Saddams in the making
By Antonio J. Montalvan

FROM A RESPECTABLE Moro leader whom I shall not name comes the information that last April 8, AFP troops abducted and tortured in Cotabato City five Moro civilians, Teng Idar, Tohami Ulong, Ismael Mamalangkas, Jimmy Saavedra and a fifth other. All were tortured at the 6th Infantry Division headquarters and were then forced to admit they bombed the Davao seaport last April 2.

Harboring suspicions about the arrests as so many people of Mindanao do, our Moro leader contacted his sources at the MILF. "The MILF told me these boys are not even their trainees, just ordinary traders and teenagers; otherwise if they were MILF members, the command would have already rescued them as they did to others."

Fall guys just to satisfy Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes and people in Manila. In a culture of Moro bashing, fall guys are easy prey. We all are still in the moro-moro age. It is a lamentable, despicable anomaly in a world that should no longer operate on a two-world system, the "them and us" which our hopelessly Americanized government bureaucracy is so archaically constricted by.

Moro bashing continues unabated even as the usually inflammatory Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte has toned down on his public dirty finger display. The day after the seaport carnage, a Moro leader of Sitio Pandanan Islam in Barangay Ma-a was abducted by four armed men wearing ski masks. Abdullah Alah, a Kalagan datu who earns a living as a tricycle mechanic, was buying a welding rod in a busy hardware shop along Ma-a road when the men grabbed and whisked him into a heavily tinted van that had no plate number.

Arrests of Moro leaders and ordinary citizens have in fact become a pattern in Davao City. In Sitio Pandanan Islam, it has become standard procedure for unidentified armed men to come to the village and round up members of the Islamic community whenever violent incidents take place in the city. Abdullah Alah's abduction came hours after three mosques in Davao City were simultaneously lobbed with grenades, perpetrated most probably by Christians who are easily inflamed by Moro bashing rhetoric.

Meanwhile, the body of Montaser Sudang, the other fall guy in the March 4 Davao airport bombing, remains unreleased in a Davao City morgue. What figment of imagination to weave the tale that Montaser, a newly-wed husband, father of a nine-day old baby, and in the company of close relatives including three nursing mothers, traveled all the way from Kabacan, Cotabato in a tightly packed vehicle, carrying a very powerful and lethal explosive, and waited from early morning till late afternoon for the arrival of OFW cousin Tarhata from Cairo, Egypt, just to plant the lethal explosive in a waiting shed full of people that included his cousins, nephews, nieces, uncles and aunts, and then say that he was the "suicide bomber."

As Montaser's body lies cold in the morgue, the case against his family members Terso and Undungan Sudang has been recommended for dismissal by the City Prosecutor's Office of Davao City due to "insufficiency of evidence."

The Sudangs have already executed a joint affidavit denying that they ever were members of the MILF. It is interesting to go over some facts in the Sudangs' affidavit. Citing another affidavit from the "sole eyewitness" of the bombing, that the suspected bomber was "a man...wearing a black jacket, maong short pants and a rubber shoes with a Muslim (sic) handkerchief commonly known as 'tubaw'... and a dark [pair of] sunglasses."

The Sudangs thus further aver that "had the police pursued that important lead, they would have found out that Montaser's last worn clothes consisted of long denim jeans and white T-shirt... and he could not have been the man referred to by the eyewitness."

Many national newspapers, some of whom are not exempted as Moro bashers, have reported that the explosives were strapped to Sudang's body. Sudang's body -- surprise, surprise -- was not blown to pieces, his body remaining intact. The autopsy performed on his remains showed he had six shrapnel wounds and that the cause of his death was "due to lacerations of the brain and massive hemorrhage as a result of shrapnel wounds of the head and trunk."

In this culture of Moro bashing, participated in by Duterte himself and military fictionists, we would have expected the voice of moderation from the respectable Bishops-Ulama Forum. Clearly this war is not a war of insurgents but of misplaced cultural attitudes. The Bishops-Ulama Forum has remained silent when it could have contributed to dousing the flames of a growing scenario of Muslim-Christian hatred which the Manila government would have loved to see.

One voice of moderation is that of Cotabato Archbishop Orlando Quevedo, president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines. Quevedo has decried the bombing of mosques as meant to "inflame religious sentiments and biases and aims to inject a religious dimension into a conflict that is primarily political and economic."

Bomb their mosques and there you have it -- a fullbown Muslim-Christian conflict. Then Manila moves in by saying that Balikatan is appropriate. It has become a very familiar script. Just as familiar with the weapons-of-mass-destruction line which has remained bogus thus far.

Hypocrisy is the name of the game. Just as we pontificate on Saddam Hussein's vileness and his torture chambers, right here in our own backyard are Saddams in the making. Surreal that our government hopped in with wild abandon to the "coalition of the willing."

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