Cotabato conflicts - again, a flashback

As the hostilities in Cotabato are played up in the media with scenarios of combatants brandishing their firearms and armored personnel carriers rumbling through burning villages, I am reminded of the situation in that place in the early 1970s.

There was no MILF then nor MNLF but just loosely organized groups called Blackshirts and Baracudas. Known for their daredevil exploits, these rebels would pillage farm villages of Christian settlers especially those in remote areas. Torching of crops and houses was their usual strategy highlighted by massacres of civilians. Ambushing of vehicles too figured not just in out-of-the-way places but even in the highways connecting Cotabato City to the cities of Davao and General Santos.

On one occasion, for instance, the passenger bus I was taking was stopped by army troopers in a secluded area between Pikit and Pagalungan, both Muslim-occupied towns. We were made to come down the vehicle and as we did so the sound of gunfire was heard at a distance. Reflexively, we hit the ground and waited in fear what would happen next. To our relief, however, nothing happened and minutes later we were allowed to proceed on our trip. About a kilometer away we passed by still smoldering remains of what used to be a cluster of houses near which had gathered some troopers with armalites.

Traveling was therefore a risky thing during those days. Despite this, trips of passenger buses went on regularly. At times buses were torched and some commuters kidnapped but most of the passengers were usually left unmolested. Commercial vans shuttling from town to town were usually attacked and robbed resulting oftentimes in injury or death of their personnel. In our boarding house two of the five sales representatives of certain companies fell victims to this hazard although there was no fatality.

One gruesome incident I remember involved a young priest from Iloilo City named Nelson Javellana, OMB. He headed a Catholic school in a barrio adjacent to Tacurong, but at the same time was active in community work. At one time he was on board a van with eight other young men on their way to a peace rally in another town. They never reached their destination. Armed men waylaid them and every one was killed. When later, the bodies were recovered along with Fr. Javellana's these were found riddled with bullet holes and most of them were mutilated.

Incidents like this would generate anger among Christians in Mindanao. Usually, retaliatory actions would follow perpetrated by civilian militias who were allegedly armed by the military. One of such group was known as "Ilaga", headed by an Ilonggo called Tootpick, whose very name was the terror among Muslims. If the latter attacked Christians villages, Tootpick's men were quick to respond by assaulting Muslim settlements venting their ire even towards innocent men and women. So ferocious were the Ilaga that, as rumored, they first tortured their captives before putting them away.

Violence of course begets violence and so there was a cycle of atrocities alternating between Christians against Muslims and Muslims against Christians. Ethnic cleansing was not yet a known term in those days, but cleansing was happening in all its naked form, antedating what happened years later in Kosovo and Serbia and in many places in Africa.

What happened in Lanao three weeks ago when alleged break-away bands of MILF rained bullets in Christian towns and killed 37 hapless residents was a temptation for something akin to ethnic cleansing. That's why some hawkish officials talked of all-out war. But of course a war against our own brother Filipinos would be a war against our own nationhood. That would be the start of the breaking apart of this country and we would end up as disparate culture groups always trying to get hold of each other's throat.

Besides, we have not exhausted the various aspects of the peace process. True, that MOA on ancestral domain has been junked and for good reason. But this does not mean the end of efforts to negotiated peace among the Islam worshippers in Mindanao. Every Christian who has spent years in that part of the country is aware of the frustration and the desperation felt by every Muslim there. It is this feeling that should be assuaged in any efforts to solve this problem.

Without doubt, those two renegade MILF commanders should be brought to justice. But in the process caution is necessary to keep the situation in the south under control. Revenge is sweet, they say, but to a civilized mind, more, to a Christian mind, revenge has no place.