed out. The massacre sneered at my romance with Mindanao. It taunted me: so you think you can write about peace? It stuck out its tongue and made me feel like a naïve fool. - 0 - The General Headquarters in Camp Aguinaldo, in the capital Manila. Four days before the massacre. A Command Conference. The Secretary of National Defense speaks: ‘When it comes to the Muslims, I can brag about this to you. If there’s any person in this country with the biggest and the most in-depth connection to the Muslims, it will be me.’ No one among the senior generals contradict him; it is, after all, impolite to cast doubts on the credentials of a cabinet secretary and one who is close enough to the president he receives her scolding from time to time, if not frequently, in the same manner that she could berate her husband in public, and in Spanish at that. The problem, says then-Secretary Norberto Gonzales, is political, not a military one. The problem is, he adds, it is ‘very difficult to convince the Bangsamoro about peace.’ Because the real problem is, the ‘face’ the government gives to the Muslim people (he means the ordinary Moros) is that of the Ampatuan’s political clan – which spearheads the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (the ARMM) through the face of the Senior’s fourth child, Zaldy (whose wife, too, holds office as town mayor). If that is the face that government shows to the Muslim people, ‘Will you be attracted to peace? Will you be attracted to honesty, to dedication, to the democratic process?’ And yet all along it was the face of political partnership, and everyone knew that: the Ampatuan family sits in its kingdom of Maguindanao because it delivered the votes that made President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo sit on the throne in Malacañang – a veritable exchange deal. And yet the defense secretary who served as national security adviser to the president before he was appointed to the post knew all along. He knew all along that ‘the one placed in Muslim Mindanao is the most abusive’ of all abusive local officials (he means those who won elections through fear, cheating, vote-buying). And yet the government puts the military under the service of this abusive face, allowing the warlord to choose officers of his liking to be stationed in his territory, those that are susceptible to his caprices, acquiescing to the status quo, officers who were graduates of the elite academy reduced to being highly-paid bodyguards for the lowest caste of politicians, officers who will train the private army under the guise of the Civilian Volunteers Organization, because it is either black or white, the rebels hiding in the Liguasan Marsh must all be wiped out to meet a president’s deadline of beating the insurgency – and what face has it got left to show the people? ‘I think we have to correct that. We cannot be protectors of abusive politicians. We will have to correct this,’ he says. And so, one way of settling the outbreak of this massacre was, ironically, to declare Martial Law in Maguindanao. The entire force of the national police in Ampatuan’s district was sacked. The Army’s 601st Brigade was transferred out. The CAFGUs were disarmed and disbanded. There were about three thousand CVOs armed with mortars and equipped with Humvees and armored vehicles that had .50 caliber machine guns; about one hundred of them were believed involved and surrendered peacefully, others panicked and hid their firearms by the roadside and tried to escape. Some police officers had decided to cooperate in the investigation saying Andal Ampatuan Junior, the seventh child known as Datu Unsay after the town in which he was mayor, was the one who had allegedly fired the first shot, thereby triggering the orgy of killings. The judges fled in fear and refused to issue warrants, inhibiting themselves from laying down the law. Martial Law was enforced on the basis that the Ampatuans were supposedly about to incite rebellion, to follow the rule of law given to executive power; but in fact it was crucial that the clan had to be removed fast and that order be restored in the province to suppress a flashpoint. The private army especially had to be prevented from hiding out with the MILF rebels (watching the events rise and ebb from their strongholds in the marsh) for self-protection or going on a rampage among the local population. The military dropped leaflets from a chopper offering safe-conduct pass. It went around with a bullhorn asking people for calm. It moved around the markets posting cell phone numbers to report any abuses. There were lootings and digging of graves where firearms were believed buried. And it was to be over in nine days, overall successful under the pressure of public scrutiny. Let’s pat the military’s back. Martial Law is a bad name, let’s not go back there again. At past midnight of 5 December, Andal Ampatuan Senior was arrested. He was trying to leave his home in an ambulance, saying he was ill and asking to be sent to a hospital in Cotabato City; instead he was taken to Davao City where he would be put under the custody of the Eastern Mindanao Command.At seven o’clock in the morning, his son Zaldy the ARMM governor was taken to jail in General Santos City. Three other sons were taken to the 6th Infantry Division headquarters in Awang for questioning. And Junior the prime suspect was immediately put on a chopper to Manila for imprisonment. On television there was no hint of remorse on his face. There will be a trial. He would plead Not Guilty. It took the military three attempts to apply a search warrant into the family compound. It had to be done with transparency, the press was allowed in. They saw three .50 caliber machine guns at bay that was just a preview of what was to be discovered in the Ampatuans’ private armory. Inside the house they opened a wall-sized vault similar to what you see in banks; there was no money in it, suggesting that it had all been cleared out in anticipation of a crackdown. They found a warehouse hidden from a wall about one-meter thick and there they unearthed an astounding display of armaments: officially counting about one million ammunition, six hundred and ninety-seven high-powered firearms of recoilless rifles, 60-millimeter mortars, M203 grenade launchers, M-14s and M-16s, Ultramax machine guns, AK-47s, Gahlils, Garand and Carbines, and three rockets used by assault helicopter. In addition to this were thirty-eight pieces of shotguns and .45 Caliber pistols. They were in boxes marked with the suppliers’ name, the local private ARMSCOR manufacturer of arms and ammunition. The other boxes were stamped DND GOVERNMENT ARSENAL, which produces more than half of the military’s small arms ammunition. These were all government approval for a warlord, in the name of peace for Muslim Mindanao? This alone could have armed about two battalions of the Army, armed to the teeth. It was mind-boggling to say the least, putting this on record in the cache of one political family. There might have been more, but that was as far as the K-9 dogs and the metal detectors could unearth in the sweep of Martial Law. Was this to be the Last Touch? (In the military academy, hazing was an open secret in the most severe test among cadets cloistered in the tradition of a fraternity house. An underclassman would be at the mercy of an upperclassman, passed on from one to the next, taking on the beatings as it gets worse if they fail to show they are of a tough shell. They say it is within this period of initiation that they form a bond. But if anything of serious gravity were to happen to a cadet, the school board will punish the upperclassman that was the last to have beaten him in a series of the hazing ritual. He could be turned back from the academic year or expelled outright. He would be made responsible for having the last touch.) Let me take you to the capitol Andal Ampatuan Senior built: imagine yourself in a mansion and a mausoleum put together, but one that would never see the pages of Architectural Digest. It is massive and it is tacky. It is styled on the tasteless imitation of art nouveau, painted pink ochre. It stands on thick pillars that you see in the days of the Romans, wealth and power being its message to his impoverished constituents. Its façade has a touch of the temples built for the Egyptian pharaohs. And here Bapa – the term used to address Ampatuan out of respect for an elder, and the older he got the more power he had accumulated – sat to dispense his money, his favors, his guns. It is not the only structure of this kind that you find on this side of Maguindanao. The Ampatuans know how to play the game of Monopoly cleverly; when they roll the dice, they grab other lands – which is easy to do when you have the CVOs to do the dirty work of a private army. It is land that gives them the status of economic dominance, a concept inherited and imprinted from the onrush of Christian settlers with a series of cadastral surveys. The Muslims in the past did not ‘own’ land per se, for it was to the datus a ‘privilege’ of allocating rights of areas to be used. When they saw a new government’s order of resettlement giving land titles and deeds, land became a commodity for survival. On the map of the province, Ampatuan carved out municipalities for smaller fiefdoms to give to his children and their family (there are nine, two of them killed violently), staking their claim to rule by putting up smaller versions of the capitol. In the years the clan was in power, fifteen municipalities were created, to saturate their positions with redundancy. This is ours. Period. And around these grand delusions are the neighborhoods of the poor, the tarpaulin shelters and the canvass dwellings of refugees, the patented GK Village, the army detachments. We climb the wide winding staircase of the capitol to visit a new ‘acting’ governor temporarily put in charge of the province, an administrative gap in the void. It is almost as empty as a tomb, hollow and lifeless. It feels like being in a movie set of a bad plot. We talked of other things before when we met at a birthday party by the seaside and it is now as much as a surprise for me as it is for her to find herself sitting in the office made for a warlord. Bai Nariman Ambolodto smiles with her braces, wearing jeans and a pink shirt, and she offers us a seat at a French-inspired round table. A glass cabinet in the room had wine glasses, ceramic plates, silver cutlery. She shows us the bathroom with a Jacuzzi and a bigger room that could fit a lavish party. In the anteroom are two teams of fully armed Special Action Force to watch over her. Bai Ina couldn’t believe it herself; she had to pinch her arm – is this happening? – on her first day on the job in mid-December, when she was picked by the Department of Interior and Local Governments to be the officer-in-charge before a new appointee occupies the seat and she becomes the vice-governor by February. She was a forty-one-year-old former board member of Shariff Kabunsuan before the province was nullified (the other half of Maguindanao), a mother of a seven-year-old girl that she could no longer pick up from school because of her staggering work. Her days of getting a facial at the parlor or shopping for gifts and grocery were over – she was too embarrassed to have her armed escorts following her. But it is going to be brief. Just then the idea of putting a woman of good stead to normalize the capitol was a calming, sobering effect on the dangerous politics of Maguindanao. It is a short respite from the aftermath of the massacre and the state of martial law that followed it. Bai Ina had to start with house keeping; all the files and computers were gone, the rooms ransacked. She had to reduce more than 200 employees of the capitol’s work force. She had to figure out from the treasury where and how the monthly IRA of eighty-four million pesos had gone to in the past months. - 0 – There were flowers for offerings to the victims, Malaysian mums that would take a while to dry and wilt. Others were scattered on the open pit. Fifty-seven innocent people died here, their bodies tortured like livestock carcasses left to waste. When an Army major rushed to the scene in a ‘pursuit’ operation, he smelled it. The soldiers had come about two hours late for the rescue, fidgeting, uncertain, waiting for orders. The mild breeze carried by the early afternoon slumber released an odor that reminded him of the stench in a fish market. Then he saw the mud tracks of a backhoe and the shards of glass on the trail. Up on the hill, he counted two dozen dead that were left there in a rush, the killers leaving their job undone, because they’d been found out. The other victims had already been buried, shot dead in their vehicles, sunk in the hole of a ready-made grave. How did the killers think they were going to hide the massacre of civilians and mostly reporters and media workers riding on a convoy on the road to Maguindanao? There was a banner in tarpaulin, You May Rest In Peace While We Seek Justice. I would like the killers to return to the scene of their crime so they can see what I see. If they had seen this they might have stopped the slaughter. They could have breathed in the air of the meadow, scanned the panorama of the earth, rugged fields and thriving plantations, and watched the sparse growth of varied trees beyond, trees that want to live. There is a mosque in the distance. They could have seen that everything around them was too beautiful to be carrying out the most evil chore of mankind. They could have given the massacre a second thought. They could have just stopped. I stood on the hill of the mass graves and I could not weep. - YA, GMANews.TV The author has written several books including Boys from the Barracks and the award-winning Sarena’s Story. This article contains excerpts from her next book.