Wayward and Fanciful
A different kind of war
"Years ago, every time I would go to sit down and talk with barangay officials or donor agencies, I would put my gun on the table before me. I left it there until it was time to go. I don't do that anymore. It's been a long time since I carried a gun," said the former MNLF commander.
If one thought hard enough, one could imagine this grizzled man holding a gun. The first time I met him, I ended up following him around off the beaten track for more than a day. He's past 50 and he still maintains the limber fitness of someone who had most likely been a soldier - and a good one at that. In unguarded moments, one catches him with that alert stillness that is second nature to someone who had been honed in a milieu of imminent combat. Here is a man who thin-slices every new element that comes into his subjective reality.
But today, the face he presents the world is that of a man who is quick to laugh and to offer his hand in friendship. Sharing the table at dinner some weeks back, I quietly asked him about his late teenage years. It probably is a question not many have asked in a long, long time. It took him a while to answer.
Discerning my sincere interest in his story, he slowly told me about his rite of passage. But too soon, dinner came to an end and we had to go. "You did not have an easy time when you were young," I said as we parted. He nodded in agreement. I forced my eyes off the marks of torture indelibly etched on his right wrist. I told him I would look him up soon.
Before October ended, I traveled five hours hoping to see him so we could talk some more. He was there waiting an hour when I walked in at 9:30.
"I have been traveling since 2:00am to get here," he said in welcome. "I came to see you."
And then we talked. We talked all day.
My friend comes from a family of Muslim farmers. As a child, he came to know the necessity of labor and the value of education. He put himself to school from the sweat of his own brow, eventually getting through his freshman year in college. It was then that Marcos declared war on Muslim rebels.
There were two things he realized when he turned sixteen. First, the western-influenced university education he was getting then posed a threat to the Islamic way of life. Second, he had to fight for the Bangsamoro. Marcos' war did not distinguish its enemies among the Muslims in Mindanao.
The fire of youth and the necessity of war allowed my friend to bring forth his leadership skills. At the height of the 80s war, his planning and coordination kept the MNLF troops in Davao del Sur and Davao del Norte supplied with arms and munitions.
He got caught during a bloody firefight where he lost three comrades. Their death is still cause for him to mourn even today. He realizes he might very well be the only one who remembers the memory of those fearless mujahideens.
He was tortured and jailed for close to two years, but he rejoined the MNLF as soon as he could. He went on to prove to be one of its fiercest warriors. Among his peers, he is recognized as a legend in guerilla warfare and mass organizing. He rose in rank until the MNLF stopped fighting.
In late 1996, he realized he did not want to be a soldier any more. Nor did he wish to be integrated into the Armed Forces of the Philippines. He chose to go home to be with his family.
Today, he is one of the guiding forces behind the effort to make the promise of the 1996 Final Peace Agreement work. It is his most fervent hope that the former conflict affected areas would become communities of peace and development.
"It's a different kind of war," he said. And like the fighter that he was, he wholeheartedly pursues the realization of the objective.
He strategizes to get people to come together to talk about what they need and what they already have that they can use. He networks with the end view of matching community needs with donor grants. He teaches people to manage and harness what Allah The Benevolent has seen fit to endow. He encourages the blessed to share their blessings.
"It took me a long time to trust that others really wanted to help my people," he said. But the post-FPA developments allowed him to hope. More than ten years after he embarked on his brand of development work, his healing presence has become familiar to the people rebuilding the communities where he had once supplied instruments of violence and destruction.
"My dream is that someday my people would be able to take care of their own needs without the help of donor agencies and institutions. I dream that the government would be all that my people would need, if they were to need any support agency," he said.
"What would you do when the donor agencies pull out?" I asked.
"I'll still be here working for my people," he said.
(Wayward and Fanciful is Gail Ilagan's column for MindaViews, the opinion section of MindaNews. Ilagan teaches Social Justice, Family Sociology, Theories of Socialization and Psychology at the Ateneo de Davao University where she is also the associate editor of Tambara. You may send comments to gail.ilagan@gmail.com.This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it "Send at the risk of a reply," she says.)