Michael, a victim in Marawi

Michael Molina was the caretaker of our house in Marawi City, but he was more a member of our family. He was diligent and dedicated to the work assigned to him. He was recruited by the missus in a nearby Christian town, and he came with his wife Robella and their two-year-old daughter Russel, who easily became the playmate of my grandson, Abdul Jalil.

Michael had a simple dream: to own a motorcycle just like Boloy, our neighbor’s helper, so that he could take his family on a leisure trip to nearby Iligan City on Sundays.

Our house is far from palatial.  But its wide living room showed off a collection of rare decorative artworks and priceless antiques painstakingly collected by the missus through the years of our foreign travels. Each ornament represented its country of origin, but mostly they were from Egypt where I once served as our country’s envoy.

When Marawi was attacked on May 23, Michael volunteered to stay and guard the house. I told him not to worry because I know some of the Maute leaders who were morit or scholars at Cairo Al Azhar University when, as ambassador, I played surrogate father to them. And because our house fronts a big mosque, it will not be violated by soldiers, I told him. Alas, it was not to be so. Now an overpowering guilt haunts me.

On the seventh day of the extremists’ attack, Michael called the missus by mobile phone, telling her that our house was swarming with fully armed, black-clad rebels. He then bid farewell to her, saying he would go with Boloy and a Muslim named Alim to escape to Iligan. That was the last we heard from them. Friends told us Michael, Boloy and their families had been hit by bombs and air strikes; others said they had been summarily executed by the rebels for being Christians.

How they died is not important to us now. We are not even sure if Michael’s name is listed among the victims because his body and those of the others have yet to be recovered. He will just be a statistic.

But Michael represents everything that is bad and wrong about the Islamic militants’ war. He was the ugly face of the Marawi crisis—i.e., the slaughter of innocent civilians who neither had anything to do with nor could care less about whatever is the cause of the rebellion. He is the symbol of how bestiality has reached its peak in the struggle for religious dominance.

The jihadists claim they are fighting to bring back pure Islam which has been corrupted. Granting that it is true, why vent their anger on the people of Marawi? They are barking up the wrong tree. The real culprit is the creeping debased Western culture and modernity. The other religions are not to be blamed because they are victims, too.

How did the people of Marawi wrong the Mautes that the latter would inflict upon them this devastation that has flattened their city? Were the Mautes motivated by vengeance against the people of Marawi for voting down their relatives in the last election? How many Michaels have been sacrificed on the altar of pseudo jihad?

Many nameless people are still buried in the rubble and ruins in Marawi. What kind of God is He who orders or condones the slaughter of innocent human beings? I don’t know about the jihadists, but I worship a God described by the Holy Koran as forgiving, “most merciful and most beneficent.” My Allah is not an angry and vengeful deity. Do jihadists worship the same Allah?  Am I being naive?

We haven’t heard any report about our house, but we have conditioned our minds for the worst. Yet it is too cheap a price to pay compared to the life of Michael or that of the gallant soldier who died defending Marawi. For Michael and those martyred soldiers, we shed copious tears. As for the charlatan mujahideen, your death doesn’t deserve a single tear from us.

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Macabangkit Lanto ([email protected]), UP Law 1967, was a Fulbright Fellow to New York University for postgraduate studies. He has served the government in various capacities.