‘Land of Bad’

We are saddened by the reported kidnapping of an American national in a coastal village in Sibuco town, Zamboanga del Norte last week. The kidnap victim, 26-year-old Elliot Onil Eastman, is a vlogger in his home state in Vermont who came to our country and married a Filipina five months ago. Eastman was abducted by heavily armed masked men last Thursday night from his in-laws’ residence in Sitio Tungawan, Barangay Poblacion.

The victim was shot in his leg while attempting to evade his abductors as witnessed by his wife Karisa Hairin. The gunmen allegedly identified themselves as and claimed to be “operatives.”

The Police Regional Office (PRO) IX have reportedly coordinated with their counterparts in the PRO Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (PRO-BARMM) in the ongoing tracking operation for the safe recovery of the victim at the soonest possible time.

While it may be described as an isolated kidnap incident, it is another black mark on our country’s image abroad.

A team of agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States reportedly flew to Zamboanga to check on the ongoing search and rescue operations for Eastman, according to Police Lt. Col. Helen Galvez, PRO IX spokesperson.

“There is no (ransom) demand, no calls and contact to the family of the victim in the US based on the confirmation of the FBI to our Police Provincial director Col. (Rainer) Diaz in the incident site,” Galvez disclosed. “Since the abduction took place, there is no proof of life yet of the victim as of now,” Galvez added. Since this is still a live kidnapping case, no further details could be given to media.

As this developed, the Taguig City Regional Trial Court (RTC) Branch 153 convicted 17 Abu Sayyaf kidnap-for-ransom bandits for 21 counts of kidnapping and serious illegal detention with ransom and sentenced each of them to up to 40 years of imprisonment for each count.

They abducted at gunpoint 21 individuals from a diving resort in Sipadan Island in Malaysia in April 2000. The victims were then taken by boat to Talipao, Sulu and held captive in Jolo, Sulu. They demanded ransom money from the hostages’ families and from the government. The ruling was handed down on Oct. 16 after 24 years of trial on these high-profile kidnappings committed by the notorious Abu Sayyaf bandits, known for their brutality of decapitating victims and soldiers they capture.

The abduction incident reminded me of the Hollywood movie “Land of Bad” that I was able to watch during the more than six-hour flight from Dubai to Switzerland two weeks ago. The movie is about a US Special Forces unit that was supposedly sent to the Philippines to retrieve a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent who was being held captive by local Islamic terrorists supposedly somewhere in Sulu. Sounds familiar?

Remember another kidnap incident 24 years ago, also an American national, Jeffrey Schilling who was abducted by the Abus in Zamboanga. At that time, Schilling was 24 years old from San Francisco, California who came to meet his Filipina girlfriend. Claiming he had converted to Islam, the flamboyant Abu Sayyaf spokesman Abu Sabaya accused Schilling of being a covert agent or a spy working for the CIA. At that time, former president Joseph Estrada launched his all-out war against Islamic extremists, including Muslim secessionist groups in Mindanao.

Fearing for the life of Schilling being caught in the war, then US president Bill Clinton even sent a letter hand-carried to Mr. Estrada at Malacañang by ex-US Defense Secretary William Cohen in August 1998. In that letter, Mr. Clinton asked the erstwhile Chief Executive to declare a ceasefire for the time being.

The other foreign governments whose nationals were also being held hostage by the Abus negotiated through a designated Libyan intermediary, Rajab Azzarouq, who delivered undisclosed amounts of money. This finally got the Abus to release their hostages unharmed. “It was not a ransom,” Azzarouq insisted and described the money as humanitarian assistance.

This “Land of Bad” movie seemed to have been inspired by these past events in the Philippines. The movie has the Oscar award-winning Best Actor Russell Crowe with real brothers Liam Hemsworth and Luke Hemsworth as lead actors. Crowe plays the role of US Air Force Capt. Eddie Grimm as the drone operator who issues the order to fire missiles from the comfort of their headquarters which, in this movie, was identified somewhere in Palawan, also here in the Philippines.

The production team filmed “Land of Bad” in the forests of Southeast Queensland, Australia. The jungle scenes were made to look like Sulu. Although the movie was primarily a work of fiction and was not based on a true story, the narrative includes certain factual elements like Sergeant JJ Kinney’s role as a Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC). A real unit in the Armed Forces of the US, Kinney in this movie used military high-tech gadgets to direct the air strikes in their ragtag rescue mission.

They were dropped from a plane on a mission to rescue a CIA asset supposedly somewhere in the jungles of Sulu. In the movie’s plot, the captive CIA agent had been gathering intelligence information on a supposed Russian operative also in the Philippines. While en route to their team’s mission, they encountered heavily armed Abu Sayyaf militia.

Another award-winning Australian actor, Robert Rabiah, played the villainous Islamic terrorist leader Saeed Hashimi, whose violent acts included decapitating a woman’s head in front of her husband and son. The entire film spirals into a brutal 48-hour battle for survival.

While Filipino actors as Abus were given very short speaking lines in Tagalog, the scriptwriter did not research that no direct US military operation is allowed here in our country without the AFP.

The action pic was released in US theaters last February. It reportedly did not do well in the movie tills. It will also flop here for sure, for the bad movie title.