Sheilfa B. Alojamiento
The year was 1989 maybe. I was in this office, one of those city-based social development institutions supporting what we then called the PDOS—the poor, the deprived, the oppressed, and struggling. There was a commotion, a shuffle. Muslim nationalists—the ones we libeled separatists—had early on absconded. We would know later that they set up their own programs to help their own poor. I was myself decamping. There was a marching order to consolidate and expand forces and there I was, a foot dragger. Sowing doubts within; doing the enemy’s job for them.
Do you know Nids?
The speaker was someone I knew from way back when I was still a student. We were standing in the middle of the receiving hall of a two-story unit in a four-door apartment. She came with the Marawi gang chauffeured by the liaison guy whose family owned the vehicle that took everyone there. Then suddenly, people were going to the kitchen behind the movable dividing wall or to the small room on one side of the main door.
Did you know that Nids died? she again asked.
I shook my head. There were arrests and executions all the time. Too many to keep track of or to have time to grieve over. That someone I might have known from way back was now on the list should not make for a terrible case. Then I saw our office head flee the hall, running to the bedroom upstairs, her face very soft and tender. I looked around me, aware all of a sudden that we were alone in the living room.
Where’s everyone?
A little before that I was in a smaller office in the same city. Around me were younger people, Muslim boys. They were diffident, quieter than the usual crowd our office feted. One or two were slinging tubaos, their smiles pale. They moved around as one would if he were inside a chapel. I was sitting on a long rattan bench beside another young woman, a comrade, and a Muslim. On the table in front of us were roasted cassava, fried fish, seaweed salad, soft drinks. The office cheerleader, the one who would leave in a little while for the burial of his politician-father, was entertaining our guests.
Have your fill! This is guerilla’s fare!
A nudge on one’s side. A smile to cover what was up. Is it true, my fellow sitter, a Muslim cadre who shared our quarters, mumbled, her voice low enough not to be heard beyond an ear. Is it true that a whole squad got wiped out because of panggi and malong?
Ha?
The story went—the one that got to her—that this team of foot soldiers was on its way to a meeting to forge a UG-level military alliance when, while spending the night in an outpost, they were raided by enemy forces. It would have been a breakthrough of breakthroughs, coming together to plan joint actions.
None escaped on account of panggi and malong.
Ha?
Board and bed, she quietly explained, the luminescence not leaving her face. Happened in Lanao Norte, accordingly. They stuffed themselves a little too much and overslept too. When the enemies fired, none was quick enough to jump out of the window or rise up from bed. Some fell with their feet caught inside their malongs.
For a long time that story never left me.
I never heard of such an incident., at least not as you narrated the case to me, Nene would say to me more than three decades later.
We were in her house. One of the more than a dozen of kittens had wetted the floor and she was wiping it dry. When she had washed the mop and had it slung over the fence to dry, she returned to the living room, to the litter of books and paper she was sorting.
Nene was my Political Science 101 instructor in Marawi. On campus, movement people called on her—for advice, for help—. It was the time when so many students were going over to the anti-Marcos struggle. A score I knew dropped out to go underground and were in the Mindanao United Front work.
I just asked what made her decide to leave. She was throwing monographs and students’ papers she did not want to be filling her cabinets. I was gathering stories I was forever writing and rewriting. I pressed the red button of the mini tape recorder I was lugging all the time.
You mean the UG?
Yes, the underground.
I no longer believe in the things I used to believe in.
I fell silent. It was a terrible thing to say coming from someone like her. And a terrible thing to hear for someone who always looked up to UG people.
You no longer believe in…
Her eyes were on the dusty notebooks. Fingers browsing through yellowing pages, the face clenched around the jaw.
No.
You no longer believe that…
No.
But….
Socialist states are not and cannot be morally superior to capitalist states. For as long as there is class differentiation, there will always be the poor, and there will always be exploitation. That’s why… she took a breath, glanced at the door, then to me.
Didn’t I tell you this before?
I did not reply. Just stared on, anger rising up in my chest.
Her lips pursed, dull eyes casting about among the litter at her knees.
That’s why Marxism is for the withering away of the state. Marx’s ideal is communism, a classless and stateless society, which, being ideal, shall never be.
There are strange moments of illumination that do not feel like illumination. Like being there before the fall, of a pillar or a monument. Like being the tail of the beast that bites itself, or, being in the eye of a storm.
I leaned back in my seat and shut my eyes. For an endless time, the tape ran on dead air. Then I opened my eyes again and reached for the pause button. She was still sifting papers, picking, throwing, casting about low. In another moment the fallen pillar was on the same eye level with the beast and the storm, looking back, mirroring one’s brokenness.
Did you know that so many were executed then?
How could I not know? I was the office’s human rights documenter, wasn’t I. Always on a fact-finding mission, always afield, always in conferences. Could she be talking about the other cases? The undocumented ones?
After that chauffeured group disappeared in our living room, none returned. One is now in Canada, another in West Virginia. The rest here and there in obscure corners of the country, revolution and class war now a faraway country sometimes recalled with a touch of nostalgia.
It took me decades before I finally got over my PTSD, the liaison guy who brought the girls out would confess at GC.
Nids died in 1987, a news dispatch would belatedly confirm to me. According to this archived item, four community organizers affiliated with the National Democratic Front, the political wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army, were killed in Tangkal, Lanao Norte, on July 24 of that year. Implicated were members of the Tunda Force, a group of capitulationists formerly under the Moro National Liberation Front. In a statement, the Muslim rebel commander overseeing the territory admitted being put in a shameful situation: his NDF guests had been slaughtered while a regional peace pact between revolutionary forces was in effect. Lost were one carbine, one M16, one .45 calibre pistol, one .38 calibre revolver, three Garands, and one radio handset. The M16 was what was used in the execution. This last detail was not in this dispatch.
In the eighties, Nene said, she was in the United Front Committee. She would come to school finding her name scrawled on the blackboard at the College of Arts and Sciences Building convicting her as a certified member of the Communist Party of the Philippines. Most everyone she knew would be received in her house at the Fisheries Village. One morning after hosting the previous night’s meeting when everyone but a couple were gone, an ex-soldier started stoning her house. That was not the first time that he did that. She rose and took the gun the sleeping man left lying on the ironing board and went out; fired shots at the water hole where their kitchen drain stopped. Then she went back in, dismantled the gun, left it where she picked it. She went out again, in her housedress and slippers, to confront the military man. A neighbor accosted her, grinning.
Patapsingi lang! Tiila lang! Don’t hit the bullseye! A graze in one leg will do!
But the man had fled. When she returned to the house, her guest, the NDF and UF bos, a co-signatory to the regional peace talks, was up on his feet, the reassembled gun in his hand.
I thought we were raided, he said to her. I told myself, Whatever happens, I should have my gun.
Then she got a scolding. What if the bullets ricocheted? What if a neighbor or one of the kids got hit? What if you got hit? What?! You went out to attack and left your gun?? What idiocy is that?!
Only the Muslim rebel commander and co-signatory to the peace talks was awestruck. Her little adventure put a stop to the harassment. The rest of the house laughed off the whole episode. But there were other executions everywhere. One of the Maranao guests that usually came to her house with the Marawi chaps would be found lying dead in bed, his two hands holding his severed head.
The comrades said he was a partisan.
A partisan?
A gunman. A hitman. They also warned me not to trust him.
The comrades paid him to kill fellow…?
No.
He was in the UF?
He was UG. He would come to the house with the rest.
Who killed him?
I don’t know. They wouldn’t say.
Where was he killed?
In Marawi. I cannot recall now if it was in his own rented place or in the house of this Tausug man where he sometimes slept.
She looked away as she said this, at a mid-point distance around the house’s vicinity, her arms crossed in a self-embrace.
Then she turned her face back to me.
But many, so many were executed at the time. Her voice was soft, low.
I did not speak for a long moment. Her daughter came out of their bedroom and walked by, impervious to the ongoing conversation. The girl turned on the faucet and washed her hands, then went out of the kitchen door.
I did not know about that case, I said. But I knew about this raid a comrade had told me about.
Then I related to her the panggi and malong incident my fellow sitter whispered to me ages ago.
The kitchen door opened again, the daughter came in, a bundle of washed clothes slung in one arm. She went inside without a word or a nod.
A massacre?
The word they used was a wipe-out. It was a whole squad.
Neither did she know about it, said she, though her voice did not betray surprise.
Then she added: Or if I did, the way it was told to me was not like how you recounted it to me just now.
And then she asked, Do you know Nids?
Nids, she explained, was a Business Administration student who went underground. She was also in the UF work, Mindanao-wide level. She was executed in an MNLF area.
It was after Cory took to the presidency when I read about the regional peace talks being broached. Negotiations in the national level bogged down after farmers were massacred in Mendiola, but in Lanao, local initiatives were in progress, with the Franciscan Brothers in Baloi and Bishop Capalla himself of the Diocese of Iligan brokering the peace. I remember reading a news item that had the CPP chair criticizing what regional bosses were doing—early signs of inner schisms I then chose to ignore—. Soon after that, I would find the picture of the MNLF-Ranao, the NDF-Northwestern Mindanao, and the NPA-Lanao bosses in the inside page of a national daily. In the same picture was a little woman corralled by an armchair, described as the NDF negotiator’s back-up service. Not exactly in those words.
While the news report quoted everyone who repeated themselves, it looked like the fourth member of the panel never benefitted from an interview. She sat in a corner with her side to the camera, her head slightly bowed, pen poised above a notepad at her right hand. In the national level peace negotiations sortie that ended just before the regional talks officially started, stories about the achievements of the underground women’s organization affiliated with the NDF made waves. Reading the news item about a seemingly indefensible local peace pact, I remember feeling a pang, a kind of hunger for words from a woman who went around with a short arm slung in her waist. I found none.
According to Nene, Nids was killed for insisting to accompany a group in an MNLF territory. She had been dissuaded from going but she did not listen. The picture of her death painted before Nene was one of a disgraceful sort: as though she was running when shot from the back: left arm raised, head turned to her right, the other arm bent in an angle by her side. The all-boys squad was there for their first baptism of fire: to consolidate and expand forces in Muslim areas.
At the time Nene was replaying the NDF bos’ lampoon of his dead comrade-deputy secretary, I had no idea that the fourth panelist in the failed regional peace talks and the Business Administration student who went underground and was killed was one and the same person. I also did not know that when she died, she did not die alone: the guys she accompanied went with her to her grave. All I could see then was Nene’s anger. She refused to know more, refused to listen further, she said, not only because she did not like hearing about comrades meted with ugly violent deaths, but most of all, she hated the story teller, hated the manner he was telling it.
How could he laugh like he derived satisfaction over a comrade’s death?! I said, what kind of a man is this I am receiving in my house!? This is no revolutionary!
I would also know, several interviews later, that the bodies were never brought home, never brought out of the place where they were felled. It was a border mountain between Tangkal and Magsaysay then accessible only by foot, and the slaying made the area no man’s land. The request to the masa to please bury the bodies had to therefore go through a long involved channel: from one kasama to another, then to an ally and then another, until finally a motley group of young boys armed with spades and shovels had to be let in to perform the unpleasant task.
What would a set of menials tasked to lift smelling bodies into an open grave feel? I never ceased to wonder. And what could Muslim gravediggers who otherwise denounce communists have seen? Wasted youth? Dead kaffir bodies beginning to stink? One small, sorry-looking girl whose last feat was to carry a gun around her hip which she was not able to fire? If the slain team’s gravediggers were Maranao boys who only had hatred for accursed communists and had no fellow feeling for peasants’ sons like them, surely, they would not trouble themselves with such a revolting job? On the other hand, if they were Muslims, and they were, what they did—burying dead bodies of strangers and jihadists of a kind—would have been the next thing to a prayer or a pilgrimage to Mecca.
The 1987 news dispatch did not give details besides the fact that four NDF organizers were killed by the Tunda Force. On the other hand, the Lanao Red Army At-Large, when first lit on during an unscheduled interview, did not deny a wipe-out of an entire squad.
Hurot gyud, all seven of them.
He moreover did not mention any Tunda Force.
Ang tag-iya lang gud sa balay. Just the house owner.
The slaying occurred in the place where the team slept and boarded for several days. According to him, it was an SYP—Sandatahang Yunit Propaganda—the armed propaganda unit of the Red Army tasked to expand base. They were all Christians, young boys just out of school. The mountain part was known to have been always under the control of MNLF commanders with a history of friendship and alliance work with Maoists and NDF personages since the seventies. Pockets of communities in surrounding villages were considered mass bases.
They had been well-briefed, this NPA commander now on leave explained. There was no lack for reminders on top of comradely reminders. To be constantly on the move and be incessantly on the guard; to not spend two consecutive nights in one place and especially not in one house; to never gather in one room with no lookout watching the periphery; to always have a night watch; and finally, to stay close to the man of the house and his wife and children. Except that, in this particular case, the house owner had no wife and no children, which might have been noted but was not, or, if it had been noted, the note might have been overruled, annulled. On this particular day or night, the man of the house did not join them for the meal. No one could recall however and none of those I interviewed could tell if it was breakfast lunch or supper; only that when the boys went out to the kitchen table, they left their arms in their bedroom—just there, leaning against the wall.
He must have temporarily lost his mind, didn’t care what was right or wrong all he saw was an opportunity, the NPA commander now on leave broached. The erstwhile fighter also did not reveal that there was a girl in the team: a 22- year-old who dropped out of college to go underground. And he did not say that of the seven, someone did not leave her gun lying around. No details from him either whether the house owner went in through the door or through the bedroom window, or if he found an excuse to get inside the room passing by the door; just that the next moment, he was raining bullets on them all.
A security lapse, a serious one. Thus went the summation that closed the case.
They were young, and trusting, he added, in a more forgiving tone. They must have underestimated him because he was alone.
No political motive imputed either. Say, that it was a military ploy, fire for fire, after losing an Army official in an ambush or after a rank demotion and such jingo talk. In certain cultures, he expounded, nothing is more irresistible than high-caliber rifles just there, within reach and for the taking.
That squad that got wiped out in Tangkal, who were they?
Across me sat this former staff of the Mindanao Committee. She was a sometime-comrade and sometime-friend from way back when we were both very young. Now she was in another trustworthy post in a government office and still wore that it’s-quiet-as-it’s-kept air about her. I was rather uneasy. Would she talk about her past? Would she lend me her lights? For I knew the woman. She would not calumny a comrade no matter what his faults might be. Not for the sake of a sentimental journey, and not for the sake of local history.
No, it was not an all-boys team. Jen was there. Jenny!
Jenny?
Nids! Leonida Gentica. An MSUan! A BA major!
Nids was not supposed to be part of that team, she went on. But there was this task to do consciousness-raising among the masa in the area. Since there was already an existing regional agreement between the MNLF Command, the NDF, and the NPA, they were confident they could go around unescorted by Moro cadres. The boys were young recruits. YS—youth and students—and peasants’ sons.
Mga Bisaya!
It appeared that either the team trusted a little too much, or, they could not find any Moro accompanier and figured the Maranao man they had befriended could help them around. For three days he fed them, offered them his house. On the fourth day, they were slaughtered. No one knew, she said, how many days or nights had lapsed before anyone went in to bury the bodies. After the incident, the military must have put the area under reconnaissance so that none of the comrades could get in.
It was a case of palihog palihog palihog. Palihog diri palihog didto. Pasa pasa pasa. Hangtod nga nalubong ra gyud sila sa masa. A long relay of please please please. Request here request there, relay relay relay. Until finally, the putative masa had all of them properly buried.
No other information had been given as to how many bullets were spent, whether there was a hole in the back of her head, a wound on her side or in the heart. Only that where she fell, there were bullet shells from her pistol.
Which meant her pistol had been fired by whom?
She postulated that Nids did not die right on from the seized rifle the house owner fired. It was her own pistol that was used to finish her. But she could not remember if there were survivors. Although she was there during the assessment meeting that post-mortemed the case, the survivors’ whereabouts were never fully taken into account. It would seem that no one in that meeting was counting on anyone’s return just in case there were any survivors because it was there that the decision to abandon the territory was made.
In 1987 there was this group of Maranao boys who visited our office. Could they be from the place where Nids was buried?
I don’t know.
Could they be the ones you requested to bury our dead?
Maybe.
I did not ask again if the whole squad got wiped out. Or rather I did, and suspected an edit that more than fitted with what had been officially reported in that 1987 news dispatch. Like the Lanao Red Army At-Large, she, too, did not assign a highly political or ideological motive for the slaying of the man’s guests.
He was really tempted. Those were high-powered guns!
For I could not help demanding: If there were survivors, how could they have run from that crazy man discharging a round of ammo? Could anyone have ducked, rolled, tumbled, crossed mountain trails unhurt to reach friendly territory? An M-16? Burst-fire mode?
Yes! An Automatic! Kaya madali sila natultol ng kaaway! That was why the military immediately located them.
And cordoned the area? That was why it took days before contacts could get to the place? So, soldiers only left when the bodies began to smell?
Maybe not. What I know is, they had been buried properly by the masa.
Why didn’t I think of it? If military men went in first, then it must be military men who first described Nids’ disgraceful state when found. The NDF bos was with the Bishop all the time and the Bishop was friends with bigwigs in the military the whole time. The Bishop even borrowed choppers at one time to bring journalists and human rights workers to mountain areas to locate and exhume missing bodies. Didn’t bishops have brothers in the underground movement? Didn’t NDF bosses have relatives in the military? For all I know someone might have promised his uncle in the military a case of beer in the event that the revolution won, all in the name of United Front work. For all I care such a wager might have made the Bishop laugh.
I said to this former Mindanao Committee staff that perhaps if that NDF team did not move beyond the confines of the house they were holed in, it was because they could not. It was not safe to do so, as their host might have counseled them.
She did not argue.
A more serious proposition would be, if it shamed the MNLF commander that he was not able to protect his NDF friends poaching in MNLF territory, it must have been a bigger shame for the underground NDF operatives and their Red Army not to have been able to protect themselves from an unarmed Maranao. A wipe-out? Their own weapons used against them? The description of the NDF bos of how Nids looked when found dead—head turned, left arm up, right arm bent by her side—indicates that she was the lone cadre who did not put away her gun when she joined her comrades to eat. The fire coming from behind her, she must have turned around, her left hand empty, not holding a plate—or it would not be raised like that—the other hand reaching for her pistol on her waist.
Maybe Nids was actually holding the pistol and was about to fire it when she was felled? Or she might have fired and missed, that was why the assailant came at her? He might have actually removed the gun from her side and shot her there and then, the second time, maybe the third and fourth time. And that was what the famously misogynistic comrade-bos was laughing over? The sight of her with her short, attempting to pull up a return fire before an Automatic discharging a storm?
Ever circumspect, she only said, maybe.
Which got me railing some more. For if the early version of the story was true, that is, that the boys were still wearing their malongs when fired upon, what does it say of us, what does it say of those boys? That they took off their foot soldiers’ pants in favor of malongs, a way to feel at home, go native? That they were a bunch of loitersacks staying in bed all hours while their masa walked around the house cutting wood, making fire, finding food, cooking, setting the table? Was Nids the only one in the team who wore her pants and helped around the house? Did the rest go there for a cultural number, a peace forum, and did not bother to sling their Garands, the carbine, the .38 caliber revolver, the radio set, the M16? Didn’t they know they were in Moro territory where possession of a gun, a weapon, is status, prestige, power, manhood, bride price, everything? Weren’t they the finest set of idiots, indeed, fit for slaughter how unrevolutionary.
But if it had not been Nids, could it have been someone else? My History teacher in Marawi now a social anthropologist and postmodern epistemologist would inform me that he was the bos’ first choice for a deputy secretary during that mess of a peace talks. Had he accepted the invitation to be in the negotiating panel, he might have died instead of Nids, said he. It was he, though, who had to go to the Office of the Registrar, breaching confidentiality protocols, to ask for Nids’ home address so that the news of her death would be delivered to her parents. Another of his former students took the long road across mountains to bring the letter to the mother. Words of praise and assurance, this courier would later recount to me. That their daughter died for a good cause and that her body had been interred properly. The mother also asked to please send home Nids’ things, so that the family will have something to remember her by. He did not know, said he, if the comrades were able to accede to such a most modest request: he was no longer there to know.
By the time I arrived at this elaborate summation, Nene was herself already dead. She finally succumbed to an illness that damaged her hearing and eyesight, a rather apt end, I would say, to what she no longer wanted to hear or read about some more. When last interviewed, she refused to say another word. I no longer have any involvement with the movement, she said.
I hold no authority now to represent the UG story.
Where I myself now stand, I am confronted with this mountain, this highland. I sometimes find myself counting my dead: mistakes on top of repeated mistakes, mounds over mounds of unknown graves. I try to reinvent the lives that I have known, the times we had, a way to honor and to praise what I and the comrades had struggled for and done together when we were still the best that we could be and did not know it. And I remind myself: Nid’s life was not and need not be wasted.
I realize, too, as I write this sentence, in this paragraph, on this page, that it was not as though I did not live. That I have a past, definitive; long and sheltering, goading me on far into this perilous present, so that the future perfect I might never have to create or imagine with what little time I have in my hands, may be more tangible, more appreciable.
You must be logged in to post a comment.