Where have all the young men gone?

This is the worst of times; this is the craziest of times.

The god of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, he who must have the ugliest haircut, might just get it into his head to push the button. Moro National Liberation Front founding chair Nur Misuari is sending 1,000 fighters into Sabah; they have to slip through the combined Philippine and Malaysian naval blockades. Thirty-two local Liberal Party candidates of Tawi-Tawi and their supporters, whose boat drifted into Malaysian waters, were mistaken for sympathizers of Jamalul Kiram III and were detained by Malaysian authorities. Jamalul III, who is reviving a claim to Sabah, walks with a cane and has to take a nap after a twice-a-week dialysis. And Misuari has changed his story so many times but finally, after 40 years, he has told the truth.

Worst of all, Kris Aquino is back.

But of course she has never really left. Even before she returned, the queen of all media madness was on television in yet another commercial, promoting a brand of detergent, and you’ve got to believe her every word. Because right there beside her in the commercial is Ate Ballsy, to guarantee that “bunso” is telling the truth this time; and so without batting a false eyelash, Kristina Bernadette Cojuangco Aquino says: “Mom taught us well.”

And in this scorching heat that has struck down at least two senior-citizen candidates and even a younger traffic enforcer with heat stroke, you worry about the President, aged in between these three victims, going out almost every day distributing baller bands and extolling the virtues of the senatorial and local candidates of the Liberal Party—so now you know who his boss really is.

A passing thought: Maybe “Bayan Ko” is actually a hymn to desperation?

Yet none of the above, however discomfiting, however frightening, however confusing, can be as world-shaking as the declaration of Misuari that he is the real owner of Sabah.

(Between the sentence before and the one after this parenthetical digression, I looked out the window, as I usually do, to rest my mind when writing agitates it too much. And my eyes were met by what I estimated to be a four-night-old crescent moon. I checked with the calendar on the wall, and I was right. It felt good to be assured I was still in control.)

When I read Misuari’s statement in the news, my mind all at once played the theme from the movie “Exodus,” as I tried to comprehend the full import of that declaration, because all that Abraham Idjirani, spokesman of Kiram III could say was “Why only now?”

A simple question, indeed, that seemed as if it did not expect any answer. But for me it was a question that turned an incredibly horrendous tragedy into a deliberately cruel farce.

Because only after 40 years did I realize the true meaning of a message written in blood, which I saw on a wall of the blood-bathed Notre Dame of Jolo College (NDJC) a few days after the town of Jolo was razed to the ground.

“Fi sabilillah baugbug agama hulah bangsa” (martyrs for faith, land and race) was the handwriting on the wall. It was the battle cry of the mujahideen of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF).

The military had taken pictures of it, I was told, but through the telling and retelling, it was rewritten and revised, becoming longer with every rewriting, and with the later versions even pinpointing the authorship.

But it really doesn’t matter how many revisions there are; the message remains the same—“this was what we fought for; this was what we died for.”

Now, with Misuari’s declaration, that message has transformed itself from a statement of purpose into a testimony of deception, confirming, at last, what many of us had thought all along: This is what we thought we fought for; this is what we believed we died for.

In the April 13 issue of the Inquirer, veteran journalist Manuel F. Almario wrote a fairly good account of the Jabidah Massacre (“Catastrophic results of Jabidah massacre”), although there were some missing but important details that only we who were connected to the local grapevine knew.

But, with due respect, there was one paragraph that we beg to disagree with: “In 1969, enraged by the massacre, Nur Misuari, a political science professor of the University of the Philippines, formed with other politically active Muslim youth the Moro National Liberation Front.”

In a later article here or elsewhere, I hope to write in detail about how the MNLF was formed, as related to me by former fighters and field commanders and, maybe, we can discard once and for all what has become the stuff of urban legends.

But for now, suffice it to say that after the exposé by then Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr. of Operation Merdeka and the killing of the young Tausug and Samal recruits in the top secret training camp in Corregidor, Misuari became a professor at the Philippine Muslim College in Jolo; organized the youth activist group “Paghambuuk” (unity), conducted teach-ins, ran for a seat in the 1971 Constitutional Convention and lost.

That year, the best and the brightest among our young men in Jolo mysteriously disappeared one by one.

At one point, I wondered, humming a line from one of our favorite folk songs then: “Where have all the young men gone?” My mother, always attuned to whatever phase I was going through at any given time, sang back, “Gone to the mountains, everyone.”

When I got home after my sad and lonely excursion through our burned town that day, after I walked through two floors of the NDJC, careful not to step on pools of martyrs’ blood, I said to my mother, “Gone to their graves, everyone.”

I didn’t have to tell her that they died in vain. Like Misuari himself, she knew.

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