Suicide fanatics are no novelty in Mindanao

According to Defense Spokesman Lt. Col. Danilo Servando, a 23-year-old rebel belonging to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) was the man, carrying explosives in his backpack, who triggered off the terrible Davao airport blast which killed 21 persons and wounded more than a hundred.

Did Muntazer Sudang intend to be a "suicide-bomber", or did the explosives he had detonate ahead of schedule, taking him to Allah or wherever, ahead of his expectations, along with his hapless victims? He need not have blown himself up in that crowded waiting shed outside the terminal itself, but perhaps he wanted to make a statement.

If Muntazer (whose relatives went to the morgue to try to recover his shredded remains) is now in the promised paradise with virgins, the tragedy is that he took so many innocent people with him – many of them young persons with their best years yet ahead of them. But that’s the heartbreak of "war". And that’s what we’re involved in, for all the pleading and bleating about "peace" and "reconciliation". Relentless war being inflicted on us by Bangsamoro jihadis.

The enemy has brought the war back to Davao, in a wake-up call that there’s no "safe zone" in this continuing battle – particularly the just-declared "zone of peace" by which the GMA government hopes to "transform" the Moro rebels’ Buliok complex and the Liguasan Marshes (long the haven of murderous insurgents and kidnappers).

What struck me, reading yesterday’s dispatches, is what the wire service Agence France-Presse said in its report about Sudang, the young MILF suicide-bomber, if indeed he was that. The AFP reporter, Jason Gutierrez, wrote that "suicide bombing is almost unheard of in the Philippines and is not known to have been used as a strategy by Muslim or communist rebel groups in the country".

Perhaps not suicide-bombing per se (which brings an ancient tactic into the modern age of terrorism), but we must remember that Moro "suicide-attack" is a time-honored practice. For the Moros, this practice is centuries-old. They used to call it, as everybody knows, juramentado.

The suicide-krismen, would prostrate themselves to Makkah (Mecca), and offer their lives to Allan, then, having girt themselves with tight arm-bands (tourniquets) and similar binding strips in the legs, so they could continue to move and kill even when hit by bullets, they would go out to slay Christians and other infidels (including Americans).

* * *

There are many very old books, written in the 1890s up to the 1930s which mention the fearsome Moro juramentado as well as the amuk or manuju. I’m a collector of these old volumes, having picked them up from New York to Washington, DC and Chicago (when I was a young buck, you could get them in second-hand book dealers for as cheap as fifty cents to one dollar!). I’ve found them in Wales, and even in Tasmania (Australia). A lot of them came from family collections here. The kids, who didn’t appreciate grandpa’s books, disposed of them to dealers and prospectors by the ton (many, alas, were shipped to libraries in the US and we lost them forever).

One sample is a picaresque tome by Vic Hurley, published in 1936 by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, entitled: Men in Sun Helmets. (Hurley also published another best-seller of his day, named South-East of Zamboanga.)

The American author had come to the Philippines at the age of 26, and tried to become a coconut planter in Cotabato, where he spent a miserable year "miles from a white man’s town" trying to become a planter, but falling ill he gave up and moved to Zamboanga. In the hospital, a doctor took tests and asked him if he had "used a mosquito netting" and if he had "boiled the water" he drank. After the test tubes and smears, the doc told Hurley he "was very fortunate to be alive".

He acquired a house overlooking the Sulu Sea.

"The first thing I noticed was that the place was built like a fortress. All the windows were covered with a heavy mesh of wire fencing and the porch was completely enclosed in the same material . . . I asked why the place was fenced in so completely... ‘On account of the Moros’, I was told. ‘We have three hundred malo hombres here... I learned that while Moros as a whole are peaceful there are still a few tribal hot-heads who cause trouble. Trouble that comes in bunches and for which there is no defense except a .45 pistol."

Hurley learned about the amuks. "A screech in the night," he recounted, "would be the only announcement that another Moro was pursuing his bloody path to Paradise. And a waving kris in a crowd can be so deadly." The American would-be planter mused that in the darkness, a Moro’s kris (sword) "would be a better and faster weapon than my pistol in the uncertain light of a flash".

Those words were penned in 1936.

Hurley was wary of the 300 Moros who worked in his neighborhood (he was the jefe), but he liked them. He surely appreciated the Moros. "They have fought everything and everybody," he related. "They have a military history reaching back into the centuries. Their kris blades have engaged stone spears of Palaeolithic times and mountain artillery of today. They fought the Spaniards for almost four centuries and they were never conquered by the conquistadores. Born for battle, they will probably fight again when America leaves the Islands."

Would you say that this fellow Hurley was... uh, prophetic? As I’ve been trying to say, the Moros – even the Tausugs – like Americans more than they like us Christian Filipinos. In fact, they continue to accuse us of having the Spanish conquistador mentality.

* * *

Since he was so entertaining and perceptive an observer, here’s more of Hurley’s comments. He wrote about a round-the-world cruise ship, Resolute, which arrived in Zamboanga. He was appalled at the thought of "those American women and their husbands running about... during the Ramadan".

He noted irritably that "the tourist could brush up against death and be blissfully unaware". They didn’t know about the amuk or the manuju who, he declared, "is violently insane. He will slash everything and everyone in his path and he runs a course of death until dropped by a volley."

Hurley recalled that the general manager of a desiccated-coconut making company for which he worked in Zamboanga had warned him: "... for Christ’s sake, belt on a gun and watch the Moros. We don’t want anybody (among the tourists) to get stuck."

Groaned Hurley: "We had our hands full keeping order during the Ramadan. It was no time to take on the additional job of herding tourists." He explained in his book: "The Ramadan is the big fast month of the Moros, the ninth month of the Mohammedan year. The Moros are ill-tempered and surly. A Moro cannot eat in the daytime during the Ramadan and tempers fray out toward the end of the month. Then it is when the amuks suddenly decide that life is not worth living. A crowd of gaggling tourists would be meat for them. It could be horrible."

* * *

In another chapter (page 27), Hurley recounts that among the buildings on the factory grounds is "an old Spanish fort we use as a warehouse".

The fort, he said, had high walls of coral rock, carefully mortised by soldier-artisans of another day.

"The tiny blockhouse is built on a sand-spit and it faces the main fortress at Zamboanga, fifteen miles away. It was just a link in that fragile Spanish chain which once threaded across Mindanao... Juan Ronquillo built it in 1596. He was one of the first of the Spaniards to believe that the Moros could be conquered. He came here to Caldera Bay with an army of fifty-five men and built this blockhouse as a base for operations against the Moros in Cotabato."

With his small force, Ronquillo "plunged into the swamps and jungle and cleared the whole peninsula of hostile Moros," Hurley narrates, "But they came back."

"When Ronquillo returned to Manila, he left a valiant soldier behind to defend this tiny fort. A man called Chaves – a captain in the Spanish Army. Chaves lived in this place with his pitiful garrison for months and months. The Moros laid a cordon around him... and in time, death came for him. As commander of the garrison, there had been little that Chaves could do other than lead an occasional sortie through the wide gateway. The sand-spit must have rung, at one time, with the clash of Toledo blade against Moro kris.

"Living from day to day, in this tiny fort, Chaves’ ultimate and final day came at last. The Moros swarmed over the arquebusiers on the coral walls and the Spanish Post ceased to be. It might have been a relief for Chaves. Possibly he was glad to have it over with. Certainly it had been no surprise to Chaves and his men. They had been playing a waiting game with death.

"In a corner of this dark old warehouse, littered now with machinery parts, Chaves himself went down before that last wild dash of the Mohammedans... Chaves stood there, back to his last wall, a figure in a suit of chain mail. Around him lay the bodies of the last of his arquebusiers (riflemen), stricken down by the wavy-edged krises of the Moros.

"That last attack of the Moros must have been horrible. I can almost picture Chaves’ emotions as he watched his men pitch from the walls as the krises bit into their armor. I stand here where Chaves stood in that short moment before the krismen lopped his head from his shoulders.

"I’ll mark the place where Chaves fell with a keg of nails." That’s how Hurley concluded this vignette. As you see, beheading enemies is an old Moro custom.

* * *

I hope the Reader isn’t bored with Hurley’s tales. I believe his observations in the 1930s are revealing of today’s continuing conflict, but now waged with modern weapons, which include bombs, grenades, and RPG rockets.

In Chapter 39, he recalls that "three soldiers of Uncle Sam have had their roots firmly fixed in Zamboanga. One rose to the top of his profession to become the Commander-in-Chief of the American Armies in France." He obviously referred to General John J. Pershing, who fought the Moro Wars, then led the American Expeditionary Force in France in World War I. He’s remembered in Zambo, in one of its main plazas called Pershing Square.

"Another served well and faithfully as Governor General of Cuba and the Philippines until death called him to Arlington."

"The third was Papa as everybody called the ‘grand old man’ who had been a Lieutenant Colonel in the Scouts, Hurley said. He wasn’t a West Pointer, the writer took pains to point out. But he was great and brave, and "among the fierce Moros he was greatly beloved." (Didn’t mention Papa’s name, though, and I’m still puzzled.)

Among the heroic stories of Papa was the time he took a detail of six men over to Basilan and convinced a Moro bandit named Apaung to surrender to him.

"Another time, while I was in Zamboanga, we had a juramentado Moro in the marketplace. He wanted to kill a Christian or two and there was horror there in that market when the crazed Moro unsheathed his barong (sword) and went to work on the crowd. The market place emptied in a moment. There were citizens with shotguns and policemen with six-shooters. Everyone of them wanted to be the hero who went inside the building and killed that amuk Moro. None of them could quite make the grade. So we milled in front of the market place. Inside there was a Moro with a barong and he was very much alive. With him were two dead men. They had gone down with terrible suddenness before the swish of that razor-edged barong."

"Papa came down in his capacity of Commanding Officer of the Post . . . Two shots and then Papa and I opened the door. ‘It’s all over folks,’ we said."

In Chapter 42 (page 225), Hurley – ever the curious chronicler – tells of "coming back from Cotabato on the boat" where he "had as a fellow-passenger an old Spanish Jesuit . . . The second day at sea, we became friendly and the old fellow told me that he had been in the Philippines for 69 years!"

"It was in 1864 I came out in Mindanao," the old priest told him. Rafael de Echague y Bermingham had been the Spanish Governor-General then "and it had been one of the worst years for the Moro pirate raids. It had only been a few years before that Claveria had fought a terrible battle on Balanguingue Island with the corsair boats."

The old priest had known Spain in her golden days and in her decline, Hurley enthused and had seen things with his own eyes.

"Here was a man who had lived in Mindanao, penned within the massive stone walls of the forts the Spaniards had built against the Moros. He had gone through the terrible juramentado years of the Seventies (1870s) when Moro fanatics had raced the streets of the Spanish settlements."

"He told of the Mindanao campaigns of Terrero and the Moro wars conducted by General Weyler who had been brought down from Cuba to try and subjugate the Moros.

" ‘It was in February 1899,’ the old priest said, ‘that Spain made the last attack on the Moros. General Buille took an expedition against the Moros of Cotabato but the fighting lasted only a few days... America took over the islands’."

The old priest "had been an eyewitness to almost four decades of that terrific three-hundred-and-seventy-seven- year struggle with the Moros," Hurley stressed.

Hurley asked the priest about the Spanish capture of Jolo. The priest confirmed that Jolo had been taken by the Spanish Army under Malcampo in 1876. "Captain Gervera became the first military governor during that same year... I almost lost my faith sometimes. I was glad to see at last the Regiemento Rey y Reina march down the streets of Jolo. (The King’s and Queen’s Regiment)."

"You were with the party that captured Jolo?" Hurley asked, impressed.

" ‘I preceded them slightly, son,’ the old man answered. ‘I first went to Jolo in 1866. I was a captive of the Moros for ten years’."

At least, they hadn’t beheaded him.