Lanao Sur folks want Commander Bravo censured

COTABATO CITY – The abusive Commander Bravo of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front is feared to go on rampage once booted out for heinous offenses and major violations of the MILF’s ceasefire pact with Malacañang.Bravo, whose real name is Abdullah Macapaar, and his men figured in another atrocity last week that challenged again the July 1997 Agreement on General Cessation of Hostilities between the MILF and the government.Bravo’s men attacked Barangays Bualan and Debarosan in Balindong, Lanao del Sur last week after staging an illegal anti-narcotics operation in the provincial capital, Marawi City, that went haywire.Heavily armed residents fought them as they came close to Barangay Bualan, resulting in the deaths of three of his men and several villagers.The attackers also set on fire a house there and destroyed another with 40 millimeter shoulder-fire grenades, sending some 500 ethnic Maranaw families running for their lives.The tension in the area was promptly defused by Maranaw leaders led by Vice Gov. Haroun Al-Rashid Lucman of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) and officials of the Malaysian-led International Monitoring Team (IMT).The IMT, comprised of military personnel and policemen from Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia, and non-uniformed conflict resolution experts from Norway and Japan, has been helping enforce since late 2003 all interim security agreements between the MILF and Malacañang.Lucman and the mayor of Balindong, Benjie Bagul, managed to convince armed villagers so irked by the intrusion of Bravo’s group into their supposedly peaceful, conservatively Muslim enclave to refrain from retaliating.Lucman said also instrumental in the restoration of peace in the affected villages were former Lanao del Sur Congressman Benasing Macarambon, Jr., MILF representative Janati Mimbantas, and a local datu, Acmad Lao, and Lanao del Sur Vice Gov. Mamintal Adiong, Jr.Senior MILF leaders have neither denied nor confirmed, when asked to comment early Friday, the veracity of stories spreading around purporting that their central committee has decided to kick Bravo out.They hinted, however, that their superiors were so embarrassed with Bravo’s latest offense, preceded by his having violated their ceasefire pact with Malacañang in earlier offenses detrimental to the Mindanao peace process. The MILF is doing something to address that issue, one of the sources said Friday.Bravo’s group had carried out in the past three years unauthorized law enforcement operations in Lanao del Norte, in Lanao del Sur and in Marawi City that lead to hostilities and abductions of people they prosecuted in clandestine self-styled sharia courts.Lucman, a member of ARMM’s inter-agency regional peace and order council, said Barangay Bualan residents, also armed with assault rifles, agreed to let their local government unit and the joint government-MILF ceasefire committee address last week’s deadly incident.The ceasefire committee, composed of representatives from the MILF, from the police and the military, is helping maintain law and order in conflict flashpoint areas covered by the interim truce forged in Cagayan de Oro City in July 1997 by government and rebel negotiators. We did not take sides. We made the residents of Balindong understand that our concerns are the safety of civilians and how to prevent escalation of hostilities that can dislocate more people. We want a peaceful closure to this, Lucman said on Friday.The hostilities in Barangays Bualan and Debarason was an offshoot of the arrest in Marawi City last week of Junaira Abdulrahman-Hadji Usman by Bravo’s men on mere suspicion she is into large-scale trafficking of methamphetamine hydrochloride, most know as shabu. Members of the municipal peace and order council in Balindong, located in the second district of Lanao del Sur, said Usman was known to them as a peace-loving, law-abiding resident who has never been engaged in any illegal activity.Irate relatives of Usman, among them her sibling, Abdulrahman, incumbent chairman of Barangay Bualan, immediately held Bravo’s son in one of the villages they control politically for a swap after learning of her abduction in Marawi City.Bravo’s men immediately attacked Barangay Bualan, sparking a bloody firefight that waned only when a villager named Abdullah, son of Alim Pangalian Solaiman, who is 2ndvice chairman of the MILF, was killed in the crossfire.Solaiman, an Islamic missionary who graduated from a secular school in the Middle East, was not in any way involved in the conflict, according to ARMM officials.Bravo’s followers immediately scampered away carrying their dead and wounded companions when they sensed that responding local officials, backed by policemen and soldiers were closing in.Residents of Balindong want Bravo and his followers who figured in the incident delisted from the official roster of MILF members by their central committee for them to be freely prosecuted to the fullest extent of law. The MILF leadership and the government should immediately hunt them down and jail them. He (Bravo) was never an obedient MILF commander, said a local official who requested anonymity.There are traditional elders in Lanao del Sur who are apprehensive of violent reactions from Bravo once dropped by the MILF central leadership core. There is a possibility he will join the Dawlah group, also known as the Maute terrorists, in the municipality of Butig (in Lanao del Sur), said an elder, who had studied Islamic theology at the Al-Azzhar University in Cairo, Egypt.There is a mounting public perception that Bravo could become like Imam Ameril Ombra Kato, who started as commander of the MILF’s 105thBase Command in Maguindanao province. He was kicked out in 2009 for insubordination, infractions of of the ceasefire accord and irreconcilable differences with members of the MILF's central committee.The defiant Kato, a foreign-trained ethnic Maguindanaon cleric, organized the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters after the MILF central committee stripped him of his post and designated Zacaria Goma as replacement.Kato died of a lingering illness last year but the outlawed BIFF he established remained, though now divided into at least three small factions, all using the black flag of the Independent State of Iraq and Syria as revolutionary banner.