By Mortz C. Ortigoza
What happens after President
Rodrigo R. Duterte declared at 10 pm last Tuesday Martial Law in the whole of
Mindanao and its islands?
Would Duterte’s pet peeve ABS
CBN TV Network, the critical Philippine Daily Inquirer, and the irritating online
newsmagazine Rappler.com be banned to circulate their news, that regularly
assailed the president, in the islands?
Would teenagers sporting long
hair, just like those rock singers, and beard and those caught in the curfew roaming
after 10 o’clock in the evening and the wee hours automatically arrested and
locked up just like what Dictator Ferdinand Marcos had done in the early and
middle of 1970s after he declared Martial Law in September 23, 1972?
Would this scenario I heard
when I was a wide eyed child in Cotabato happened?
This after Muslim Black Shirts’ rebels (predecessor of the Moro National Liberation Front) massacred an entire Catholic Church’s parishioners, members of the military and the dreaded Ilaga (Christian extremist paramilitary composed mostly of Ilonggos), who want to retaliate tit-for-tat the carnage, flagged every passenger of plying buses, mini-buses, and public utility jeeps and body frisked and searched their belongings for any hidden firearm and asked them the incriminatory question:
This after Muslim Black Shirts’ rebels (predecessor of the Moro National Liberation Front) massacred an entire Catholic Church’s parishioners, members of the military and the dreaded Ilaga (Christian extremist paramilitary composed mostly of Ilonggos), who want to retaliate tit-for-tat the carnage, flagged every passenger of plying buses, mini-buses, and public utility jeeps and body frisked and searched their belongings for any hidden firearm and asked them the incriminatory question:
Ano ang tribu mo (What’s your
tribe)?
Here were the following
answers of the passengers;
Passenger A: Ilonggo ako (with
a real Ilonggo accent and he was given the safety exit).
Passenger B: Cebuano ako (with
a real Cebuano accent and he was given safety exit).
Passenger C: Ilocano ako (with
a real Ilocano accent and he was given the safety exit).
Passenger D: Tagalog ako (with
a real Tagalog accent and he was given the safety exit).
Passenger E: (A Muslim, whose name if I was not wrong was Datu Udtog Ramanam Amin, who was
trembling at the rear seat of the bus retorted to the intimidating query):
Tagalog ako (with a thick Muslim accent that betrays him) and he
was pumped with a bullet on the head.
The same scenarios ensued in other places in Mindanao.
The same scenarios ensued in other places in Mindanao.
