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Misuari's journey: From the burning of Jolo to the siege in Zamboanga
Part 2 of a 3-part series
On the Google Earth map, the mayor showed me where they – the Moro National Liberation Front of Nur Misuari’s men – did it. We call her Beng, a diminutive for Isabelle. Her name is printed in candy pink at the back of her dark blue vest. She comes from the Climaco family, a name revered in this city for her well-loved uncle, who was also a mayor. He was assassinated while on his motorcycle without security escorts years ago.
"Why Zamboanga?" she asked. "They know Al Jazeera will be here, they want publicity at the cost of lives!" she said of Nur Misuari and his rebel group.
But more than this, she blamed the peace negotiator who had failed to consider the consequences of diminishing Misuari’s role in the overall agreement with the national government, another piece of this story that is complicated in itself.
The scenario she was seeing had its precedence in 2001, when Misuari rallied his armed men en masse and held hostages who were eventually released in a negotiation that achieved his goal in calling attention to his name, his legend. It happened in the outskirts of the city, sparse of a neighborhood. It was over after two days.
This time around, they were in the middle of the city and in the first hours of the crisis, Beng had feisty words, much like her uncle. But as it came to a standoff that paralyzed her city of nearly a million people, she was near breaking down.
It was that close.
She had heard of what was happening when her plane landed at the airport in the morning. In the dark hours before dawn, the crossfire between the Navy and the rebels in Mariki, a mangrove area that was an offshoot village of Rio Hondo, was not enough to stop the rebels from forging on.
Whatever boats the Navy had were on its port on the western portion of the city's coast, blocking the Strait of Basilan to make any attack as daunting as possible. Push them back at sea, keep them in their jungle strongholds in Basilan, which is across the city about half an hour away by boat. Prevent them from joining their main rebel force that had already arrived from Sulu a couple of days beforehand.
On land in Basilan, the Army had to fight off rebels from having their own show of force on the island.
There were an estimated 120 rebels from Basilan and about 150 from Sulu, who got on a passenger boat without their weapons; in its early stage some estimates were feared to have been about 500.
An Air Force MD-520, an assault helicopter, accompanied the blockade but could not fire without ‘clearance’ from headquarters.
The rebels swept through the marsh, others through Rio Hondo, to link up in the twin communities of Santa Barbara and Santa Catalina, where they were believed to have stored their weapons in preparation for their plan. It is here where elite units of the army and police were in a battle down to the last dozen rebels left, and to free the few remaining hostages this week.
On the first day of their incursion, they came to about 100 meters of the main police station, with a goal of going past that to reach the hospital on Veterans Avenue, a major artery that delineates the pueblo, the center of the city. The police set them back; if not the crisis would have reached a greater proportion.
Side by side, these two communities of Santa Barbara and Santa Catalina had risen like a ghetto with a mixed population of Christians and Muslims, a maze of alleys packed with houses, both of concrete and ramshackle ones, the kind of neighborhood one would avoid when night falls. By military accounts, these knitted locations were a perfect refuge for drug smuggling and human trafficking, and where the rebels had their cache of weapons and ammunition. It had to start from there, with some of the rebels knowing the intent of the plan, others lured with money into joining a ‘peace rally.’ As a consequence of the fighting, it went up in flames, the rebels throwing improvised molotov bombs while the soldiers' ammunition added to the combustion.
The fire stoked an event of the past: the burning of Jolo on the island of Sulu, almost forty years ago, obscure in the memory of many. By some fortuitous reason, Zamboanga happened because people in Sulu have not forgotten. Nur Misuari was going to make his last stand in Jolo, as if repeating what he had done in 1974 when he was a young revolutionary and the whole of Mindanao was behind him, electrified by his spirit of a warrior to create a new world for the Muslims. He fled when the military burned the city, which had been an exuberant capital of commerce, where the Christian and Muslim families mingled, where women wore mini-skirts and life was a constant buzz of parties.
It was the beginning of Misuari’s failure – and more of his failures followed in this long quest for peace in Mindanao, and all throughout the luster of his legend faded. The Tausug Muslims – the ethnic tribe of which Misuari holds pride – won’t let him do it again, no, not in Jolo, threatening Ma’as, the Old Man now in his 70s, of dire consequences if he were to push through with it. They would not let him near the mosque.
Sulu has never been able to recover from that burning. Families have fled, bandits and warlords have taken over, insurgents have made it their haven. Chief among the rebels is an ustadz named Habier Malik, whom Misuari had ordered to lead the assault in Zamboanga. He is known to have about 500 armed men and could mobilize as many as 3,000 fighters gathered among relatives and followers, feudal alliances that only those who know Mindanao would understand.
It’s a bold move using the template of the 2001 incident, where the rebels had been allowed to go free in exchange for the release of their hostages. Who knows what was going on in the mind of an old man who had gone progressively delusional, but who among a segment of his people retains a charisma, a filial honor of tradition? In Sulu, he could still hold fort if he wants to; as for the rest of Mindanao, the tragic adventure in Zamboanga revealed that beneath the surface of an aspiration for a common Moro land, the reality of ethnic differences divide them. Unlike before, the Maguindanaoans and the Maranaos did not come to the fight of the Tausugs.
Misuari had to stand on his own, recoiling to the jungles of Sulu, last heard in Malik’s territory in Talipao, which might well be his heart of darkness. Where is he to go now? Who will take him? -- YA, GMA News
Read Part 1: In the shadow of Fort Pilar, anger and pain in Rio Hondo
Raised in Zamboanga City, CRISELDA YABES is the author of the novel 'Below the Crying Mountain,' on the rebellion in the south in the 1970s. Published by the University of the Philippines Press, it was nominated for the prestigious Man Asian Literary Prize. Her latest book, 'Peace Warriors,' which followed the military in Mindanao, won the National Book Award last year.
