THE atrocities perpetrated by breakaway bandits in Maguindanao tested once more the sincerity and dedication of relief workers to serve under fire and they, once more, exemplified courage and love of work as they walked the tightrope when they, too, became subject of harassments.
Even as the smoke has cleared, thousands of people, about many of them children and women, remain languishing in squalid evacuation sites in five Maguindanao municipalities Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Movement (BIFM) bandits attacked.
Physician Tahir Sulaik, chief of the Maguindanao Integrated Provincial Health Office, and Pombaen Karon Kader, the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao’s assistant regional social welfare secretary, both said the situation figured by their subordinates, some of them near brushed with death, scared them.
“It was something they did not experience during the conflicts in Central Mindanao in 2000, in 2003, and in 2008,” Sulaik said.
Kader said they were even forced to repeatedly suspend for several hours their relief works in evacuation centers in Datu Saudi town when BIFM fighters came too close, in total disregard of the presence of thousands of evacuees in the area.
Kader, who saw action as a young amazon of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) in the 1970s, said she, too, got scared with the BIFM’s attacks in supposedly demilitarized relief sites.
“We have to run and take cover and relocate the evacuees and our workers to safer areas. This is something we haven’t experienced before,” Kader said.
Sulaik, who hails from Shariff Aguak, said what is consoling for him was that health workers who figured in the incidents returned the next day and resumed with their works.
True indeed, the affected health and social workers consoled themselves spoofing about their experiences, making anecdotes and stories intended to let them laugh.
“The incidents emboldened them to continue with their assignments and challenged them to help victims of these senseless violent attacks. Imagine? Even evacuation sites get attacked? This is something new to us,” Sulaik said.
The ARMM police, the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, and Army units in the five towns the BIFM attacked- Datu Saudi, Guindulungan, Datu Unsay, Shariff Aguak, and Ampatuan, all in the second district of Maguindanao, are now preparing criminal charges against all members of the BIFM’s central leadership core and its spokesman, Abu Misry Mama.
Mama announced over Catholic station dxMS, Cotabato City’s pioneer broadcast outfit, the attacks were meant to retaliate for the deaths of several comrades in recent encounters with the military in Maguindanao and Basilan, and to disprove assertions the BIFM is nothing but a “crackpot” and a ragtag band of rogue rebels.
The BIFM intensified its attacks, targeting evacuation centers and attempting to topple down more power relay pylons in Maguindanao and North Cotabato just an hour after warning last Tuesday, over dxMS, of more atrocities in response to Army counter-offensives.
BIFM rebels felled wooden electric posts carrying high-tension wires connecting a power relay station in Datu Saudi to at least 10 surrounding towns, plunging them into total darkness, in the second day of their incursions that started before midnight last Sunday.
Sulaik said his subordinates remain committed to work, even if they know of the dangers they are to face.
Lt. Col. Benjie Hao, commanding officer of the Army’s 7th Infantry Battalion, said BIFM bandits have attempted to pull off attacks meant to make the lives of innocent people difficult.
Hao said bandits even tried to topple down a steel power transmission tower in Barangay Galakit in Pagalungan, Maguindanao using improvised explosive device (IED) they attached to its columns.
The IEDs all detonated, but failed to destroy the tower.
Local officials said the government should treat the BIFM only as a rogue Moro faction like the Abu Sayyaf, which has no political and religious directions.
“Evacuees from areas affected by the BIFM’s felonious acts thought before that the group was pursuing an Islamic discourse, one based on the Islamic principle of genuine peace and harmony with all people, regardless of religions, in furthering its cause,” a former member of the Maguindanao Provincial Board told The Mindanao Cross.
Islam, for most moderate Muslim scholars, has profound teachings on humane treatment of war victims and prisoners, particularly children and women.
Islamic history books tell of how Islam’s progenitor, Mohammad, ordered his Army not to destroy or burn houses, cut trees and destroy crops, and citadels that can be used as shelters for refugees, before sending them to fight superior pagan forces in the ancient Arabian desert sprawling from Mecca and Medina into what are now the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and surrounding now independent Arab nations.
Teachings also point out that it is also obligatory among all Muslims to give decent burial to enemies killed in battle and feed children orphaned in war.
“The BIFM has marginalized its image into nothing but a criminal gang that true Muslims in Mindanao ought to condemn,” said Ustadz Salik, a preacher in a Madrasah (Islamic school) Datu Odin Sinsuat town in the first district of Maguindanao.
Members of the Municipal Peace and Order Councils in Maguindanao’s conflict-stricken towns have confirmed it is not Kato, who is still recuperating from paralysis that resulted from a hypertensive stroke last year, who is running the show.
“There are radical jihadists in their ranks who instigated the conflict,” said a local official in Shariff Aguak.
The ongoing military operations against forces of the BIFM that carried out the attacks on military positions and farming villages in Maguindanao are all but a “brigade level” police action, according to the commander of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division, Maj. Gen. Rey Ardo.
“The operations against the BIFM are calibrated police actions no more no less. There is no truth to mounting notions that we’re in a war,” Ardo said.
Ardo said the Army’s anti-BIFM operations are, in fact, only being supervised by officers of the 1st Mechanized Infantry Brigade and the 601st Brigade based in Barangay Kalandagan in Tacurong City. (JOHN M. UNSON)