THE MOURNERS OF MAMASAPANO

By Patricia Evangelista
10:33 AM, Feb 18, 2015

It is a quiet town. There is a river. There are cornfields. There is a main street, a clinic, a
barbershop, a number of small roadside stores. Electricity is rare; water is pumped out
of wells. In the afternoons, groups of children toss balls in the field.

It is a pastoral postcard, marred by the occasional odd image. Bullet holes, for example,
on the moorings of a wooden bridge. Unexploded M32 slugs half-buried in the cornfield.
A chalk drawing, on the wall of a classroom, of fishermen on a boat with a helicopter
overhead dropping bombs into the water.

This is Mamasapano, population 22,354, stronghold of the Moro Islamic Liberation

Front. The wide swathe of fields and villages are swallowed by the Liguasan Marsh every
June. Once it was called Manganoy, until it was named for the eldest son of Datu Andal
Ampatuan Sr. Here, the rebels of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front live among the
community – they are the elected village captains, they are farmers, they are fishermen
with waterlogged fingernails, they are the men who ruffle the hair of the barefoot babies
toddling down the road. Many of them have seen action, most were once part of Nur
Misuari’s Moro National Liberation Front, have cousins among the Bangsamoro Islamic
Freedom Fighters, some of whom live in the heat of small huts.

The people here know how to disappear. How to crouch, in the dark, at the sound of
gunfire. How to pack, fast, gathering children and food and changes of clothing. How to
run, when the floodwater comes and rises to the waist.

It is a town of water lilies, says a local official. They move away when the prow of a boat
cuts into the water; they slip back into place once the danger is past.

Now there is blood soaking the water lilies. It is scarcely metaphorical. It was among the
water lilies, after all, that the last bleeding survivor of the 55th Battalion of the Police
Special Action Force hid after 35 of his comrades fell in the cornfields of Tukanalipao.

The dead range in age, gender and religion, from the terribly young to the not quite old.
Some of them were recognizable when they were found, others were identified only by
the clothes they wore. Some were buried to the sound of trumpets under the flag of the
republic, others were wrapped in white, while wife and children sat in huts unaware of
their loss. The dead include an 8-year-old girl with a speech defect, a 37-year-old rebel
with an infant child, a farmer who wandered into the killing field with a flashlight and a
cellphone, a former security guard, a one-time veterinary student, a medic, a man
planning his wedding, a Moro policeman, a new father, a father of 2. They came from all
over the country, and died, sprawled in the dirt of Bangsamoro.

The toll is high, 65 from the government’s official count.

Former Police Special Action Force chief Getulio Napeñas claims a different number.

He has no doubt his men shot down at least 250.