KIDNAP: An ABS-CBN Special.
Second of Three Parts
On June 9, the second day of our captivity, I still hoped I could do my work and followed up our interview. I was told not to worry about it and to have coffee and breakfast first. I looked around and saw the group had swelled to about 20 armed men. The men did not seem on alert; some were still sleeping while others busied themselves to cook.
I sat beside the professor who had told me quietly to expect the worse, that there may be no interview and that we may have already been kidnapped. My heart sank but I did not betray my fear. The men in our hut were busy cleaning their handguns, something that would become routine for them at the start of the day for the rest of our captivity.
At about seven in the morning, I was called to see the “commander” alone, some distance from our hut. The commander told me, “ito na lang ang sasabihin ko sa iyo, kidnap for ransom na ito (I am only going to tell you one thing. This is kidnap for ransom.).”
I took the news without batting an eyelash, even if my heart sank and my knees seemed to turn to jelly.
I tried to reason out with him. I told him to call me Ces, recalling somewhere that as a hostage, it was important for him to consider me a person and not just a commodity.
The commander was surrounded by ten to twelve men. I asked if Radulan Sahiron knew about what they were doing. He said he didn’t. He said that he was scared Sahiron may learn about it. Later, his men told me that their commander was hard-headed and didn’t follow orders.
Where is Sahiron, I asked. They said they didn’t know.
“Is he alive?” I asked, remembering what the professor told me that he overheard from the armed men that Sahiron was hurt in a bombing incident.
The commander said he didn’t know the whereabouts of Sahiron.
What cause?
I tried to convince them that granting me an interview would be better, to convey their cause to the people. I told them I was one of the first journalists to cover the massacre of seven civilians and a soldier in Ipil, Maimbung in February, that I was the only one to report on the case of Visma Juhan, a woman injured by a bullet from an M203 rifle grenade used by US forces while training in a military camp in Bud Datu.
The commander remarked that they had given an interview to a former colleague in ABS-CBN but it never was aired.
I asked if they had political demands. “Political demands?” the commander scoffed. He said they had none and that the government doesn’t listen to such demands.
I said the professor has been fighting for peace, to which the commander replied that nothing has ever happened to the professor’s proposals.
‘Just a reporter’
During our days in captivity, our captors would listen to the radio. It was surreal sitting in the middle of the jungle listening to news about us.
One night, the one-armed man said to me, with a pleased smile on his face, that I was an important person. I said no, I was just a reporter.
Some of them didn’t know who I was were it not for the radio broadcasts. It would have been funny if not for the following day, when I was told that they had information that I was related to Senator Frank Drilon. I was afraid they would drive up the ransom demand for us.
In my journal, I wrote: I’ve always had a romanticized view of Sulu. That outlook was shattered today.
What turned these young men into the monsters that they are? What went wrong? They have a deep hatred and a warped sense of the Muslim struggle. My mistake was my being so naïve in hoping that the man I was to interview would present a different view of the Abu Sayyaf. I was wrong. Apparently the message never even got to him. Greed and hatred got in the way. If we are to believe the commander in charge, he just decided to form a team to kidnap us for ransom. The poor professor who arranged this was naïve like me. He said this will be a very big scoop. The irony is we became the story. I want to hang my head in shame.
But there was a principal behind all this, it became clear to us as the days wore on. The professor believes it was none other than Sahiron himself.
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