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.