‘What I’m fighting for today is an extension of what I fought for before’
SHE CROUCHED in the foxhole that she and loyal Berto had dug with their bare hands, breathing heavily as she tried to fit her eight-month pregnant body sideways into its shallow hold. Above the roar of gunfire, she could hear the invading soldiers shout out the name that had come to be identified with her.
‘We returned to democracy, but the practices are undemocratic’
WE OFTEN think of the lives of military men as nothing less than exciting, and the one led by retired Brig. Gen. Raymundo Jarque does not disappoint, although it had some unexpected and confusing twists. From a young lieutenant assigned to Mindanao to face the Muslim secessionists in the 1970s, he went on to become a military commander fighting a raging communist insurgency in his home province, then a fugitive from justice seeking sanctuary among the very rebels he fought, and later a consultant to them in their peace talks with the government. Had the local film industry not been in the doldrums, there would probably have been a movie based on his action-packed life by now.
‘Without justice, there can never be an end to the war in Mindanao’
“IT WAS a little bit eerie,” Nur Misuari says, recalling that cold early morning in January 1986 when a stranger came knocking on the door of his hotel room in Madrid. On the run from the Marcos government, the chairman of the secessionist Moro National Liberation Front or MNLF was then living in Tripoli, dependent on the hospitality of the Libyan leader Muammar Khadaffi. He was in Madrid for just that night, waiting for a flight to Casablanca in Morocco, where he was to attend a meeting.
by Sheila S. Coronel, with additional reporting by Booma B. Cruz and "Probe"
THE GHOSTS of the last elections haunt Lanao del Sur and they refuse to rest. They will not go away. They flit about, seeking resolution. So when Brig. Gen. Francisco Gudani, the commander of the Marine brigade stationed in the province during the last election, testified in the Senate in September, saying that he had been mysteriously relieved from his post two clays after the voting, the ghosts were roused again. Days after the Senate hearing, Gudani and one of his officers, Marine Lt. Col. Alexander Balutan, were sent to court martial for refusing to heed their superiors’ orders not to testily. The ghosts, having been roused, are now rattling even more noisily than ever before.
by Booma B. Cruz
POONA BAYABAO, Lanao del Sur — “Fernando Poe, Fernando Poe.” With clenched fists and his right hand raised, octogenarian Hadji Mohammad Monte repeated the name of the late action star like a mantra when asked whom he voted for in the last presidential elections. He insisted that Poe was number one among the residents of this town where the late king of Philippine movies was — and still is — very popular.
Focus on the Filipino youth: The Lost Generation
by Samira Gutoc
BEFORE ME was an Islamic religion studies graduate, an aleema who divorced her aleem (Islamic learned man) husband (for beating her up. She was lecturing on significant Muslim women in Islamic history. So far she had taken up the Prophet Muhammad’s wife Khadija and daughter Aisha. Today’s topic: Madina’s Umu Sulaim Rumaisa. All were women of virtue whose lives could give us insights on what a Muslim woman should aspire to.
Virgilio Garcillano
by Sheila S. Coronel
VIRGILIO Garcillano will go down in history as the election official whose wiretapped conversations mortally wounded a president. He disappeared from public view in the second week of June, as the controversy over the wiretaps heated up, and many may have a hard time recalling what he looks like. Yet his raspy voice, distinctive lisp, and thick Visayan accent are now embedded in the audio memory of millions of Filipinos who have listened to the “Garci” tapes.
by Yvonne T. Chua
“WHERE ARE the boys?”
Quezon City Schools Division supervisor Beth Meneses has been asking this question the past several years. On really bad days, she says, as many as one in five of the male students in the city’s high schools could be anywhere — the streets, the canteen, the mall, the computer gaming shop — but in the classroom.
by Yvonne T. Chua
WHEN BARRIO doctor Richard Lariosa arrived in Tagapul-an, Samar in 2002, he was surprised to learn that medicines for the town were being kept at the mayor’s office. “When you gave a prescription to a patient not of the same political color as the mayor, he’d be told by the people at the mayor’s office there was no medicine even when they were still a lot,” the doctor says. “Color coding.”
by Avigail M. Olarte and Yvonne T. Chua
THE YOUNG mother was frantic. A seven-month-old baby was burning with fever in her arms, barely able to breathe. The doctor at the rural health unit quickly attended to the child, who was suffering from serious respiratory tract infection. But she had no medicine to give the baby: her supply of Ventolin or salbutamol, which would have given the infant instant relief, had run out.
