Soldier faces probe for harassing 2 Germans

SOUTH UPI, Maguindanao — Two visiting German nationals inspecting a foreign-funded education program for Tiruray children here will return to Germany with a sad story to tell — that of being harassed by a soldier, who suspected them to be international terrorists, while they surveyed their project site here over the weekend.

Maj. Julieto Ando, spokesman of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division, said their commander, Gen. Generoso Senga, has ordered an immediate probe on the complaint of Ekkehart Arnsperger and Thomas Varadi, both of the Stistung Fur Kinder (Foundation for Children), of "undue treatment" by a certain Sgt. Mendoza while they were holding a dialogue with a Tiruray community here.

Arnsperger and Varadi told reporters that Mendoza, who belongs to the 57th Infantry Battalion, first interrogated them in Barangay Pandan, a remote tribal village here, where he kept on insinuating they could be members of an international terrorist organization.

Mendoza, according to local officials, heads a team of soldiers and militiamen in a detachment in Barangay Pandan, where the German foundation is operating a pre-school program for Tiruray children.

Although apparently annoyed, the two foreigners, village officials said, politely discussed with Mendoza the purpose of their visit and the intricacies of their foundation’s project here.

The misunderstanding worsened when at nightfall, after questioning Varadi and Arnsperger, a practicing lawyer in West Berlin, Mendoza gate-crashed at a fellowship-dialogue between the foreigners and the villagers.

According to Arnsperger, Mendoza took to the floor and, to their surprise, talked lengthily about so many issues, including terrorism and the deposed Taliban regime of Afghanistan.

Piqued by Mendoza’s actuations, the two Germans, their guides and project coordinators left Pandan the next day and returned to the town proper via another route, worried that the Army sergeant and his men might see them along the farm-to-market road they earlier took on their way to the Tiruray village.

While they protest Mendoza’s actuations, Varadi and Arnsperger said they want him censured only for his misbehavior and not to be discharged from the Army.

Ariel de Asis, a representative of a non-government organization that helped arrange the visit of the two Germans, said the incident was a "wake-up call" for the Armed Forces to orient its men in the field on how to relate with foreigners and representatives of donor institutions involved in humanitarian projects in hostile areas.

"The visiting foreigners were so forgiving. They just want the soldier to be given disciplinary action just enough for him not to commit such a blunder again," De Asis said.

Many communities surrounding this town are known lairs of Muslim secessionist forces and enclaves of the obscure Indigenous People’s Federal Army, a native militia fighting for ancestral domain and the creation of federal governments for each of Mindanao’s Muslim, Christian and ethnic communities. — John Unson