Soldiers bike through hostile areas in Maguindanao

CAMP SIONGCO, Maguindanao , Philippines  – Clad in sports outfit, more than a hundred soldiers criss-crossed hostile areas in Mindanao using their mountain bikes yesterday appealing for public support to the Mindanao peace process and the restoration of normalcy in the troubled Maguindanao province.

The so-called “bike for peace,” which was also participated in by members of media in Tacurong City led by radioman Benjie Caballero of the Notre Dame Broadcasting Corp., was meant to dramatize the support of the military to peaceful means of resolving security problems in Central Mindanao.

The military bikers, led by Col. Mario Mendoza of the Army’s 104th Brigade, are assigned in different towns in Maguindanao that were once ruled by the feared Ampatuan clan, which are still under a state of emergency as a consequence of the Nov. 23 massacre of 57 people in Barangay Salman in Ampatuan municipality.      

Lt. Col. Benjamin Hao, spokesman of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division, said the activity, the first ever in the history of the 6th ID, was to show how soldiers in Maguindanao and surrounding provinces value the Mindanao peace process and the ongoing peace talks between the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

“There is also this burning desire for the military to see Maguindanao province become politically stable, where leaders would no longer need private armed groups to perpetuate power,” Hao said.

Hao said the 6th ID has been very supportive of propagating the cordiality among the 6th ID, the joint government-MILF ceasefire committee, and the Muslim communities in Maguindanao.

The MILF has also been actively initiating peace dialogues in the towns where the Ampatuans once ruled with an iron fist.

Some 7,000 MILF members, supporters and local villagers held a dialogue on the Mindanao peace process the other day in a former stronghold of the feared Ampatuan private militia in Old Maganoy District in Datu Abdullah Sangki town, some 10 kms. northwest of the provincial capital, Shariff Aguak.

The event was preceded by last December’s dialogue on the prospects of the GRP-MILF talks by some 9,000 guerillas, supporters, and representatives of different peace advocacy outfits in nearby Mamasapano town, whose mayor, Bahnarin Ampatuan, is the grandson of their clan’s patriarch, former Maguindanao governor Andal Ampatuan Sr.

The mayor and his grandfather were both implicated in the Nov. 23 massacre in Ampatuan municipality.