Chapter 8
Regarding the War from Campo Muslim

The Bangsamoro War and the Meaning of Campo Muslim

The Bangsamoro Rebellion was waged as an intense armed struggle from late 1972 until early 1977. A negotiated cease-fire held for most of 1977, but by 1978 fighting had resumed, albeit at a somewhat reduced intensity. It was not until 1980 that armed clashes became infrequent and the separatist movement assumed a mostly unarmed form. This chapter returns us to the Cotabato City community known as Campo Muslim. As an urban poor community sheltering a large number of war refugees, Campo Muslim is an appropriate site from which to begin an investigation of the Bangsamoro Rebellion from the point of view of the rank-and-file insurgents and supporters who suffered the greatest losses of the war.

The term "Campo Muslim" denotes a bounded Muslim community in a city in which Christians predominate, thus signifying the accelerated marginalization of Cotabato's indigenous Muslims in their own traditional capital. The community's name also suggests a second significance. Campo Muslim is the site of a concentrated and self-consciously Muslim population. As such, it has always been viewed by separatist leaders as a vital resource for waging the Muslim nationalist struggle. There is yet another meaning to be found in Campo Muslim.

It is an urban poor community composed primarily of residents who are self-evidently impoverished not only in relation to the Christians who control the city but also by comparison to various other urban Muslims, including virtually all of those who seek their political support.

In this chapter and the two that follow, I examine the nature of rank-and-file participation in the Muslim separatist movement by exploring the interplay between these three meanings of Campo Muslim—as marginalized indigenous community, Muslim community, and urban poor community. In its every aspect, Campo Muslim provides the ideal setting to investigate contemporary Muslim politics (and especially Muslim nationalist politics) from the perspective of ordinary Muslims. Here I focus on the Bangsamoro Rebellion as experienced in and viewed from Campo Muslim. In particular, I argue (based on evidence collected in Campo Muslim) that ordinary fighters and followers of the separatist rebellion held views and produced symbols of the armed struggle that differed markedly from those promoted by movement leaders.

The Construction of Campo Muslim

A prominent datu politician, in a 1985 speech to support the reelection of Ferdinand Marcos, expressed the opinion of many of his fellow members of the Cotabato Muslim establishment when he stated that the most significant architectural accomplishment of the martial law period in Cotabato was the construction of the impressive Regional Autonomous Government (RAG) complex at the edge of the city. I was unable to find any poor Muslim resident of Cotabato City who shared that assessment. Most of those whom I asked had never been to the RAG Complex, for lack of travel fare or interest. Some of them referred to the complex bitterly as "the Graveyard of the Martyrs," inasmuch as it had been built on the site of a celebrated battlefield of the rebellion. In respect to most of its residents, it would be far more accurate to say that the construction of Campo Muslim was the most notable architectural consequence of martial law and the Bangsamoro Rebellion.

The story of the creation of Campo Muslim as a refuge for Muslims displaced from other communities because of political violence or economic loss is best introduced through the words and experiences of two early migrants to the community.

The Case of Kasan Kamid

In 1986, Kasan Kamid was a thirty-five-year-old resident of Campo Muslim, married with four children. He supported his family by working as a middleman in the public market—buying coconuts or other produce from farmers or wholesalers at the river pier and selling them to retailers or retailing them himself at the nearby marketplace. A community organizer, he had established a residents' association in his Campo Muslim neighborhood to resist evictions, and organized Muslim street vendors to fight attempts by city authorities to remove them from the street fronting the public market.

Kasan is Iranun, and he was born in the city to a family of farmers originally from Nuling (now known as Sultan Kudarat), the coastal municipality just north of the city on the opposite side of the Pulangi River. His father owned three hectares of land in Nuling as part of a larger family holding but moved his family to Cotabato City in the 1950s, at a time when cigarette smuggling had begun to create economic opportunities for Muslims in the city. Kasan's parents operated a tiny stall in Matampay, a Muslim urban community on the river, where they sold nipa, vegetables, and bananas. His father often returned to Nuling to help his siblings harvest coconuts and rice.

In the early 1960s, Kasan's father purchased through installment payments ten hectares of land in a hilly region sixteen kilometers from the city near the main road running east. He relocated the family there and attempted to grow cash crops such as mongo beans and corn. In 1965 their water buffalo was stolen and the family, unable to replace it or to support themselves solely on the farm without it, moved back to the city. There, Kasan's mother again worked as a vendor while his father continued to work his land as best he could, traveling back and forth to the farm. In 1970 their house at the farm site was burned by the Ilaga.

That same year, Kasan began studies at the local college on a scholarship. At school he heard of secret military training for Muslim separatists in Malaysia. He planned to take part but could not afford the required travel expenses. In 1971 he eloped with a young woman from the city—a Christian who subsequently converted to Islam. His parents were at first bitterly opposed. They had a Muslim girl in mind for him, he knew, but he doubted he could ever afford the bridewealth payment.

The couple struggled their first year together. They lived in a Muslim community near the public market. While his wife worked sewing

buttons for a tailor, Kasan parlayed twelve pesos into seventy-five pesos of trading capital by selling first cigarettes and later chickens on the street in front of the public market. With that stake he was able to begin buying and selling vegetables. He also managed to attend college until martial law was declared in late 1972.

Kasan did not join the fighters when the rebellion began a few weeks later because he was by then a father. He did at one point use his knowledge—acquired from two years of ROTC training—to assist in the training of a contingent of rebels just outside the city. The rebellion, and the military occupation of the city, altered the character of Muslim marketing in the city. After the army closed the river systems to civilian traffic, Muslim farmers were unable to bring their products to market or easily obtain city goods. They became willing to sell their goods very cheaply or even barter them for such needed items as salt, sugar, and cigarettes. City residents, on the other hand, were willing to pay more for scarce produce, often not bothering ever/to bargain out of the haste created by their concern to avoid the daily army patrols at the public market. Good returns were thus available for those Muslims willing to take great risks by disregarding the military's ban on river travel in order to place upriver goods for sale in the city market. The following is Kasan's account of those days: "When the military closed the upriver areas to the city, we middlemen would have to sneak out of the city to obtain goods, traveling by foot or in small boats. I would return to the city with as many as thirty chickens and ducks and three goats. I was fired at by army helicopters patrolling the river. I would leave the goods in the open and hide and come back for them. If you were caught by military patrols they would beat you and steal your goods. But it was the only way for middlemen to survive."

Kasan and his family moved to Campo Muslim in 1974, after much of the neighborhood where they had been living near the public market was destroyed in a single night by a fire started by military gunfire. The public market neighborhood before the fire was divided into Muslim and Christian halves with a single barangay captain who was a Christian.^[1] In late 1973, a Civilian Home Defense Force (CHDF) detachment composed exclusively of Ilonggos was stationed at the public market area,^[2] and began to harass Muslim residents. On this particular night, the CHDF detachment fired a single shot into the Muslim neighborhood. The regular army infantry battalion across the river, mistakenly believing that the shot was directed at them from the Muslim neighborhood, opened fire on the neighborhood, a barrage that continued for most of the night. It took Kasan and his family' five hours to

crawl two hundred meters to safety. The resulting fire destroyed a great number of houses in the Muslim neighborhood.

The military attack and fire had finally made life in the public market area unendurable for Muslim residents, and many of them, more than one hundred families, moved within the next few weeks to Campo Muslim, seeking a safer place to live. Those evacuees whose houses were still standing sold them "for pennies" to Christians. Campo Muslim was an undeveloped swamp far from their places of work but it was the only area in the city proper with a Muslim barangay captain, one who they hoped might be able to protect them from the deadly harassment of the Philippine military.

Kasan moved to Campo Muslim in the company of most of his neighbors. What they found was a marsh with water waist-high in parts. They used a convenient pile of garbage to begin to fill the swamp. Those who could afford them bought mollusk shells for additional landfill for their homesites. The evacuees brought wood salvaged from the destroyed houses in the public market community to build their first homes in Campo Muslim. They also began to pay land rent immediately to the owner of the property—five pesos (approximately U.S. twenty-five cents) per month.

The Case of Imam Akmad

Imam Akmad is the chief imam (prayer leader) of the Campo Muslim mosque. A man of about fifty years of age in 1986, he and his wife are the parents of eight children. Imam Akmad was born in Kalanganan, just a few miles west of Campo Muslim.^[3] He is also an Iranun speaker. Imam Akmad's father, whom he never knew, was a colorful character, and I was told many stories of his exploits as an aristocratic gambler and adventurer. The father of Imam Akmad was the first cousin of the Amirul Umra Sa Magindanao, the noble titleholder who ruled the district of Kalanganan.^[4] Because of this kin relation, he possessed some tribute rights over land in Kalanganan and elsewhere. Imam Akmad related to me the following about his father: "I was told by my father's old friend, the Sultan sa Nunungan [in Lanao] that my father had more than twenty wives living along the shores of liana Bay from Bongo Island to Malabang, and others in Lanao and Sulu. My father would marry a woman, leave her with child and some means of support for a year or so, and move on. He returned once to my mother's house to claim me when I was three years old, but my mother hid me

under a basket when she saw my father approaching." Akmad's father roamed throughout the South evading marital commitments and gambling debts. He fought and won numerous duels and performed many supernatural feats in his travels. "My father possessed many mystical powers. He was able to repel blades and bullets and could travel in mysterious ways. He would sometimes tell a companion to go ahead to a certain place and he would meet him there later. When the companion reached the appointed spot my father was already there and seated."

Imam Akmad's mother farmed her parents' land dressed like a man, wearing trousers and bolo (bush knife), to support her son. Akmad was also reared by his mother's brother, a guru, or traditional religious instructor. His uncle taught Akmad to recite the Azan (call to prayer) and to read the Qur'an. Akmad's vocation as an imam developed gradually. He farmed as a young man. After he married, he moved to Cotabato City to the house of his wife's father, a fairly prosperous smuggler, and went to work for him delivering cigarettes throughout Cotabato. He first served as an imam at the mosque in Katuli, a Muslim community directly across the river from Cotabato City. When the first mosque was built on Bird Island in 1968, he was asked to become the head imam there. After Bird Island was demolished in 1970, Akmad moved his family to Sulun, north of the city, to farm the land of his wife's mother.

In 1973, some of the earliest fighting of the rebellion in Cotabato broke out in Sulun, compelling Imam Akmad to move with his family to Campo Muslim. Campo Muslim was still rather sparsely settled in 1973, and Akmad was able to buy a small house close to the main road through the community—a road that had been built up with sand taken from Bird Island. They enlarged the house as the family grew. Akmad became head imam of the Campo Muslim mosque, a small concrete block structure with a tin roof. It was squat and unadorned but sturdier than most of the houses in the community.

Patterns of Immigration to Campo Muslim

The migration histories of the families of Kasan Kamid and Imam Akmad provide qualitative context for the quantitative census data I collected on migration to Campo Muslim. Nearly half (47.3 percent) of current Campo Muslim household heads moved to the community before 1976. The great majority of those arrived in the years between

1970 and 1976, the period when political violence was most pronounced in Cotabato. In contrast to Kasan Kamid and Imam Akmad, the majority of pre-1976 arrivals (63.8 percent) moved to Campo Muslim directly from their birthplaces. Of the eighty individuals who moved directly to Campo Muslim from birthplaces outside the city prior to 1976, thirty-four (42.5 percent) left their rural communities as refugees from either sectarian violence or the Bangsamoro war. Forty (50 percent) moved to the city for economic reasons. The great majority (89 percent) of all pre-1976 arrivals to Campo Muslim reported that they chose to reside in that community because they already had relatives living there (28 percent), or because it was the safest, most convenient, or only available place to live (61 percent). Census data indicate that Campo Muslim grew together from its edges. The areas nearest the two already established communities were occupied first, often before 1970. The swampier inner portions were then taken up by later arrivals.

Campo Muslim, then, has never been a community made up entirely—or even primarily—of war refugees. It is, nevertheless, an urban refugee community to the extent that the great majority of its pre-1976 arrivals (93 percent) migrated to the city to escape political or economic problems in the countryside. In particular, 63.3 percent of pre-1976 immigrants were farmers forced, for one reason or another, from the land. All the same, Campo Muslim is not a community of landless cultivators. Some 32 percent of pre-1976 arrivals reported that they "owned" agricultural land.^[5] Thus, many Campo Muslim residents had rights in land but had (temporarily or permanently) abandoned that land either because they could not make a living from it or, as in the cases of Kasan Kamid and Imam Akmad, conditions became far too dangerous to continue to support themselves on it.

The War in Campo Muslim

This section relates how Campo Muslim residents endured the military occupation of their community during the Bangsamoro Rebellion. It is a story assembled from many days and nights spent recording reminiscences that were often animated and anguished in equal measure.

Many of the early migrants to Campo Muslim came in search of a safe haven from the depredations of the Ilaga or the abuses of the Philippine Army. On their arrival in the community, however, they

found that those leaders who seemed likely sources for were either ineffective or uninterested. The barangay captain, Datu Kamsa, cooperated with the martial law regime and made no effort to shield community residents from the army. When army intimidation of community members intensified he left the city to visit his land in the countryside. Campo Muslim residents also remember him for humiliating and abusing new arrivals to the community, particularly war refugees from upriver.

Even had he been willing, it is unlikely that Datu Kamsa could have protected Campo Muslim residents from the army. The full military occupation of Cotabato City established in late 1973 stripped virtually all nonmilitary authorities, Muslim and Christian, of any effective power. The military ejected the Christian mayor of the city, Teodoro Juliano, from office and jailed him for three years for too strenuously protesting the usurpation of his mayoral powers. Local datus were quite fearful of the military and attempted to maintain low profiles. Even prominent datus such as the Sinsuats, closely aligned with the Marcos government, had little sway with military authorities; they bestowed honorary titles and awards on local commanders in an attempt to gain some influence with them. Campo Muslim residents remember that, at the time, datus did not wish to be called by that title in public, and hadjis (those who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca) no longer wore their distinctive white caps for fear of attracting persecution by soldiers. Islamic clerics in the city were particular targets of abuse because the Philippine military assumed them to be the instigators of the rebellion. They too could not publicly defend other Muslims.

While rebel units often prevailed in armed skirmishes with the Philippine military, they were usually not available to protect Muslim civilians. In a pattern typical of guerrilla warfare, the very success of the rebels at harassing and eluding government soldiers invited often severe army retaliations against Muslim civilians. Such reprisals led many rural Muslims to flee to the city only to face further repression at the hands of the army in the urban communities where they had resettled.

Active rebel fighters stayed in Campo Muslim during the rebellion but always in small numbers and on a temporary basis. The city was an exceedingly dangerous place for insurgents. They faced the continual risks of being stopped at a checkpoint or detained in one of the frequent military lineups. Identification by a government informant in such a lineup often resulted in summary execution at local military command posts. Consequently, rebels in the city more often relied on

the protection of community residents than they provided protection to them.

By 1974, the section of the city that included Campo Muslim had come under direct military occupation. The army situated a military detachment on the riverside road in Lugay-lugay and established a checkpoint on the same road at Manday and another on the Manday bridge leading to the center of the city. In Campo Muslim itself, the army ordered signs to be posted on each house listing the names of all permanent residents. Visitors were required to register with the barangay captain. Community residents tell of being repeatedly accosted at the army checkpoints by soldiers who were often drunk and abusive. Because of the difficulty of traveling back and forth to the center of town after dark—and as an adaptation to the 10 P.M. to 4 A.M. military curfew—Campo Muslim residents started a night market in late 1974 where cooked food and other items could be purchased. When the barangay captain noticed the popularity of the market he built sturdier stalls on the lot, installed electricity, and began to charge rent to vendors.

The military occupation became more menacing for community residents following an incident early in 1975. Soldiers had apprehended two suspected rebels in the center of the city and were bringing them to the detachment at Lugay-lugay, apparently to execute them unofficially (described in the Philippine idiom as "salvaging"). Summary executions were reportedly common at the Lugay-lugay post. I was told that soldiers regularly shoved rebel suspects into the river, ordered them to swim and then shot them in the water. Such killings were officially reported as consequences of escape attempts. The two detainees, presumably aware of the fate that awaited them, struggled with their captors on the road in front of Campo Muslim, seized one of their guns and shot them before fleeing into the community. That night a platoon of soldiers entered Campo Muslim, firing into the air and at houses. The soldiers ordered the men of the community out of their houses then beat and abused them for most of the night. Residents still believe a massacre was avoided only because of the arrival of a Muslim army officer who took pity on the men and called off the soldiers.

On subsequent nights, and for months afterward, the military conducted regular "operations" in Campo Muslim. These sweeps usually occurred late at night but there were sometimes as many as three in a twenty-four-hour period, carried out by three different army units. In some of the operations the men of the community were made to file in

front of an armored personnel carrier from which an unseen informer would view them, pointing out the rebels among them. Those identified as rebels were taken away and frequently not seen alive again. At other times, all the men in the community would be loaded onto trucks and taken to military headquarters on the other side of the city to be viewed by informers. Those released would then walk home. Occasionally, soldiers brought informers, their heads covered by masks, to the night market to point out rebels. Soldiers sometimes marked residents' hands with a rubber stamp if they had been cleared by an informer. The men of the community endeavored by various means to maintain those ink marks for as long as possible, even eating with spoons rather than with their hands in the usual manner.

Community residents received a respite from military raids when the rebel commander Peping Candao surrendered later that year with his fighters. In the last weeks of 1975, Candao's men were reconstituted into a CHDF unit and assigned to man the checkpoints in the Campo Muslim area, including the one at Manday Bridge controlling access to the community. Army units now required the cooperation of Candao's men to enter Campo Muslim. In this manner, the rebel defectors formed a protective buffer between the military and community residents.^[6] Military operations were greatly reduced and daily molestations by soldiers in the area were virtually eliminated. In addition, the returnees patrolled the community, punishing thieves and disciplining anyone found drunk in public.

Prominent rebel defectors who acted as protectors of Muslims were found in other localities as well. Shortly after the surrender of Peping Candao, Commander Jack, a picaresque urban outlaw turned rebel, negotiated his own surrender and he and his men began defending Muslims in the public market neighborhood. Jack's surrender was notable for its terms. As he states them today, he and his men (more than three hundred of them surrendered) were allowed to keep all their weapons and occupy the public market neighborhood. The military in the area were to be confined to within ten meters of their barracks and any military operations in the area had to be coordinated with him. The only condition he recalls being placed on him was that he try to convince other rebels to surrender. For more than a year, Commander Jack and his men comprised an independent armed force in the center of the city, keeping the peace, protecting Muslim civilians and, on multiple occasions, openly battling government troops that attempted to regain control of their zone. In late 1976, Commander Jack was

captured by ruse and imprisoned for eleven months.^[7] In early 1976, another commander, Tocao Mastura, surrendered and received as compensation the mayorship of the municipality of Nuling, just north of the city. He maintained his own CHDF unit of rebel returnees that also effectively insulated Nuling residents from army incursions.

Residents recall that conditions in Campo Muslim and the city actually worsened somewhat after the cease-fire in early 1977 as a consequence of three factors. First, the number of rebel defectors in the city increased dramatically after the cease-fire. Almost all were armed and most had not received the allowances promised them. Payments anticipated by defectors were often never dispensed to them by the government, or, if disbursed, were either soon cut off or retained by their former commanders. Those more larcenous among the returnees took up extortion and kidnapping to earn money (some among them had left that sort of work to become rebels). Kidnappings of members of wealthy families became a regular occurrence in the city, sometimes instigated by Christians who hired returnees to carry them out. Poor Muslims, however, suffered most regularly from the extortions of the former rebels. Community residents tell the story of one notorious returnee who stood at a busy street corner in the Muslim quarter of the city with a half coconut shell at his feet and a pair of .45 caliber automatic pistols in his belt. Only when the shell was filled with money by passersby would he retire to a nearby beer hall. Another former rebel operated a protection racket exacting payments from Muslim pedicab drivers. A nonextortionary form of intimidation, but one equally disturbing to urban Muslims, was practiced by a certain returnee who accosted young Muslim women dressed in snug-fitting jeans at the public market and forced them at gunpoint to remove their jeans and proclaim themselves prostitutes for having worn them. Public outcry eventually ended these public humiliations, probably by means of a warning from active rebels.

Second, after the cease-fire was broken by the government in late 1977, the war took on a form that, while less intense, was more injurious for urban noncombatants. From 1978 till 1980, fighting centered on the city more than ever before, making the streets of the Muslim districts especially hazardous as urban assassins and terrorists took over the conduct of the war. The military had developed special intelligence units (known as "U2" units), composed mostly of recruited rebel defectors. These operated as murder squads—targeting other returnees who had turned to crime or, more typically, active rebels in the city

who had been identified by informers. Urban rebels retaliated against informants and members of murder squads. The rise in urban violence was not limited to political killings. Old feuds were reactivated as private antagonists began to settle long-deferred private scores, and crime-related homicides increased as military control was eased somewhat in the city. The assailants in most of these killings attacked their targets on busy public streets, using automatic rifles or, occasionally, hand grenades. The victims left in their wake were as often accidental as intended. Urban terror bombings, which began in 1975 and continued well into the 1980s, added to the distress of the public assassinations. Grenades were thrown into movie theaters, parades, or public gatherings, and although they most often had the appearance of being the work of Muslim rebels, the majority of their victims were ordinary Muslims.^[8]

Third, life in Campo Muslim itself became more difficult after the cease-fire agreement. Shortly after the start of the cease-fire, the men of Peping Candao were transferred from the Campo Muslim area and the checkpoints were again manned by regular army troops. The military resumed and intensified regular lineup operations in Campo Muslim. Soldiers again assembled, abused, and sometimes arrested male residents. Some measure of protection against this second wave of military harassment came from another unlikely source.

On August 17, 1976, a powerful earthquake struck Cotabato, damaging a number of buildings in the city and destroying many homes in Campo Muslim. The tsunami that followed devastated Muslim coastal communities and forced many evacuees to resettle temporarily in Campo Muslim. Shortly after the earthquake, two Filipino Catholic nuns, members of a religious order active in the province, settled in Campo Muslim in order to aid earthquake victims. With the permission of the barangay captain they built a small house in the center of the community and began distributing food and medicine. The sisters remained in the community even after the immediate needs of the evacuees were met, providing medicines and rudimentary health care to community members. They met a good deal of resistance from community members who were suspicious and resentful of the continuing presence of representatives of the Catholic Church in this Muslim community. One of the nuns, Sister Theresa, soon began to supplement her provision of health services by actively defending the young men in the community from military harassment. She used her special status and her ties to some army commanders to limit the number of raids and to

protect the rights of the arrested. Through this work she gained the trust of a number of community members and began to train some of the young men, including Kasan Kamid, in community organizing. By 1979 she had established a growing community action program that included nutritional assessments, aid distribution, cooperative stores, and the monitoring of military detention cases. Through its sponsorship of Sister Theresa, the local Catholic diocese had become, by 1980, the principal provider of social and protective services in the community.

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.

Conclusion

The marshbound community of Campo Muslim offers an analytical vantage ground from which to survey the understandings of the ordinary adherents of the Bangsamoro Rebellion. For the greatest part of the period of armed separatist struggle, popular support for the separatist insurgency was substantial in Campo Muslim and throughout Cotabato and was expressed unofficially in songs and stories. Those unauthorized narratives nevertheless reveal that ordinary Muslims'

perceptions and representations of the war were often conspicuously independent of the ideological influences of any separatist leaders or, for that matter, of any elite group.

A close reading of the cultural work of the rank-and-file composers of the unofficial songs of the Bangsamoro Rebellion reveals significant variance from its official motives. Song 1 presents the voice of a self-consciously "poor man" who sings of social distance and social rejection before "horizontal comradeship" (Anderson 1983). The song's narrator—a failed suitor turned rebel—unabashedly pursues a separate reward of genuine social recognition (represented by his request for reconsideration by his beloved) in addition to the official cultural recognition as either victor or martyr offered to individual fighters.

The two key unofficial images found in the lyrics of both songs—those of "inged" (community, homeland) and "jihad"—are deeply resonant ones signaling fundamental understandings about community and religious identity. Those terms convey deeply held notions not at odds with those that separatist leaders wished to implicate in their nationalist appeals for the "complete liberation" of the Philippine Muslim "homeland" in order to ensure the preservation of its "Islamic and indigenous culture" (Misuari quoted in Majul 1985, 139). The wide use of "inged" and "jihad" in inspirational rebel songs reflects the power of those mythical concepts to motivate Muslim fighters. They expressed with particular force the fears (of the aggression of the Christian-controlled martial law state) and longings (for an end to domination by hostile outlanders) of ordinary Muslims and provided fuel for separatist military mobilization in Cotabato. Although the cultural knowledge imbedded in those two terms was widely shared, they could nevertheless possess quite different colorings for differentially situated Muslims. In Cotabato, most elite and non-elite adherents shared the view that the Bangsamoro Rebellion was a struggle to preserve the integrity of Muslim communities and defend against Christian hostility. Interpretations diverged, however, at the point of delineating the boundaries of the crucial community and the parameters of religious struggle.^[20]

The most commonly endured experience of Muslim subordinates immediately prior to and during the rebellion was terror at the hands of the Philippine military. Their suffering generated a community-based "knowledge of the moment" (Rebel 1989, 362) that conditioned the responses of ordinary Muslims to the nationalist appeals of separatist leaders. The search for protection against external aggression

was a powerful impetus for joining or supporting the separatist insurgents and was independently symbolized by subordinates in magical narratives of the bestowal of divine mercy. For Campo Muslim residents especially, effective protection was often not forthcoming because of the limited capabilities of the rebels in the city. When comparable protection became available for Muslim urban residents from rebel defectors, they accepted it unreservedly. Although the defectors had deserted the armed struggle for the officially imagined community (Bangsamoro), they had not abandoned their primary communities (ingeds), and divine mercy was permitted them. Today those defector-defenders remain heroes to community members who nonetheless express commitment to Moro nationalism.

Magical stories describing the condition of the corpses of slain rebels present another dramatic instance of contrary interpretations of key communal representations. By recognizing or denying the signs of martyrdom, storytellers either acknowledged or disputed official assertions of jihad. The increased difficulties and disillusionment experienced by ordinary noncombatants (especially urban residents) during the late stages of the armed rebellion prompted some of them to perceive the political landscape differently than separatist leaders and, eventually, to interpret central signs of the struggle in a manner that directly countered official versions—in effect, denying political legitimacy to certain officially sanctioned insurgent activities. The Muslim nationalist cause saw its lowest levels of popular support during this period. As described in the following chapters, substantial popular backing was only recovered some years later in a reconstituted form through the strenuous efforts of a coalition of Muslim clerics and politicians to build a broad-based political movement for Muslim autonomy. All the same, the independent motivations, perceptions, and assessments of ordinary Muslims have persisted in postrebellion politics in Cotabato City.