Ampatuan and Mangudadatu clans were allies once

BULUAN, Maguindanao, Philippines  – The ancestors of the Ampatuan and Mangudadatu clans would never have imagined that their friendship, started some 300 years ago, and their alliance against the Spaniards and then the Japanese invaders during World War II would be severed by a gruesome incident now recorded in the Maguindanaon traditional tarsila, or genealogy of the royalties, as the worst ever election-related violence in the Moro homeland.

The Mangudadatus of today, among them Maguindanao’s incumbent governor Esmael, are 17th generation descendants of Shariff Mohammad Kabunsuan, an Arab-Malay prince from Johore, now part of Malaysia, who set foot in mainland Mindanao in the 14th century to propagate Islam.

The Ampatuans, on the other hand, descended from an Arab preacher named Shariff Saidona Mustapha, who hails from an old Arabian desert settlement in what is now Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and set foot in Mindanao sometime in the late 16th century also to preach Islam in the Raya area (upper delta) of what is now Maguindanao province.

It was in the late 17th century when members of the Mangudadatu and Ampatuan clans banded together to fight the Spaniards who attempted to establish garrisons along the riverbanks that traverse the chartered towns now comprising the second district of the province.

Contemporary Maguindanao historians said the two warrior clans’ successful rescue of relatives enslaved by the Spaniards in a settlement in what is now Tamontaka in Datu Odin Sinsuat, where they decapitated and slaughtered more than a hundred Spaniards and their Moro collaborators, putting up their heads for public viewing in an open field like dried coconuts, made them greatly feared by the people. That field is now called “Da’obab,” which means scattered coconut shells in the local language.  

The two clans preserved their alliance throughout the Japanese occupation and during the darks days of the Mindanao Moro rebellion in the 1970s.

The father of Gov. Mangudadatu, the late Datu Powah, was to become the feared “Buaya sa Ranao,” a moniker he earned as leader of a militia that helped the government fight lawless Moro gangs that preyed on impoverished Muslim communities in this town and surrounding municipalities at the height of the Muslim uprising in the South more than 30 years ago.

The detained leader of the Ampatuans, former Maguindanao Gov. Andal Ampatuan Sr., also became an active leader of a community defense militia in Shariff Aguak town that fought secessionist rebels then under the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF).

The tactical alliance between the armed followers of the two families started to loosen over their manner of dealing with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

Ampatuan Sr. became hostile to the MILF when his son Saudi, mayor of Datu Piang, was killed along with 18 others in a bomb attack on Dec. 23, 2003 by suspected guerrilla ordnance experts.

Soon after, Ampatuan Sr. used his militia, backed by Army units whose commanders he adopted as his own sons during his stint as governor, to wage a long, bitter war against MILF forces in several towns in the second district of Maguindanao that were then part of his so-called political principality.

It was also during that time when the Ampatuans, with the help of three former commanders of the 6th Infantry Division – one of them an Ilonggo, the other a Cebuano, and another who subsequently became chief of the 1st Infantry Division before retiring from military service – amassed enough weapons to arm two brigades of soldiers.

The Mangudadatus, at the time, were already active in reaching out to MILF forces in this town as a low-level backdoor effort of propagating tranquility among the local communities in support of the 1997 General Agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities between the government and the rebel group.

Even so, the Mangudadatus still supported the gubernatorial bid of Ampatuan Sr. during the 2004 and 2007 elections.

The supposedly strong political alliance between the two families reached its turning point in June 2009 when Ampatuan Sr. and his son, then Datu Unsay Mayor Andal Jr., the prime suspect in the Nov. 23, 2009 massacre of 57 people in Ampatuan town, ordered their armed followers to attack communities controlled politically by the Mangudadatus after hearing stories that one of them would run for governor of Maguindanao during the May 2010 elections.

“The original purpose then was only to show to the world that the Ampatuans are not the gods in Maguindanao and that there are politicians that can challenge them in an election. Whether Toto (the incumbent Maguindanao governor) would lose or win then did not matter to us,” said an uncle of the incumbent governor, who asked not to be identified.

An irate Andal Jr., now detained in connection with the massacre, had repeatedly vowed before friends and relatives that he would never allow anyone to contest his bid for the gubernatorial post of Maguindanao during the 2010 elections, being his father’s heir-apparent.       

“He made good his promise, but his actions were against the teachings of Allah and so ‘murkah’ (divine wrath) fell on Junior,” a close relative, a public school teacher, said of Andal Jr.

Nov. 23, 2009 was a normal day in Barangay Salman in Ampatuan municipality when Andal Jr. and about a hundred members of their private militia, along with dozens of policemen, allegedly flagged down the convoy of Gov. Mangudadatu’s wife Genalyn, who, along with relatives and 32 journalists, were to file for him his certificate of candidacy for Maguindanao governor at the provincial capitol in Shariff Aguak.

Andal Jr. and his men herded the victims to a nearby hill about a kilometer away from the highway where their convoy was stopped and gunned them down one after another.

The incident sparked indignation even among the most loyal political supporters of the Ampatuans, among them re-electionist mayors who, out of sympathy, supported the candidacy of Mangudadatu, then vice mayor of this town, who was for them an underdog.

Mangudadatu’s election as governor last May drove in the last nail that sealed the coffin of the once feared Ampatuan political empire, which ruled the province for almost two decades with zero tolerance for political opposition.

Wrong place, wrong time

Unknown to many, one of the 57 people who perished in the Nov. 23, 2009 Maguindanao massacre was neither a member of the media nor a relative of Mangudadatu, but a son of a multi-awarded retired government mathematician whose car was mistaken by Ampatuan Jr. as part of a convoy he planned to stop from reaching its destination that fateful day.

Anthony Ridao, a mathematician of the National Statistics and Coordination Board in Region 12, was on his way home from Koronadal City when he unsuspectingly overtook one of the vehicles in the ill-fated convoy and got “sandwiched” between two of the cars in Mangudadatu’s party.

Ridao was the son of an incumbent city councilor here, Marino, who was a math professor for 40 years in a state-run university in Maguindanao before he became a politician.

“It’s so painful to lose a very loving and caring son that way, but I don’t question God for giving him such fate. Everything in this world happens only through the permissiveness of the almighty,” Ridao’s father told The STAR between sobs.

Ridao’s car was among the first to be buried by the suspects in the massacre on a hill where they were slaughtered, using a yellow backhoe marked “Provincial government of Maguindanao.”

For members of the Ridao clan here, justice is all they want, something that should come out of a “sensible litigation” of the massacre case.

“My son was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Councilor Ridao, a devout Catholic and a fourth degree member of a local chapter of the Knights of Columbus.

Muslim preachers in Maguindanao have warned “murkah” could fall on President Aquino if he will not flex his muscles to round up the other suspects in the massacre that are still at large.

Among those at large but who have been charged for having been seen with Ampatuan Jr. when he allegedly led the mass slaughter of the victims were his two nephews, Bahnarin and Saudi Jr., then mayors of Maguindanao’s neighboring Saudi and Mamasapano towns.

A third suspect, Datu Ulo, also a nephew of Andal Jr., is also still free. 

There were talks in Shariff Aguak, hometown of the Ampatuans and former seat of the provincial government, that Andal Jr. deliberately brought his nephews with him when he perpetrated the massacre as an initiation for them to become “true warriors” like their elders who were feared for their amulets and propensity to kill as Moros that fought the Spaniards and the Japanese during World War II.

“President Aquino should focus attention on this concern. He has a maxim ‘tahakin ang matuwid na daan,’ something we also recite in our daily prayers as ‘si ratal mustakim’ when we implore Allah’s help to guide us to the right path. The only right path for us to achieve justice is for us to put all the suspects behind bars and prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law,” said Uztadz Samroud Samsudin, a preacher in Datu Odin Sinsuat, Maguindanao.

Many Muslim clerics said last year’s massacre of 57 people in Ampatuan town was Allah’s way of punishing a clan for its impunity while in power.

“We Muslims believe that once in a while, Allah needs to hurt us emotionally, spiritually and physically for us to bounce back and become better Muslims after such ordeal,” Ustadz Salik Maniri, 43, said.

There are relatives of the Ampatuans who also want three detained clan members, siblings Zaldy, Sajid and their brother-in-law Akmad, to have a fair chance in court, convinced they had nothing to do with the massacre.

“But it’s all up to judiciary. The ball is in its hands,” said an elder of the three suspects.