Another Ampatuan massacre ‘shirker’ promoted general

How was the Nov. 2009 Maguindanao massacre pulled off with such impunity? Obviously it was with police-military complicity, or at least negligence.

No company-size private army could have barricaded the highway from dawn to dusk; detoured 58 civilians in eight vans up a hill; gang-raped five of the females; decapitated, dismembered, disemboweled some; machine-gunned all, including two pregnant, in the face and genitals; then bulldozed them dying or dead, with the vehicles, into a ready pit — without the co-opted uniformed services abetting it.

Sixty-five co-indictees of the Ampatuan political kingpin-principals are in fact foot soldiers and patrolmen. Eyewitnesses have testified that the massacrers used M-14s and M-16s, and toted mortars. Raids on five Ampatuan arsenals had yielded crates of military-issue assault and sniper rifles, shoulder-fire rockets, grenades, 330,000 rounds of NATO ammunition — and army Humvee and armored personnel carrier. It’s inconceivable, from police-military intelligence and civil relations, that the brass would not have known about the buildup of war materiel.

Yet no high commander is charged as accomplice or accessory. Worse, two Army leaders were even promoted to general, one only the other day. Relatives of the 20 slain Mangudadatu clanswomen, 32 journalists, and six passersby are incensed.

The National Union of Journalists-Philippines is decrying the promotion of colonel Medardo Geslani to brigadier general. Made last June 23, the upgrade comes 55 months since that grim day of Nov. 23, 2009, with court trial barely starting.

Geslani, then 601st Brigade commander, had turned down two requests of the Ampatuans’ political rival Esmael Mangudadatu for security escorts, NUJP chairperson Rowena Paraan recounts. First was days before Mangudadatu’s wife and kinswomen were to motor to the provincial capital, dangerously in the heat of pre-election violence, to file his gubernatorial candidacy. Again, when informed by an intelligence team that scores of gunmen had stopped the convoy in Barangay Salman, Ampatuan town, and forced their vehicles toward the woods, followed by a backhoe. “That may have sealed the fate of the Ampatuan 58,” Paraan says.

This is the second promotion of an Army commander whose inaction or dissimulation allowed the massacre to happen, Paraan laments. The first was now-retired lieutenant general Alfredo Cayton, then major general of the 6th Infantry Division in Maguindanao.

“It was Cayton who assured the journalists who would eventually perish in the convoy that it was perfectly safe to travel from Buluan to Shariff Aguak,” Paraan recalls. “The Army never ceases to boast of its intelligence prowess, (yet) missed the fact that, three days before the massacre, Maguindanao police and the Ampatuans’ private militia already had set up checkpoints on the highway leading to the capital, or that as early as then, word was spreading like wildfire that the family that ruled Maguindanao had vowed that Mangudadatu would never run against the(m).”

Paraan recalls another incident: “Months before the massacre, a convoy of 50 journalists covering the massive displacement of civilians in Maguindanao caused by fighting between the military and the MILF was arbitrarily stopped and the media practitioners told that they had to get clearance from the brigade commander — no other than Geslani.”

An Army internal investigation had absolved Geslani and Cayton of any responsibility in the massacre.

Paraan notes that Cayton’s promotion was by ex-President Gloria Arroyo, under whose term the Ampatuans came to control the regional, provincial, and almost all 36 municipal governments. But Geslani’s is by President Noynoy Aquino. “(This) betrays his promise to make justice and human rights the cornerstone of his Presidency,” Paraan says.

During US President Barack Obama’s recent state visit, American reporters pressed P-Noy on the continuing media killings nationwide. He continually fumbled about the number of journalists massacred in Maguindanao, the worst violence against journalists in world history.  One hundred-forty one journalists have been slain since the end of martial law in 1986, making the Philippines un-safest for them worldwide.

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 Reader Michael Cesar de Guzman reacts to my series on corruption of and non-maintenance of the MRT-3: “I’ve been following your exposés. Food for thought from writer Simon Black: ‘Elections merely change the players. They don’t change the game. And it is the game that is fundamentally flawed. The real solutions are not with politicians, but within ourselves.’ Keep up the good work, and to hell with that so-called lawyer threatening you with a lawsuit. He won’t know what will hit him from social media alone.”

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