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Redeeming Maguindanao
MANILA — The government acts swiftly to ease mounting calls to bring the perpetrators of the Maguindanao massacre to justice. In one day the Armed Forces of the Philippines was able to accomplish what it should have done in the last decade: disable the 4 Special Paramilitary Forces in Maguindanao province comprising about 400 armed men responsible for sowing terror and other unspeakable atrocities in the area.
On the morning of November 26, government soldiers also disarmed these so-called special military forces in Maguindanao. The Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) also took control of the Philippine National Police, a wise move as the loyalties of many local policemen there, are questionable. Reports say many of them may have taken part in the gruesome killings. That’s why various police chiefs have also been relieved, while investigations into the involvement of political kingpin and Maguindanao ruler Andal Ampatuan Jr. in the deaths of at least 57 people including 27 journalists continue.
During Thursday’s joint press conference by the DILG, PNP and AFP, Ronaldo Puno vowed to hunt down everyone involved in the Maguindanao carnage on November 23, 2009. This means investigating and making subsequent arrests of about a hundred men, believed to have performed major and minor roles from killing everyone on the Mangudadatu convoy, to the backhoe operator who dug up the mass grave.
The widely condemned and unthinkably heinous massacre has told to the world the story of this part of the Philippines that has been entangled in a twisted, dystopic reality for decades now. If something good is ever going to come out of the Maguindanao Massacre, it would perhaps be the liberation of the province from the forces and powers that deliberately left its people poor, desolate, and silently suffering from human rights violations committed on them habitually. Many residents of Maguindanao have been deprived of justice and robbed of other opportunities for personal growth enjoyed by fellow Filipinos governed by less ruthless leaders elsewhere in the country.
In my very brief soujourn in Maguindanao early this year, I was awed by the beauty of its serene and verdant landscape traversed by a long lonely highway. If I didn’t know about the place’s bloody past and uncertain present, I would have envisioned Maguindanao as heaven on earth.
I was traveling from Cotabato to General Santos City via Maguindanao and I may have passed and gazed at the same site where a horrific massacre was to take place in the months to come.
Maguindanao is a province of contradictions.
The lush beauty of roadside nature in Maguindanao is not an indication that behind and beyond the bushes there is meaningful human existence. The truth is, there is no economic life, no community living in harmony and peace, no success story of people rising above their own personal circumstances through education, prolific employment or equal opportunity.
Perhaps the most imposing symbol of the dormant social justice in the area is the provincial capitol, a palatial structure standing prominently in the middle of an ocean of shanties.
Every so often along the lonely national highway in the towns of Ampatuan to Sultan Kudarat, small human settlements made up of uniformly sized box houses would interrupt one’s view of pristine rolling plains. These are actually relocation sites for communities driven away by conflict in the hinterlands. They are called “the Bakwits”, local slang for “evacuees” a poignant reminder of the raging wars in the heart of Maguindanao and the attendant suffering of its people due to atrocities committed on them by both the enemy and the forces that defend them.
Before the massacre it seemed like the entire nation has turned a blind eye on the suffering of the Maguindanaoans, while its rulers continue to brandish wanton efforts to keep the citizenry impoverished. The absence of schools, learning facilities, agricultural support, people empowerment and development in the area are casually accepted realities as the anecdotal 12-0 win for the administration party in the last election courtesy of massive cheating in the province.
Ironically, it took the deaths of 57 people for the whole country to snap out of its indifference. May no blood be further shed and may the Maguindanao we know, be a thing of the past.
