Part 1 of a 3-part series
(Editor's note: In this evocative piece, journalist Criselda Yabes looks at the social cost of the most recent outbreak of violence in her childhood home. She flew to Zamboanga City early this week with photographer Rick Rocamora to document the ongoing crisis.)
Among the faces of war, I will remember his eyes that held the weight of emotions and his voice that trembled. He was a Muslim no doubt, with the wisps of thin beard that are common of the men in his community. In the vast track field turned into a refugee camp of blue tarpaulin tents, where the stench of squalor rises in the breathless humidity of the day, he blended with the rest in a long queue for breakfast.
He asked me if he should eat the hot dogs in a bun, wrapped in plastic in a mountain heap distributed by volunteers who reassured them it was chicken, not pork. Should I really eat this, he asked me a second time to demand an answer, the tremor in his voice giving way to helplessness.
What was obvious around us was that a life has to begin here. From now on there is no home to go back to—it’s all in ashes. He has to live like the others in this camp waking up to another day: the women bathing in their malongs, the men lighting their first cigarette. The children play with kites or a Spiderman toy. They race cars fashioned out of plastic bottles along a red running track, jumping heights as to who makes it the highest, too much of their innocence defying the gravity of loss.
I’ve seen them rush to the awnings for a nursery class that my high school classmate Gretchen has set up with goverenment social workers. They fight for attention, for candies, and they dance and sing, count the colorful numbers on the board, follow the teacher singing a spelling rhyme, L-O-V-E.
He showed me his yellow card, this Muslim man on the food-line. This is our credit card, he said. This is how we can survive and we don’t have to pay. He spoke of the irony and laughed at that. His name is Musa. Thirty years old. A Muslim, as I’ve said, his mother a Badjau of the seafaring tribe that perched their stilted wooden shacks on the Rio Hondo, where the Muslim rebels had made their first attempt to penetrate the city in the early darkness of September 9.
“Why did they have to burn it? That’s all we had.”
It was the first time I had heard a refugee express his indignation, unlike most others who seemed resigned to the tragedy. He wasn’t looking for an answer because he knew, and then he saw me unable to push back my tears.
“Yes, I’m angry at the soldiers. I’m angry at the rebels. I’m angry at all of them. What will happen to the children? What will we tell them when they grow up and they will be angry, generation after generation?” He spoke to me in a mix of Tagalog and English. He was a teacher who volunteered in a school, teaching Islamic values to children. At first we had spoken in Chabacano, and when he made the shift it was as if we have elevated the dimension of this event to a future of more mistrust and fighting, and also back to a past that led them to where they were now.
I don’t know what will become of him. I don’t know if his anger has already consumed him. His words resonated the outcome of what has taken place in Zamboanga City – this complicated trouble in southern Mindanao that never seems to end, unraveling the loss of dreams and aspirations built up over the years. Now on its third week, with fighting reduced to a limited scale, it could not go back to thinking of what would constitute ‘normal.’
Growing up in this city in the late 1970s, we knew what Rio Hondo stood for, an enclave of a water village on the edge of the coast for the marginalized Muslims, those who had fled from a previous war in Sulu, further down south in a chain of islands. These were the people Zamboanga did not want to touch, many of them outcasts who wound up selling their wares in the narrow grids of downtown, at the pier filled with crime, at the open market where much of the goods were smuggled in.
We were allowed to go only as far as Fort Pilar, because beyond that was Rio Hondo. It’s an easy walk from the famous Lantaka Hotel By The Sea, whose doors have been shut since the outbreak of the fighting, where the police force manning the outpost in a garden restaurant would take respites in their hammocks. It was wrenching to see the water sliding gently onto the breakwater, only to be shattered by the sound of a rolling thunder.
Mortar, said a soldier beside me. Next came the thumping round of a .50 caliber machine gun, and military choppers hovering above us. The acoustics of what the military calls urban warfare – that’s all we know of what’s happening inside the zone, in ground zero.
Outside, in the empty streets, walking became an eerie trance. In the street straight from the City Hall – refurbished to its old likeness of colonial architecture – to the stone structure of Fort Pilar, wild bougainvilleas had once overflowed. And if the rebels had not been repelled by the Navy and had gone forward, it could have been a stride taking the seat of government. For the Catholic majority of this city, the Virgin Mary at the shrine had protected them. This has been the unifying belief—that Zamboanga was impenetrable, this jewel in the southern tip of the peninsula where an imaginary line has divided the Christians from the Muslims of the Sulu archipelago.
But the symbol of a fortress has been broken. The invaders are at their doorstep. For the first time in recent history Zamboanga is vulnerable, this former garrison from where the Spanish fleet was launched against the Muslim pirates centuries ago. The Americans too, had used it for its base.
If you have heard the rabble-rousers of Zamboanga saying they want no part of any Bangsamoro deal, you'll have to understand that it goes back a long way. To see what has happened, it is obvious that the little tolerance the people of this city had managed to accommodate over the years of conflict might prove difficult to rebuild. – YA, GMA News
In part 2: from the burning of Jolo to the fires in Zamboanga
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.
http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/328431/news/specialreports/in-the-shadow-of-fort-pilar-anger-and-pain-in-rio-hondo
Among the faces of war, I will remember his eyes that held the weight of emotions and his voice that trembled. He was a Muslim no doubt, with the wisps of thin beard that are common of the men in his community. In the vast track field turned into a refugee camp of blue tarpaulin tents, where the stench of squalor rises in the breathless humidity of the day, he blended with the rest in a long queue for breakfast.
He asked me if he should eat the hot dogs in a bun, wrapped in plastic in a mountain heap distributed by volunteers who reassured them it was chicken, not pork. Should I really eat this, he asked me a second time to demand an answer, the tremor in his voice giving way to helplessness.
What was obvious around us was that a life has to begin here. From now on there is no home to go back to—it’s all in ashes. He has to live like the others in this camp waking up to another day: the women bathing in their malongs, the men lighting their first cigarette. The children play with kites or a Spiderman toy. They race cars fashioned out of plastic bottles along a red running track, jumping heights as to who makes it the highest, too much of their innocence defying the gravity of loss.
I’ve seen them rush to the awnings for a nursery class that my high school classmate Gretchen has set up with goverenment social workers. They fight for attention, for candies, and they dance and sing, count the colorful numbers on the board, follow the teacher singing a spelling rhyme, L-O-V-E.
He showed me his yellow card, this Muslim man on the food-line. This is our credit card, he said. This is how we can survive and we don’t have to pay. He spoke of the irony and laughed at that. His name is Musa. Thirty years old. A Muslim, as I’ve said, his mother a Badjau of the seafaring tribe that perched their stilted wooden shacks on the Rio Hondo, where the Muslim rebels had made their first attempt to penetrate the city in the early darkness of September 9.
“Why did they have to burn it? That’s all we had.”
It was the first time I had heard a refugee express his indignation, unlike most others who seemed resigned to the tragedy. He wasn’t looking for an answer because he knew, and then he saw me unable to push back my tears.
“Yes, I’m angry at the soldiers. I’m angry at the rebels. I’m angry at all of them. What will happen to the children? What will we tell them when they grow up and they will be angry, generation after generation?” He spoke to me in a mix of Tagalog and English. He was a teacher who volunteered in a school, teaching Islamic values to children. At first we had spoken in Chabacano, and when he made the shift it was as if we have elevated the dimension of this event to a future of more mistrust and fighting, and also back to a past that led them to where they were now.
I don’t know what will become of him. I don’t know if his anger has already consumed him. His words resonated the outcome of what has taken place in Zamboanga City – this complicated trouble in southern Mindanao that never seems to end, unraveling the loss of dreams and aspirations built up over the years. Now on its third week, with fighting reduced to a limited scale, it could not go back to thinking of what would constitute ‘normal.’
Growing up in this city in the late 1970s, we knew what Rio Hondo stood for, an enclave of a water village on the edge of the coast for the marginalized Muslims, those who had fled from a previous war in Sulu, further down south in a chain of islands. These were the people Zamboanga did not want to touch, many of them outcasts who wound up selling their wares in the narrow grids of downtown, at the pier filled with crime, at the open market where much of the goods were smuggled in.
We were allowed to go only as far as Fort Pilar, because beyond that was Rio Hondo. It’s an easy walk from the famous Lantaka Hotel By The Sea, whose doors have been shut since the outbreak of the fighting, where the police force manning the outpost in a garden restaurant would take respites in their hammocks. It was wrenching to see the water sliding gently onto the breakwater, only to be shattered by the sound of a rolling thunder.
Mortar, said a soldier beside me. Next came the thumping round of a .50 caliber machine gun, and military choppers hovering above us. The acoustics of what the military calls urban warfare – that’s all we know of what’s happening inside the zone, in ground zero.
Outside, in the empty streets, walking became an eerie trance. In the street straight from the City Hall – refurbished to its old likeness of colonial architecture – to the stone structure of Fort Pilar, wild bougainvilleas had once overflowed. And if the rebels had not been repelled by the Navy and had gone forward, it could have been a stride taking the seat of government. For the Catholic majority of this city, the Virgin Mary at the shrine had protected them. This has been the unifying belief—that Zamboanga was impenetrable, this jewel in the southern tip of the peninsula where an imaginary line has divided the Christians from the Muslims of the Sulu archipelago.
But the symbol of a fortress has been broken. The invaders are at their doorstep. For the first time in recent history Zamboanga is vulnerable, this former garrison from where the Spanish fleet was launched against the Muslim pirates centuries ago. The Americans too, had used it for its base.
If you have heard the rabble-rousers of Zamboanga saying they want no part of any Bangsamoro deal, you'll have to understand that it goes back a long way. To see what has happened, it is obvious that the little tolerance the people of this city had managed to accommodate over the years of conflict might prove difficult to rebuild. – YA, GMA News
In part 2: from the burning of Jolo to the fires in Zamboanga
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.
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