HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH

Town Still Struggles with Terror

The horrifying past of Laak, a town in Compostela Valley, has come back to terrify villagers, no thanks to the state’s intensifying militarization in the countryside.

By Cheryll Fiel
Bulatlat

LAAK, Compostela Valley -- “Mura man kag taga-Laak!” (You act like you're from Laak!) In this part of the country, people say this when they mean you’re tough.

Carlos Ramos, a 50-something native of this town, traced the expression’s origins to the anti-dictatorship struggle in the 1970s. A crowd of around 4,000 residents took part in a march-rally during one of the Independence Day rallies at the height of martial law. When a picture of the rally appeared in a newspaper, it bore a caption that said the marchers were all members of the New People’s Army (NPA).

Thus, the expression connotes a time in history when all residents of Laak were believed  to be Communist guerrillas. To actually let the world know that at the height of the Marcos dictatorship took courage. Although the caption was wrong, the image it conjured stuck.

Ramos lived with his family in Tabon at the time, one of the interior villages of the town. He was one of the many who lived to tell the tales of horror that Laak went through in 1981, a period etched in the collective memory here as “panahon sa hamlet” (a time of hamletting), referring to the military’s practice of displacing residents and holding them literally under the gun for days on end.

Ramos’s family was among the thousands that were driven out of their homes and put in veritable concentration camps upon orders of the military.

The parish priest allowed Ramos’s family to put up a house within the parish’s property. Ramos had been a kaabag, a church minister. This parish, now called the Parish of the Holy Family, is the same institution where Ramos now serves as the Parish Social Action Ministry (PSAM) coordinator.

Military abuses

Nestled on a hill a few meters from the town hall, the church opened its doors many times during the martial-law period to victims of human rights abuses. The same door opened in November to the cries of Laak residents complaining of the military’s abuses.

“Not one of the 44 barangays (villages) of Laak was spared by the military from hamletting at the time,” Ramos said. He vividly recalled scenes of residents hurriedly tearing down their houses and evacuating to the barangay center.

“We had to dismantle our houses in a week’s time because we were told that the military  would soon be coming and they said they would burn down our homes,”  he said.

Ramos said the order to vacate the community was released as a barangay directive signed by a certain Colonel Cruz. “First it said that we must move over to the sitio (sub-village) centers. When families started building houses there, another order came, telling us to move instead to barrio centers. It was not easy to uproot the house that you built for years, much more leave your land,” Ramos recounted.

Ramos said the villages worst hit by the harassment were San Antonio, Inakayan, Mabuhay, Panamoren and del Monte.

But he was dismayed that the media ran stories disproving any incident of hamletting. The reports instead said that the people themselves volunteered to dismantle their houses so they could occupy lots at the barrio centers.

Even the parish priest, Fr. Eli Bianchi, a prominent figure in the anti-Marcos struggle, had to bring a sick child to the town hall just to disprove the claims of then Laak mayor Panfilo Amoren that all was well in his town.

“People felt defeated. They stopped going to the farms because of fear. Many died of diseases at the concentration camps… This was the hardest part to remember,” Ramos said.

Two generals

Later, two generals -- introduced to the residents as General de Castro and General De Guzman – flew by helicopter to the Laak parish and faced the residents. “I stood up to the generals and the media and told them what really happened to the people of Laak, contrary to what was projected in the press,” Ramos said proudly.

The moment the generals left and the dialogue with the media and churchpeople ended, members of the CHDF, the paramilitary group at the time, closed in on Ramos. “Even the barangay captain yelled invectives at me. I felt like I was Jose Rizal about to be hurled to the firing squad. But I did not yield,” Ramos said.

That night, Ramos tediously documented the hamletting cases. With the help of the priests, nuns and the parishioners, he submitted the report, with the attached order of the military ordering them to vacate their properties, to the human-rights organization called Justice and Peace.

“I continued documenting the incidents. I was not afraid because members of the press who had visited the area when the generals came were now covering my expose,” Ramos said.

But even Church workers from whom the victims sought help were themselves victimized by the consequent acts of repression by the military. Human rights advocates later signed petition letters against these abuses.

The hamletting left many of the villages of Laak practically a “no man’s land” in the 1980s. As the military overran the communities, killing residents who dared get in the way, logging and mining companies started to take over the lands. Little wonder then that many of the present villages are named either after local bureaucrats or owners of big logging concessions, such as Lorenzo Sarmiento.

After the abuses in Laak caught the attention of national and international human rights organizations, the military dismantled the camps. But they left behind residents who were terrified, hungry, and afflicted with diseases that spread in the course of the massive displacement. Bulatlat

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