How far would the government go in its campaign against the New People’s Army? The harrowing experience of the residents in a remote Mindanao village provides some answers. For three straight days, soldiers practically held them hostage, torturing them, abusing them, accusing them of being Communist guerrillas or sympathizers. Even the children were not spared.
DAVAO
CITY – “The soldiers were cruel,” said 37-year-old Sione Caagay, a
resident of Spur Dos, a mountain village on the borders of Davao Oriental and
Compostela Valley Province. Her
right elbow, which was sprained after one of the soldiers twisted it,
was bandaged with a white towel printed with the words “Good Morning.” Caagay
said she could still feel the pain in her back, which was whacked three times with a
piece of wood.
Gilbert
Masumbid, a 19-year-old Lumad neighbor of Caagay’s, had bruises on his
left arm and stomach. He said he was turned into a punching bag by the soldiers; his hands
were tied with a rope whose other end was tied to a beam, forcing him
to stand up all throughout the nine hours that the soldiers tortured him.
Caagay
and Masumbid, along with about 30 families in Spur Dos, suffered physical pain
and psychological trauma from the "barbaric" conduct of the military.
"The
soldiers were cruel,” Caagay repeated. “We thought we would die because of
what they did to us.” Caagay was referring to the elements of the 30th Special
Forces of the Philippine Army, led by Capt. Nasser Lidasan, based in Cateel town
in Davao Oriental.
The
operations were such that, according to the residents, the military even accused
children as young as 12 years old of being members of the New People’s Army.
Maricris Sabele, a 12-year-old Grade Six pupil, said that the soldiers accused
her of being a member of the NPA’s medical team. At one point, Maricris’s mother, Erene, tried to prevent
soldiers from harming her child. She was instead beaten on the legs with a piece
of wood.
Spur
Dos, which can be reached from this city after a seven-hour drive through the banana
plantations and logging roads of Compostela Valley, is as sleepy as any mountain village can get. But on March
31, bursts of gunfire disturbed the stillness of the village. On that day, the
three-day ordeal of the residents started.
Just
before dawn, at about 5 a.m., Caagay and her five children were awakened by
gunfire just outside her house. The military had come as part of their
operations against the NPA. But when the soldiers failed to catch any
guerrilla in the area, they turned their ire on the villagers. They barged into the local
folks’ houses and ordered them to assemble at the village’s center.
The
village chief, Rodel Oliveros, was also awakened by the gunfire and had proceeded to the center
together with two neighbors to find out what was going on.
Along
the way, however, Oliveros and the two others were stopped by soldiers, who
angrily inquired about the NPA’s whereabouts. When the three told the troops
that they did not know of any guerrilla in the village, the soldiers mauled
them. Before ordering them to proceed to the village center, one of the soldiers
told Oliveros and his neighbors: "If ever we see an NPA here, we will skin
you alive and kill you!"
Masumbid
was also
roused from sleep by the gunfire. Shortly afterward, he heard strong
knocks on the door. Before he could open it, the soldiers had barged inside, and
accused Masumbid of being an NPA guerrilla. The young man was then dragged to
the purok center (a hut within the
village where leaders gather for official meetings) where he was tortured.
When
soldiers went to Caagay’s house, the mother even thanked them for not strafing
her home: “Thank you, sir, for not strafing our house,” Caagay told one of
the soldiers.
She
knew only too well that strafings are common during such military operations. A
month before, soldiers from the same command riddled with bullets the house of 23-year-old
civilian Malen Carsona in Lucasan, a nearby village. Carsona and her two
children, Mary Joy, five, and Dodong,
three, were injured; Mary Joy would die later. Another civilian, Roy Latiban,
23, died on the spot.
But
Caagay’s remark did little to dissuade the soldiers from doing what they did
next. Indeed, it apparently angered them as they went on to ransack her house. The
soldiers said they found acupuncture needles and alleged subversive documents
inside Caagay’s home. They accused her of being an NPA member. Caagay, a
volunteer for the Davao City-based Brokenshire Integrated Health Ministries,
denied the accusation.
Caagay,
who had joined the other residents at the center while the soldiers were
ransacking her house as well as the other houses, was picked out from the crowd
and was struck three times with a piece of freshly cut firewood. One soldier
twisted her right arm, spraining it.
Under
extreme pain, Caagay thought she would faint. The soldiers asked her who were
the other NPA guerrillas in the village. When Caagay couldn’t stand the pain
any longer, she falsely named another resident, Carlito Sabele, 38, as an NPA
member.
That
ended her torture. The soldiers then looked for Sabele, who was also in the
crowd. Despite his repeated assertion that he was not a guerrilla, Sabele was
dragged away, tied, and beaten in the chest and stomach. He was hit several
times with rifle butts. In the next hours and in the next three days, Sabele was
coerced to serve as the soldiers’ “guide” in scouring the area for
guerrillas . As of this writing, Sabele is still in the hands of the military.
Caagay
and the other villagers were commanded to stay inside two houses, which served
as their prison cells. Under guard by more than 40 heavily armed
soldiers, some of whom had no nameplates, the residents stayed in the houses
in the next two days. During their incarceration, the villagers were
bombarded with questions about the NPAs in the area, particularly on the
guerrillas’ location.
At
around 8:30 a.m. on the first day, another burst of gunfire reverberated for
about an hour in the
mountains nearby. Later, the soldiers raided an alleged NPA makeshift
camp about three kilometers from the village. According to the residents, two
soldiers were killed and one was wounded. (Military reports in the media said
two soldiers were wounded and only one was killed.)
As
soon as the raiding soldiers came back, one of them shouted at the villagers:
“You liars!” They then laid out in the village center their “trophies”
from the fight: backpacks, sacks of rice, among others, that were supposedly
taken from the NPAs.
The
soldiers then sent some male villagers to retrieve the bodies but before they
could reach the site of the firefight, soldiers, for some reason, mauled them again and were told
to return to the village center. The soldiers instead commanded the driver of a
passenger motorcycle to bring the
bodies to the village’s elementary school ground, which had been converted
into a helipad by the military. After the chore, the driver was also beaten up.
Caagay
said that at around 10 a.m. that same day, the men were herded out of the two
houses and ordered to lie on the ground where they were continuously buttstroked
and kicked by the soldiers. The torture lasted until noon. At times, the men
were forced to look straight at the fierce sun.
Meanwhile,
Masumbid, who was initially held separately at the purok center, said
that while the soldiers were torturing the detained men, he, too, was being
mauled mercilessly by the soldiers, his body virtually becoming a punching bag.
By two p.m. that day, he joined the other villagers in one of the houses cum
detention cells. "I thought I wouldn't survive," Masumbid told Bulatlat.com.
At
about noon, the roads of Spur Dos had been abandoned. The military had ordered
that motorcycles -- the main mode of transportation that can survive the bad
roads and steep slopes of the mountainous region -- could only reach as far as
Quarry, a mining and farming village before Spur Dos. The move effectively cut
off the village from the rest of the world, stopping trade to nearby farming
communities, rendering residents immobile.
The captive villagers had no breakfast and
lunch on the first day, according to
Caagay. The soldiers only allowed them to eat at 3 p.m., sharing less than five
kilos of rice, which the villagers cooked into porridge so everybody could
eat.
Caagay
said they weren't allowed to farm. During
the night, they had to make do with the cramped space in the two houses to
sleep.
The
villagers were under the watchful eyes of the soldiers, who had by then occupied
their houses, the elementary school and the purok center, which had been
turned into the military’s communication post.
For
Caagay, capping the first day of their ordeal was not the mauling nor the
military raid but the bombing operations in the nearby Tambuyong mountain that
lasted for four hours in the afternoon.
On the second day, elements of the 60th Infantry Battalion
from Compostela Valley province arrived in Spur Dos as reinforcements. One of
the troops sneered at the villagers: "I heard you were beaten?"
According
to the fact-finding report by human-rights group Karapatan, 19 civilians,
including two women, were mauled and beaten in those three days. Last April 5,
Karapatan led a fact-finding mission to Spur Dos. The mission was
participated in by
members of the media, religious and health sectors, farmers’ groups and
representatives from the party-list group Bayan Muna.
As
a result of the military operations, at least 17 families from Spur Dos had to
evacuate and seek temporary shelter elsewhere, especially after there was talk
that the military would again conduct operations in the area. In fact, some of
the residents hitched a ride with the fact-finding mission in going to the
nearby villages to seek refuge.
"Fear
ruled our lives in those days. Our children would cry endlessly, traumatized by
it all,” Caagay said.
A
footage by ABS-CBN’s Bantay-Bata told of tales of woes straight from the
mouths of children, who could not hide their utter grief at the same time that
they are furious against the military. The footage was taken during the
psychotherapy session conducted by the mission. The session featured around 20
children ages four to 12; they were seated in a circle with representatives from
children's organizations and the local ABS CBN's Bantay Bata.
A
child commented in the local dialect: "Even though we go to school, they
accuse us of being NPA members. Many of us have been beaten (by the
soldiers).”
Caagay’s
12-year-old son was the most eloquent among the children.
His words were dripping with anger but he was calm. "The soldiers’
attitude toward us was bad. Why did they have to beat us? If they come to our
village, they should just talk to us. But they had to beat us up and accuse us
of being NPA members,” the boy said in Visayan.
He
continued: “This is why more people are joining the NPA, because the soldiers
are abusive. They would steal our livestock, they would ransack our things…”
Another
child, aged seven, when asked about the incident, could only utter the word "nagpabuto"
(“they fired”). He became incoherent and then he stopped altogether. As
he sat silently, tears started to roll down his cheeks. He then covered his face
and rested it on his knees. #