On the first day, August 26, 2009, Wednesday, they massed on the grounds of the Sulu State College. On the following day, August 27, Thursday, at the Notre Dame of Jolo; and on the third and last day, August 28, Friday, they gathered at the Southern Mindanao Islamic Institute. School has been suspended to give way to this huge gathering. Hundreds stood under the mid-day sun: students, teachers and administrators from all the colleges. Priests and nuns from Catholic schools, NGO activists, workaday people, vendors and tricycle drivers were also there.
On the SSC grounds, the air was tense. There was anger, indignation. There was also exhilaration, the feeling of strength in number; of courage multiplied, and just maybe, the hint of the yearned-for freedom. Every decent citizen seemed to be there, young and old, professionals, human rights activists, the religious. A great number was mostly women, and mostly young, in school-uniform and properly veiled. All around, placards and streamers screamed for justice. Girls balled their fists into the air, shouting Allahu Akbar.
The object of the protest is the series of abduction and gang rape victimizing young women, some of whom students from the town’s colleges. There had been at least 20 cases documented and it would seem there had been more undocumented ones. A news reporter from the Philippine Daily Inquirer reached the Governor and asked for a statement about the uncovered crimes, and she was bluntly put out. The Governor told her not to bother him as he is busy with so many other things to be talking about rape. On the ground, however, everyone was up in arms. Even the Catholic sector, a traditionally timid segment and silent spectator in the islands’ gold-and-goons politics, was finally incensed. One victim is rumoured to have lost her mind; others who had spoken up later hid or ran away, some reportedly paid off to disappear from the town. A gay friend of one of the student victims who witnessed the abduction had been later hunted down and stabbed to death. His body was later found in Dan Puti in Patikul.
A day before the series of mass actions, an announcement had been made over the local radio. No classes from Wednesday through Friday, August 26th to 28th; everyone is enjoined to take part in the series of demonstrations and indignation rallies in the campuses and around downtown Jolo. The colleges were shaken: it is their students that are being raped, sometimes right outside the school gate. The streamers and placards cry: Justice for rape victims! Jail the rapists! Days back, the president of Sulu State College, Dr Hamsali Jawali, aghast over the events that have been taking place in his hometown, went up to the second floor of the SSC Hostel to join the meeting of the Women Support Group, an ad hoc body set up to address the rape issue. He had to be carried up the stair in his wheelchair as he has been half-paralyzed from a stroke. At the meeting he broke down. He never thought he would see this day, he said, when his cherished homeland, Lupah Sug, should come to this.
Earlier, during an end-of-Ramadhan lecture, the grand mufti of the Province of Sulu had wrongly spoken, denying the rape cases as hearsay. His statement was broadcasted internationally via TN, a Tausug website. The local people got so furious that criticisms flew his way. A Tausug girl strongly reacted and commented, Subay san tilu’un sin batu in mufti yan, that mufti ought to be stoned.
Most outraged were the women. Bansag Babae, Muslimah Resource for Integrated Development, and the MNLF’s Bangsa Moro Women Organization, in league with Bawgbug, a human rights alliance, had over the last few months uncovered a series of VAW cases dating back to several years back. On June 12, 2008, a girl was abducted by two men on a motorcycle while walking down a road juncture called Crossing. She was able to escape when the motorcycle stopped somewhere in Dan Puti. In July of 2009, a student of Sulu State College was again taken by van-riding men and was held captive for five days in a big house where she was gang-raped for two days. She was released. (See related story on p. 2.)
Then on the second week of August 2009, another 12-year old girl was taken by van-riding men and was also raped for days by several men; and again, on August 19, 2009, a 19-year old woman was abducted by a group of men in a van. This too was able to escape. Another report points to another uninvestigated case, the daughter of a teacher at Bakud Elementary School abducted in Mawbuh and was brought somewhere in Tanjung, where she was raped by several men. The Tanjung area in Indanan is a turf of the Estino clan, a close ally of Sulu Governor Abdusakur Tan. This girl and her family had to later leave their residence at the PC compound in Asturias, Jolo. Her father had tried to contact Bawgbug and the girl’s abductors had somehow got wind of it and paid them a visit. They left before she could testify or make a report. The teacher-mother had to seek a transfer elsewhere.
Filing a complaint for rape is high-risk in Jolo. In one case where the victim was able to make a report to human rights groups, she stirred a hornet’s nest, with the town’s warlords put on the defensive. An “invitation” for an affidavit signing at the Mayor’s office turned into a confrontation between her and prominent politician families backed by a hundred Civilian Emergency Forces (private armies turned auxiliary forces of the police and the military). Hadji Kadil Estino was notably present, along with Hadja Aminah Buclao and her who husband Provincial Board Member Hector Buclao. The hadja would be thenceforth to be famously remembered as the lady who threatened the rape victim with an on-the-spot clitoridectomy for daring to complain. She had allegedly took out a pistol from her bag and brandished it against the victim and the human rights activist who sought to defend the girl from her verbal assaults. “Larutun ku san in tutuy mu yan. (I will have your clitoris removed.),” Hadja Aminah was heard to have said.
The rape issue has polarized the Tausug community, especially the religious under whose leadership all of the Moro Muslims traditionally sought guidance. Sadly, as the religious leaders and teachers argued and bickered as to how to confront the disgraceful news, new cases kept on turning up. On the last week of August 2009, a 22-year old married woman was found dead in the outskirt of Sahaya Village in Latih, Patikul. Unconfirmed accounts said that her body was thrown there in the bush by two unidentified motor-riding men. On September 4, 2009, another report to the Justice and Peace for Integrity of Creation (JPIC) states, an 72-year old woman was also gang-raped by ten men in Tulay, Jolo. Then a day later, on September 5, 2009, a decomposing body was found, again in Tanjung, Indanan. The body was identified later to be that of a lost girl from Igasan, Patikul. Then again, on September 9, 2009, a 17-year old girl was also found by a policeman in the jambatan (docking area). The young girl was in a state of shock and her body bore rape and torture marks. It was found out that she was gang-raped by four men.
All of these cases were part of sketchy reports filed in the desks and offices of DSWD-Women’s Desk, the PNP, the PHO, the Medico-Legal department of the Provincial Hospital, and NGO offices in Sulu. Human rights organizations and the Women Support Group, a coalition around the VAW issue, had repeatedly called for a national investigation into the cases, but none has so far been taken. Complaints against military abuses to the Commission on Human Rights in Region 9 earlier filed have yielded no results as the Office has no power to prosecute. As a matter of procedure the CHR would write the AFP about the lodged complaints, the latter would deny the charges, then CHR would inform the complaining party of the military’s response, and no further action would be taken. In the case of rape cases where perpetrators were identified to be politicians’ sons and members of local warlords’ militias, resistance to the pursuit of justice primarily comes from local officials. In the outrage against the gang rapes in the islands, the Governor, the Town Mayor, the Provincial National Police were one in their response: outright denial. The religious leaders, now beholden to politicians because their monthly subsidy, including the Central Mosque’s and the madaris’ light and water, are paid for by the Governor, have had to feign ignorance as well, echoing the official line that reports of rape is hearsay and that human rights reporting is bad for the image of Sulu. Such non-cooperation from authorities in the province has made life difficult for human rights defenders. Threats have become frequent callers. Motorcycle-riding men would follow them or their closest of kin, and “mysterious” men in civilian clothes would be espying around their offices inquiring into their whereabouts. An” exemplary” case of harassment was that of Temogen “Cocoy” Tulawie who, for spearheading a series of human rights campaigns and mass actions, had been charged with multiple attempted murder cases by the Governor and had been issued by the regional court of Jolo an arrest order. The staunch human rights activist had to flee the town and is now in hiding.
Since the last quarter of 2009 when huge throngs of people made a stand against the rape of women in the islands, no other massive protest action has been staged. The heavy hand of the fascist machinery seems to have reasserted itself, cowing people into submission. Some of the civil society organizations, half of the once critical Tausug intellectuals, and the better-fed part of the ulama, are now one by one making a turnaround, falling into silence or else issuing statements that absolve the crimes and abuses of those in offices. Nowadays, not many seem to have remembered the words of Fr. Jose Ante of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate: “We had been the quietest sector,” he had told the indignant crowd massed before him on August 17, 2009, “but this is an issue we cannot be silent about. We must unite and gather our strength around this and speak up!”
And yet, that someone, one of the victims, spoke up is maybe already a great source of hope. It is now up for the rest of the women victims to turn up and speak, carry on with the fight.
Baira Julkipli is the pseudonym of a Tausug writer now based in Manila. Baira spent some college in Mindanao State University in Marawi City, finished a course in Manila, then wrote and did some photography for a newspaper in Dubai.
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