Gracia: AFP did all it could

WASHINGTON — US missionary Gracia Burnham, who was held captive by the Abu Sayyaf for more than a year in the southern Philippines, said she did not mean to belittle the efforts of the Philippine military.

"I think the Philippine military did all they could. Their goal was to get us out of there. They were working to get us out safely and a lot of Filipino soldiers lost their lives in this campaign and I would never belittle what they did for us," she said in a phone interview with The STAR.

Burnham, in her book "In the Presence of My Enemies" (Tyndale House Publishers, $22.99), detailed the terror and savagery she and her husband Martin suffered during their captivity, including a revelation that a military general demanded a 50 percent cut in the ransom money.

The military rescue attempt to save the Burnhams and another Abu Sayyaf captive, Filipina nurse Edibora Yap, resulted in Martin’s and Yap’s death and Gracia’s release on June 7, 2002.

Another revelation she wrote in her 307-page book, co-written with Dean Merrill, was that the greatest goal of Muslim rebels who kidnapped the US missionaries was to live in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, which they considered utopia, or failing that, "to go to America and get a good job."

Burnham said the Abu Sayyaf proudly proclaimed themselves to be an "Osama bin Laden group," shortly after kidnapping the missionary couple and 18 other people from Dos Palmas resort in Palawan on May 27, 2001.

The Burnhams, who were celebrating their 18th wedding anniversary, and Guillermo Sobero were the only Americans in the hostage group.

"Here in late May 2001, a full three months before Sept. 11 (terror attacks in the US), that name meant nothing to me," she said.

Bin Laden became a household name after three hijacked commercial airliners were slammed against the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon that day, killing about 2,800 people.

The US blamed the attacks on him and led an invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban Muslim fanatics who were harboring the Saudi-born mastermind and his al-Qaeda terrorist network.

Mrs. Burnham said that when the rebels heard about Sept. 11 over the radio "guys huddled in little groups, talking and laughing and congratulating one another. Everybody was really happy that Moslems had done something treacherous to the US."

From Palawan the hostages and their 15 heavily armed kidnappers, including Aldam Tilao, alias Abu Sabaya, better known as the rebels’ spokesman and negotiator, piled onto a 35-foot speedboat with three massive outboard engines and headed for Basilan. There they were met by Khaddafi Abubakar Janjalani, supreme leader of the Abu Sayyaf.

During the ride the victims were asked individually how much they thought they could raise as ransom. The following day, after rendezvousing with a bigger fishing boat, they were given a satellite phone to call their relatives in Manila and elsewhere to arrange payments, Mrs. Burnham wrote.

Within hours of their landing in Basilan the rebels and their captives were attacked by an army patrol on June 1 but no one was injured. It was the first of 17 firefights over the course of the year between the rebels and pursuing government troops.

A few days later the rebels stormed and occupied the Lamitan town hospital and fled with four other hostages including Yap and two other nurses. Then it was off to the jungles with all the hostages who, the author said, became "pawns in the dark drama of a desperate face-off."

Arroyo negotiates with rebels

Burnham said shortly after the Lamitan incident she overheard Sabaya talking on the satellite phone apparently to President Arroyo.

She heard him say: "Madam President, it does not seem that you are getting the picture. We have three Americans. We need a million dollars for Martin. If we get that, we’ll let him go free, and his companion too."

Whatever Mrs. Arroyo said in reply unleashed a forceful rebuttal from Sabaya who, Mrs. Burnham said, shouted: "You want our unconditional surrender — what are you crazy? If your generals think they can follow us into the mountains and finish us off, they are out of their minds."

In the heat of the conversation Sabaya screamed "If you don’t let Malaysia in here to mediate within 72 hours, we’re going to kill one of the whites."

Sabaya’s Sunday deadline passed without incident amid a flurry of sat-phone conversations, Burnham said.

The next morning government troops found the rebels again, the fourth time in less than two weeks. This time the troops fired artillery at them.

The Abu Sayyaf were clearly upset by the developments and that night they took Sobero, his hands tied behind his back, to the woods. That was the last time he was seen alive.

From the comments of some of the rebels, Mrs. Burnham said "we gradually admitted to ourselves the awful truth: Guillermo’s decapitated body was back there somewhere on a hillside, marked only by his head raised up on a bamboo pole like a trophy."

The author writes of acts of random kindness by the rebels but also cites examples of cruelty "to show what rats they are."

She said that one of the hostages, Lalaine, seemed quite taken with one of the kidnappers and reasoned this may have been a case of Stockholm Syndrome, a reaction common in kidnapping situations, in which a hostage becomes sympathetic to or even falls in love with his or her captor.

One cannot help but wonder if the author too did not come under the spell of the Abu Sayyaf.

Burnham, who lives near Wichita, Kansas, admitted to The STAR that she and her husband may also have been afflicted with the Stockholm Syndrome.

"As we got to know them I do believe we started to care for them," she said, "so much so that Martin and I often had to remind ourselves who the bad guys were and who the good guys were."

The good guys were the soldiers trying to rescue them though this is not readily apparent in the book.

Soldiers use sledgehammer instead of flyswatter

Mrs. Burnham said the soldiers generally didn’t bother to pursue the rebels after a firefight. "A battle was one thing, but pressing on for capture didn’t seem to be on their agenda. This was one of the continuing mysteries of our ordeal," she wrote.

She said one day in September as the rebels and their victims trekked through the jungle, automatic rifle fire and artillery shells came raining down on them. Helicopter gunships with machine guns blazing swarmed over their heads and a group of A-10 Warthog attack planes came screaming across the sky dropping bombs.

"How in the world we avoided getting hit I will never know. Out of this whole battle the Abu Sayyaf suffered no deaths and only one injury," she said.

In effect she accused the military of using a sledgehammer to effect their rescue when a flyswatter would have done.

"The AFP wanted to help us hostages, but pulling off an operation that sensitive was simply beyond their training. At this point, we knew that our only real hope of getting out alive lay instead in negotiation," she wrote.

She estimated the rebels suffered up to 11 killed and several seriously wounded in the campaign.

Burnham said throughout their captivity their days ran to one of two extremes, either they were running for their lives or else sitting with absolutely nothing to do. Sometimes she and her husband amused themselves "with contests to see how many flies we could catch with our hands."

As to the possibility of their escape, she wrote that the Abu Sayyaf need not have worried. "Martin and I talked about the possibility all the time, but every time, we came to the same conclusion: If we tried to escape and were caught, we would be shot, end of story."

She told The STAR there were generally about 80 people in their group most of the time. Only in the last few days did the rebel strength dwindle.

In the book, Burnham said a number of female hostages were forced to "marry" their captors, a practice she described as being "Sabaya-ed," the word Sabaya meaning war booty, as well as the name of the self-styled spokesman. Some were duped into converting to Islam beforehand on the promise they would be released if they converted.

The author explained she did not use the word rape in the book "because some of my friends were the ones on the receiving end."

She said Janjalani "married" Reina, one of the nurses abducted from the Lamitan town hospital, barely two weeks after the kidnapping but she was released after four months because she was pregnant. Janjalani left the group soon after.

Three hostages beheaded

By November the only hostages left were the Burnhams and Yap. Six were ransomed, three beheaded and the others escaped or were set free. Yap was not allowed to leave by Isnilon Totoni Hapilon alias Abu Musab who had "married" her.

Burnham wrote that at the start of 2002, their food supply improved dramatically for a most unusual reason: "The Armed Forces were feeding us! A group of them met our guys and handed over quantities of rice, dried fish, coffee and sugar. This happened several times over the course of a few weeks."

"We were told that it was because Sabaya was wheeling and dealing with the AFP general of that area over how to split up the ransom that might be paid."

"Sabaya was willing to give the general 20 percent of the action," but the unnamed general wanted 50 percent, she said. Negotiations broke down.

The Abu Sayyaf told the captives they got their arms and ammunition from the army itself. "We pay a lot more than it should cost, of course. So somebody’s making a lot of money. But at least we get what we need," Jainal Antel Sali Jr. alias Solaiman told her once.

Sometime in March the Burnhams were told by their captives that someone had paid a P15 million ($330,000) ransom for them. The money was raised from friends and relatives back home in Kansas.

"At last! Our hopes had finally been realized. We’d be going home!" she wrote.

But the rebels were sticking to their original demand of $1 million for the Burnhams and wanted P30 million more.

It was then that Sabaya decided it was time to leave Basilan so about 15 of them including the Burnhams took a small boat and headed towards Zamboanga.

They landed at what they called Island 11 and there every night a boat came from the mainland with supplies. Every captor had been given P10,000 pesos ($200) to spend as he wished – part of the ransom money.

As the days dragged on Sabaya was heard on the sat-phone threatening to take matters into his own hands if the P30 million did not arrive.

Noose tightens around the rebels

On May 27, the one-year anniversary of their captivity, the Burnhams heard that several shiploads of soldiers had landed on the Zamboanga peninsula. "It was clear that the noose was tightening around us." The arrival of the soldiers cut the group from their supply lines and they were reduced to eating leaves.

Troops encountered the group on June 7 after the rebels had decided to camp because of heavy rain.

"We had just closed our eyes when a fearsome barrage of gunfire cut loose from the crest of the hill," Mrs. Burnham said.

"Before I even hit the ground, I felt the zing! Of a bullet slamming through my right leg."

"I rolled down the steep hill maybe eight feet, dazed. I looked up and saw Martin on the ground too, so I quickly crawled to his side." Then she saw blood beginning to soak through his shirt from his upper left chest. After a while his complexion turned pasty white "and then I knew the man I loved more than anyone in the world was gone.."

At the height of the shooting Mrs. Burnham also heard Edibora yell "Mart". It was the last word she said.

"As we had feared for so long, the AFP had come upon us with all barrels blazing."

Mrs. Burnham said the soldiers were clearly upset, "realizing that in their rescue attempt, they had shot all three hostages."

Reflecting on her experience she wrote that had the American military, who were on exercises in the vicinity, been allowed by Mrs. Arroyo’s administration to conduct the rescue attempt they would have done the job far differently. "They would have moved into action at say, two in the morning instead of two in the afternoon, wearing night-vision goggles and all the rest to snatch us out safely."

But "the local authority said no and the Pentagon felt it could not trample upon an ally’s national sovereignty," she said.

In the end, Burnham’s faith and her dogged determination to survive was what pulled her through. As she said during her months in captivity, her daily focus was "to put one foot in front of the other, to stay alive one more day."

Abu Sabaya, who had a $1 million bounty on his head, was reported killed in a shootout with government troops in waters off Zamboanga del Norte exactly two weeks later. His body was never found but a backpack containing his signature black shades and satellite phone was recovered.

Mrs. Burnham said writing the book was a healing process for her. She said if it was at all possible she would not hesitate to return to the Philippines where she spent many happy years. But for now her focus was on her three children. — With Ann Corvera, CNN, Fox News, eMediaMillWorks