The War from Campo Muslim

From my conversations with Campo Muslim residents I received, in addition to the picture of the war as it occurred in their community, a broad depiction of the Bangsamoro Rebellion as experienced by ordinary Muslims. The most recurrent image presented in these accounts was one of acute loss. When residents remembered the war, they rarely emphasized their personal afflictions, instead matter-of-factly cataloguing the damage wrought by the conflagration that swept over them. The composite story, however, was a chronicle of immense suffering and devastation. Nearly every resident I spoke with had lost a close relative and many mourned more than one family member killed in the fighting. Most had been driven from their land, often after their homes and livestock had been destroyed. In 1985 I met numerous farmers who had yet to replace draft animals shot or stolen during the war. I heard of other farmers who, having returned to farm their land after the cease-fire, were killed by roving bandits or, in some cases, by unexploded ordnance.

Almost all families had lost valuable family heirlooms (pusaka ), most often gold jewelry, but also brass pieces, antique porcelain jars, decorated chests, swords, and fine textiles. These treasured items, many of which were important ritual items in traditional celebrations, were either stolen by the military or sold to meet the subsistence needs of war refugees. They had been held in families for generations but are now rarely seen among ordinary Muslims in Cotabato. In addition to losing homes and loved ones, many Campo Muslim residents were thus also culturally impoverished as a result of the war, having lost key heirloom items that served as material representations of cherished cultural traditions.

The severe losses described by Muslim noncombatants, together with the casualties suffered by rank-and-file rebels, provoke the questions addressed in this section: how did ordinary Muslims understand this costly struggle? What was their primary impetus for joining or supporting the rebels? To what extent were the key symbols and goals of Muslim nationalist ideologues shared by rank-and-file fighters and supporters? In what follows, I focus first on the experiences of rank-and-file insurgents and on the unofficial songs that expressed their sentiments about the rebellion. I then consider the understandings of ordinary Muslim civilians and especially the magical stories that voiced both their support for the rebellion as well as their dissent from official Muslim separatist rhetoric. Together, these unauthorized narratives demonstrate the remarkable degree to which the experiences, interpretations, and motivations of the ordinary fighters differed from those of movement leaders.

The Experiences of Rank-and-File Insurgents

Among the Campo Muslim residents (and their friends and relatives) who spoke with me about the rebellion, a number were former or current insurgents. It became clear from our conversations that certain motivations and sentiments were strongly shared among all of them. Not surprisingly, all the fighters expressed enmity toward the martial law regime and a desire to be free of its rule. Virtually all of them reported that they had joined the rebellion to defend themselves and their families against the Philippine government. Some also expressed a desire to protect Philippine Muslims and the Islamic faith against attack. With five of the former combatants I also conducted detailed interviews concerning their wartime experiences. Four of them had joined the armed resistance in 1971 or 1972, before the declaration of martial law, in order to defend themselves and other Muslims against the Ilaga and the military. The following quotes from two of the former fighters are typical: "The rise of the Ilaga caused young Muslims such as me to join the front to defend the people as fighters, to protect the people and Islam": "I joined because of the violence created by the Ilaga; because there was no place safe during the trouble at that time." The fifth fighter, a local commander, joined the rebels immediately after the declaration of martial law for reasons somewhat more particular: "I was an enlisted man in the army in the late 1960s. When my enlistment was up I went to college. But when martial law was declared I

was called up again—required to reenlist—even though I had been disqualified more than once because of illness. Still, they accused me of being AWOL, so I went to the mountains [and joined the rebels]."

Rebel fighters, in general, were very young, mostly fifteen to twenty-five year olds. Two of the fighters I interviewed enlisted as teenagers (fifteen and sixteen years old) and two others joined in their very early twenties. The last fighter, Nasser, was twelve years old when he joined the rebels in 1972. As he remembers, "I was the youngest in my squad. I wore short pants, even into combat."

Each of these fighters received some sort of formal training, those who joined earlier being trained multiple times. Nasser, who received the most training, was trained five separate times, gaining instruction in armed combat, jungle survival, and treatment of civilians, as well as political instruction in "strong resistance." Muslim clerics figured significantly in the armed separatist leadership in Cotabato in the 1980s and some had substantial roles during the war as well. The fighters I talked to had different amounts of contact with clerics, as suggested in the remembrances of two fighters: "There were no ustadzes [Islamic teachers] in our camp. The only ustadz I knew was Kudin, who was also a rebel but not a commander"; "The ulama [clerics] supported the rebels through education. They also joined the combatants. Ustadz Kusain was the chaplain of my zone. Ustadz Hassan was a member of the general staff. He was a commander and a companion of Hashim Salamat, a graduate of al-Azhar and a one-time military trainee in Syria." All the fighters interviewed reported receiving support from Muslim noncombatants: "The Muslim populace supported the rebels 100 percent. Often money given to the people by the government was given by them to us"; "We supported ourselves through contributions from civilians, including businessmen. This supplemented what we received from abroad." Each of the fighters, as recorded in the following five quotes, recalled the hardships and losses that they, their companions, and Cotabato Muslims in general suffered; they also remembered the exhilaration of struggling, and often prevailing, against great odds:

Military operations in my zone started in 1973. There were air attacks and artillery. There were also tanks and napalm and helicopters. But many soldiers died. The army only controlled the areas within the poblacions [towns proper]. There were many abuses by soldiers: they raped and murdered civilians; they looted and destroyed houses, mosques, and schools. The army even declared Pagalungan and Carmen municipalities no-man's lands [free-fire zones].

I took part in three battles in Sulun. The first lasted one day, the second lasted seven days, and the third lasted twenty-nine days. There were only one hundred men against three battalions of the AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) with air and sea support. We had only seventy guns. Some were homemade. We had no M16s, only Garands and BARs [Browning automatic rifles]. My young fighters were very brave. They were angry if they couldn't fight. They regarded the war almost as if it were a game.

The second battle I took part in was in Biniruan, close to the city. The army used tanks and battalions of troops. We lost one dead and two wounded. Many soldiers were killed. Our commander waited until the soldiers were very close to us, not much more than five meters, until he gave the order to fire. That was to make sure we could kill the soldiers.

We suffered injuries and deaths at every fight. In my first battle we had thirty casualties because we were ambushed by the military while marching. We were on our way to reinforce our comrades in Midsayap when we were ambushed. The ambush was actually an accident because we were passing on parallel paths. We retreated into the forest. Two of my friends were killed. Many soldiers were killed in every encounter.

I fought at Tran in 1973. There were only thirty of us fighters, but many civilians. They had been abandoned by Datu Guiwan Mastura when he surrendered and went to Manila. He was not a true rebel. The government used jets against us and many civilians died. The army was only able to capture civilians there, and those they captured they abused . . . My father, brother and sister were killed by the army.

None of the five fighters I spoke with ever surrendered officially to the government. Two remained under arms in rebel encampments. The other three considered themselves inactive rebels, having returned from the hills and forests to civilian life but willing to take up arms again should the need arise. Each of the three returnees left the rebel ranks after the cease-fire. One returned home because his commander went home. Nasser, the youngest, went back to civilian life to attend high school. Those who remained under arms bore no ill will toward those who returned home. Instead, they considered them inactive reserves in the continuing struggle. They were even sparing in their criticism of those commanders and followers who surrendered early to the government and received compensation, remarking only that they "lacked determination." This remarkably tolerant stance toward early rebel defectors contrasts with official pronouncements by the separatist leadership and indicates both a divergence from official attitudes and an appreciation for the political (and moral) complexities of a largely defensive insurgency. Additional evidence for the independent

perceptions of rank-and-file rebels is found in the unofficial songs composed and performed in rebel camps.

Rank-and-File Perspectives: Rebel Songs in Campo Muslim

A number of the political idioms that the rank-and-file fighters employed (in some cases self-consciously) in our conversations were identical to those advanced by rebel leaders. At the same time, it was striking to note how rarely any of the insurgents, in expressing their motivations for taking up arms or fighting on against great odds, made spontaneous mention of either the Moro nation (Bangsamoro) or Islamic renewal, the two central components of Muslim nationalist ideology.^[9] Direct interviews were not my primary means for discovering rank-and-file perceptions of the ethnonational rebellion. A richer source of information was the songs and stories of the rebellion that community residents shared with one another and repeated to me. Those narratives reinforced the impressions gained from interviews that unofficial understandings of the rebellion were not congruent with its official ideology.

One night in Campo Muslim I happened upon a performance of rebel songs in the house of Kasan Kamid. His elder brother was visiting on a short leave from his overseas job in Saudi Arabia and had arranged to make a recording of a performance to take back with him. I added my tape recorder, and over two nights I recorded almost three hours of songs performed by a young man with a splendid voice and a battered guitar.

I later heard some of the same songs performed in a variety of public settings: at political rallies, on Muslim radio shows, and on jukeboxes in Muslim coffeehouses throughout the city. Most of the songs had been composed between 1973 and 1977 (the period of the armed rebellion) by three renowned singers. All three were rank-and-file insurgents from lower-class backgrounds. One of the three was killed during the fighting. The other two became well-known after the cease-fire in 1977, when they began to perform the songs in public. Before 1977, they were sung almost exclusively in rebel camps to fighters. The man whose performance I recorded is an illiterate dockworker. Too young to have fought in the armed rebellion, he is a second-generation singer who was taught the songs by the most active of the original composers.

Rebel songs comprise a new and distinct genre of Muslim popular music. The songs share Western harmonic features and a common topical content, with all lyrics addressing some aspect of the armed rebellion. While traditional phrasings are occasionally present, all the songs exhibit a modern lyrical style. Some, especially those songs concerned with forced separations or unrequited love, are variations on a novel song form popular in the years prior to the rebellion. From the mid-1950s, local singers had put Magindanaon lyrics to the melodies of popular Filipino love songs heard on the radio (whose original lyrics were in Tagalog, Visayan, or English).^[10] These adaptations, especially popular among teenagers (Wein 1985), differed in lyrical style from traditional love ballads, which are distinguished by the obliquity of their metaphors. The new ballads are, by contrast, notable for their directness of expression. Rebel singers used these popular love songs as the basis for many of their ballads.

Other rebel songs, usually up-tempo, inspirational pieces, borrow motifs and melodies from contemporaneous Filipino or American popular music. The following song, "Mana Silan Cowboy" ("They Are Like Cowboys"), is sung to the melody of Glenn Campbell's 1975 American hit record "Rhinestone Cowboy."^[11]

Nineteen seventy-one
taman ku seventy-nine,
entu ba su lagun mayaw
su rebolusyon
siya kanu embala-bala
a inged u mga Moro.
Guden makating-guma
su Paminasakan.

Natadin su mga manguda,
lu silan natimu u damakayu.
Mana silan cowboy,
di magilek masabil.
Mawasa, mamala;
ulanan a sinangan
kanu mga lalan.
Namba su paninindeg.

From nineteen seventy-one
until nineteen seventy-nine,
those were the years when the
revolution was raging
throughout all the different
communities of the Moros.

It was the time when the
Destroyer had come among us.

The young men at first were scattered, but they gathered together deep in the forest.
They are like cowboys,
unafraid to be martyred.
[They fight] wet or dry;
they are soaked by the rain and scorched by the sun along the way.
These are the revolutionaries.^[12]

While putting Magindanaon lyrics to nonindigenous melodies is certainly not a new undertaking (it may be traced to the late American period), the combination of melodies, lyrics, and topics found in rebel songs does constitute a distinct popular genre that offers a source of grassroots expressions of support for the armed separatist struggle. As noted above, the songs are of two types. The majority are ballads of separation or loss, lamenting loved ones left behind by rebels gone to fight in the forest. The rest, as with "Mana Silan Cowboy," are patriotic songs, glorifying the struggle and extolling the virtues of the fighters and their commanders. The following introductory stanzas from two songs exemplify each type:

Song 1

Manguda a inendan sangat
I kamiskin nin.
Uway den u inendan
paninindeg ku inged,
Jihad pi Sabilillah.
Ayag tig i inendan,
sekami a paninindeg pimbulugan sa limu
na inenggan sa tademan.
Tademan di lipatan.

Uway den u inendan na
rasay rumasay kami
sa hadapan sa Kadenan
ka Jihad pi Sabilillah
taman den sa kapatay.
O seka papedtayan na
pamimikilan ka den.

The young man whom you rejected
was a poor man, it's true.
But now he's fighting for the homeland
and offering his life
in the struggle for the faith.

I whom you rejected say to you,
that we the fighters are shown mercy and are given recognition,
given recognition that will
never be forgotten.

Yes, you've refused me, it's true.
Yet we fighters suffer hardship
till we stand before our God;
we will sacrifice ourselves
for the sake of our religion
until the day we die.
Oh my beloved, please consider this.

Song 2

Aden maulad a lupa
a gadung a pedsandengen
na san bun ba i dalepa ni Hadji Murad.
Pagagayan, panandeng, ka pamagayanan nilan
i sundalo a pagukit ka di nilan kalininyan
madala su Agama.

Ka duwan nengka den, Marcos
ka di ka den makandatu ka inagawan
ka nilan ku bangku nengka matilak
bangunan sa Mindanao.

Behold in the distance
a wide green land.
That land is the abode
of Hadji Murad.
[The fighters] lie in wait
for the soldiers to approach,
for they never will allow
their religion to be lost.

Oh Marcos, you are pitiful
for you can no longer rule here.
They have seized from you
your splendid throne,
the realm of Mindanao.

These two sets of lyrics, typical of the discourse found in rebel songs, are revealing both for what they voice and do not voice about the objectives of the rebellion. Song 1 combines the themes of romantic redemption and religious struggle as a rejected suitor seeks to convince the woman for whom he yearns that the rebellion has introduced new standards of worthiness. It expresses in its opening lines a significant independent incentive for taking part in the rebellion: fighting as a

perceived avenue for poor men of low status to improve their relative social standing. As nearly all rank-and-file insurgents were drawn from subordinate classes, the composer, in framing this ballad as a poor man's entreaty, gives voice to social resentments and aspirations broadly shared by his principal audience.

Two central concepts found in most of the rebel songs—"inged" (community or homeland) and "jihad" (struggle in defense of the faith)—are textually coupled in the first song.^[13] The inged is the socio-cultural entity in need of defense. As a term referring to any sociopolitical collectivity larger than that found at a single residence site, "inged" is usually glossed as "settlement" or "community" but may also be used to refer more broadly to a "homeland." Though both terms reference political entities, "inged" and "bangsa" possess quite different connotative meanings. "Bangsa" may be glossed as "country," "nation," "race," "ethnic group," or "tribe" (Fleischman et al. 1981, 10). As used in the term "Bangsamoro," "bangsa" describes an imagined community—an ethnic nation . "Inged," on the contrary, denotes a familiar, territorially bounded, and, often, face-to-face community. In none of the rebel songs I recorded (some in multiple versions) did the terms "bangsa" or "Bangsamoro" ever occur. "Moro" appears only once, in the song "Mana Silan Cowboy" in conjunction with "inged" in a phrase referring to the geographical extent of the rebellion, which is said to be raging "siya kanu embala-bala a inged u mga Moro" (in all the different ingeds of the Philippine Muslims). While fighting for the inged is not alternative to fighting for the nation (bangsa), neither is it simply a subjacent goal. If it were, one would expect at least an occasional reference to the "bangsa" that has subsumed the various ingeds. These are not found in the songs, nor were they heard to any measurable degree in the many private and public conversations I had with rank-and-file fighters or their civilian supporters. Fighting for the inged is a collateral goal—one conceptually distinct from the nationalist project but germane to it.

In song 1, "inged" and "jihad" are thematically linked: the community being defended is the indigenous community of the faithful. Song 2 extends this theme. There, the inged to be protected is the homeland of Cotabato Muslims.^[14] In these lyrics, Cotabato is represented as the dalepa , or occupied territory, of Hadji Murad, the commander of the Cotabato rebels. The rebels have repulsed Ferdinand Marcos the invader (signified in the song "Mana Silan Cowboy" as "the Destroyer") and recovered from him his bangunan , the territory ruled by him in

Muslim Mindanao. The rebels are ready to repel all military counterattacks in order to preserve their religion. This second song expresses the fighters' particular notion of jihad—armed resistance to the specific aggressive actions of the martial law state, personified by Marcos. For rank-and-file rebels, struggle in defense of Islam was coincident with armed defense of cultural tradition, property, livelihood, and life. In this song as in the first, those sentiments are expressed in the language of locality and territoriality—"lupa" (land), "dalepa" (occupied territory), and "bangunan" (realm)—rather than in terms of nationality.

Divine Mercy and Divergent Evaluations: The Rebellion According to its Ordinary Adherents

What of the understandings of ordinary Muslim civilians, nearly all of whom supported the rebels during the insurgency in Cotabato? The official ideology of the Muslim separatist movement was not widely disseminated to non-elite Muslim civilians during the armed phase of the rebellion. Rebel ideologues were in self-imposed exile abroad, and Campo Muslim residents told me they possessed little or no knowledge of rebel leaders beyond the level of local commanders until after the first cease-fire in 1977. Even after the cease-fire, when key separatist symbols were more effectively presented to the Muslim populace, they did not readily take hold. The residents of Campo Muslim were generally familiar with the nationalist rhetoric of the rebellion, but even after years of appeals to Bangsamoro nationhood continued to denominate themselves either as "Muslims," which was also the term used by local Christians to refer to them, or by the name of their particular ethnolinguistic group, rather than identify themselves as "Moros."

Muslim civilians did identify strongly with rebel fighters during the insurgency, viewing them as their primary protectors from the murderous hostility of the military. A rebel commander remarked to me that early in the rebellion Muslim civilians provided little support to the insurgents but that the depredations of the Philippine military quickly gained adherents for the rebel cause.^[15] He added that other factors intensified support for the insurgency: "The government caused the masses to support the rebels, especially after the Ilaga were formed into CHDF units. When the government realized the damaging effect of that decision, they organized Muslim CHDF units, but ten men would only receive two guns. Most datus, however, were afraid to support the rebels."

As the government's campaign against Muslim insurgents intensified, military attacks on Muslim civilians multiplied, further alienating ordinary Muslims from the Philippine state and solidifying their identification with the rebellion.^[16] Popular support for the rebels was expressed symbolically in popular narratives of the divine mercy shown to rebels. In accord with cultural practices widespread in Southeast Asian warfare, individual rebel fighters sought magical powers—especially invulnerability to blades and bullets—through the use of spells, amulets, and other manifestations of esoteric knowledge (see Bowen 1993; Kiefer 1972; Reid 1988).^[17] Distinguishable from these individual acquisitions of magical protection was the popular belief in divine mercy (limu a Kadenan ) bestowed collectively on all rebel fighters (expressed in the first verse of song 1 above).

Divine mercy was most often manifested as supernatural assistance received from local spirits. Popular narratives relate how government boats were overturned and attacking soldiers devoured by spirit crocodiles. These pagali (literally, relatives)—ancestor spirits who appear in the form of crocodiles—were described for me by a Campo Muslim resident in the following account: "The pagali are large crocodiles with bands of yellow around their necks. In times past, people would place food on the riverbanks as offerings to petition them for favors. These stories are hundreds of years old, but we have proof that these spirit crocodiles still exist because they assisted the fighters during the rebellion. Once, in fact, when a carnival came to Cotabato City during the war, the government soldiers arrived and shot all the crocodiles on display there."

The most frequently reported instance of supernatural assistance was that received from a class of spirits known as tunggu a inged , or Guardians of the Inged. The tunggu a inged may appear as animals, birds, or even insects but very often take the form of giants (masela a mama —literally, large men) as described in the following narrative:

The masela a mama are not always visible. They appear only to certain people at special times. They live in remote places and stand more than fifteen feet tall. Before the coming of Sarip Kabungsuwan [the man who brought Islam to Cotabato] they were always visible, but they became frightened of him. They said: "His voice is louder than ours." They assisted our forefathers long before the rebellion. The individual who saw one of them would know that something was about to happen—usually something bad—and prepare for it. The masela a mama aided the rebels during the conflict by guiding them through valleys at night. At other times they would create fog so the enemy could not see the rebels. One

day during the war, my uncle, a commander, was sleeping in camp after the midday meal when he woke to see one. He told his men, "We must leave this place." As soon as they had left, artillery shells began to fall on their camp.^[18]

These and other unauthorized narratives illustrate how those deemed to be fighting for the inged were afforded divine mercy in the form of supernatural assistance from local spirits, most prominently from the supernatural guardians of the inged.^[19]

Unofficial interpretations of the events of the rebellion were also vehicles for ordinary followers to express their approval or disapproval of its developments. For illustration, we may examine the operation of subordinate perspectives in regard to rebel commanders who defected from the separatist cause. Defections were a serious problem for the Cotabato rebel leadership. The martial law regime offered substantial economic and political incentives for rebel commanders to "return to the folds of the law." Stories told by Muslim subordinates recount how some of those defections provoked supernatural sanctions. The following narrative concerns the tribulations of one of the best-known rebel commanders, Disumimba Rashid, after he surrendered to the government for the promise of a large sum of money: "Disumimba was a notorious outlaw who joined the MNLF and became a famous fighter. He possessed the power to transform himself into grass or a tree or an animal. However, many misfortunes befell him after he surrendered: motors on military boats that carried him would fail and tires blew out on trucks in which he rode. He was finally killed a few years ago for unknown reasons." Disumimba's eventual violent death attested to the failure of his protective magic and the withdrawal of divine mercy.

Other prominent defections were evaluated quite differently by ordinary Muslims. The three well-known defecting commanders depicted above—Peping Candao, Commander Jack, and Tocao Mastura—surrendered to the government contemporaneously with Disumimba Rashid, yet none of the them was reported to have suffered any divine retribution and all three remained popular with Muslim subordinates long after their defections. Their contrasting fortunes relate to their postdefection activities. Each was instrumental in insulating poor Muslim communities from many of the daily predations of the Philippine military. Disumimba provided no comparable postdefection services and the popular assessment of his abandonment of the rebellion appears to reflect that fact. Although all four defections were identically injurious to the rebel cause, and the defectors equally condemned by

rebel leaders, the estimations of Muslim subordinates centered on a separate set of considerations, most immediately a concern with securing protection from state aggression.

Perhaps the most poignant instance of unauthorized understandings by subordinate adherents concerns a special sort of divine mercy shown to sabil , or rebel martyrs, as described in the following account: "Previously, when the fighters were killed, their bodies did not smell bad or decompose, even for one entire week. The bodies exuded a pleasant fragrance. They had the scent of flowers. They were real mujahideen (those engaged in a struggle for the faith) who fought and died for Allah." As this passage suggests, these perceptions have a distinct periodicity. At one point in the rebellion this mercy ceased and rebel corpses decomposed just as those of government soldiers. The previous quote continues: "Later, if the rebels fought the soldiers or paramilitaries they would all smell bad; because now it was all just for politics." That perceptual shift on the part of followers demarcated the post-cease-fire period of late-1977 to 1980, a phase of the armed rebellion marked by the urbanization of the war, political infighting between rebel factions, and general confusion and disillusionment. Rebel actions had come to resemble "normal" political activity rather than jihad, and as a result divine mercy had been withdrawn.

The belief in the magical preservation of the corpses of slain rebels was widely shared among rebels and their supporters and was sanctioned by Islamic clerics. Ordinary followers, nonetheless, separately established clear limits to such divine evidence of participation in a righteous struggle. Despite rebel leaders' assertions of the integrity of both the armed struggle and the bodies of recently slain fighters, Muslim subordinates observed only deterioration. That withdrawal of blessing was an expression of their assessment, based on shared experience, of the "normal" political activity of Muslim leaders.