Shooting Mindanao: How the Press Reports Mindanao from a Photojournalist Viewpoint (Part 2 of 5)
2nd of 5 parts
[This piece was first published in the book, “Transfiguring Mindanao: A Mindanao Reader” edited by Jose Jowel Canuday and Joselito Sescon (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2022). The article opens Part V on “Mediating Truths, Contested Communities, Making Peace” of the book, which was launched on June 22 this year in Davao City. The Ateneo University Press granted MindaNews permission to share the article. Bobby Timonera is one of the editors of MindaNews.]
Click here for the first part
MNLF Coverage in the Mountains
In 1988, we were to go to a mountain lair of the Moro National Liberation Front in Calanogas, Lanao del Sur, to cover the rebel group’s founding anniversary on March 18. Our travel options were: 1) take public transport overland to Marawi, then transfer to another vehicle for the trip to Calanogas; 2) a land trip to Sultan Naga Dimaporo town (formerly Karomatan) in Lanao del Norte, then a banca ride to Malabang, and then a tricycle to the jump-off point somewhere on the highway in Calanogas.
We opted for the second option because at that time, the road around Lake Lanao, now called the Narciso Ramos Highway, was so bad. The rough roads of Lanao del Norte going towards Sultan Naga Dimaporo (SND) weren’t that good, either. There was no road connecting SND and Malabang at that time, so we hired a fisherman and asked him to bring us to Malabang, some 50 kms away, on his pump boat.
We started our sea journey after lunch, cruising slowly, taking our time, following the curves of the coastline. We should be in Malabang way before sunset, we thought. But the boat malfunctioned, and the fisherman asked another fisherman to tow us back to Karomatan. Unfortunately, the boat was pulled backwards, so the propeller was rotating in reverse, thus loosening it. The propeller fell and disappeared into the sea.
We stayed a few hours in a village somewhere between Karomatan and Malabang while the boatman looked for a way to fix the problem, which he did after a few hours.
We reached Malabang at maybe 9 o’clock in the evening, amid the darkness as most of Lanao del Sur had no electricity at that time. (We were told that the Lanao del Sur Electric Cooperative owed the National Power Corporation millions of pesos.)
The next day, we took a tricycle to get to our jump-off point along the highway, from where we walked eight hours in the mountains, finally reaching the MNLF camp by midnight. It was a pleasant walk with several armed rebels who pointed out to us every now and then where the military detachments were. Meranaw villagers in nipa huts gladly offered us water.
That was one exciting coverage. My photos and stories landed on Page One. Our return trip was uneventful. But I returned to Calanogas, somewhere near the MNLF camp, maybe a week later, this time accompanying a Dutch photojournalist. I could not quite remember how we brought him there from Iligan, but I’m sure that on our way back, we took public transport from Malabang to Marawi, then to Iligan.
Today, the 75 kilometers between Malabang and Marawi is less than a two-hour ride on the paved Narciso Ramos Highway. But at that time, it took us more than four hours. The unpaved road was so bad; it was full of potholes and dust flew all over that we had to cover our entire bodies with our malong, with only our eyes showing.
The malong had another use, though. The Dutchman, Kees Metselaar, with hair so blonde and eyes so blue, was taller than all of us in the jeepney. The malong hid him from possible kidnappers who could chance upon us along the highway. Only those who boarded the jeepney with us knew there was a foreigner inside. The Meranaws were astonished and exclaimed: “Amerikano!” (Kees later told me he wanted to have a shirt printed with the message, “I’m not American.”)
True enough, a few months later, I heard a news report that a foreigner passing the same route was kidnapped. I didn’t get the story though, I was busy with personal matters that day. But I was told Agence France-Presse called hoping to get details. Whoever was left alone at home at that time replied: “Sorry, Bobby can’t get to you. He’s in church getting married.”
I did get a wish-you-well card from AFP a few days later. This was when Bobby Coloma and Romy Gacad ran AFP.
Contrast Manila
A few years later, when I moved to Manila to work for the Inquirer, I was amazed at the networks of paved roads connecting the municipalities and cities of Luzon.
Coverage was much easier there, as I was either being driven to the field in an Inquirer vehicle, or aboard a car owned by any of the government agencies I was assigned to cover, or hitching a ride with a non-government organization espousing some issues.
In a drive to Ilocos, seeing the highway there, I said to myself, “Wow, this must be First World territory.” No surprise there, I was in Marcos country.
Honestly, I got bored doing coverage work in Manila, keeping to my beat all day for a year, then moving on to the next beat, and the same thing again for a year, and so on, with the typhoons, floods, traffic, and the rat race as backdrop. Maybe I got bored because I was a full-time writer and I did not have the time to do photo coverage. I tried doing both at first, but it was impossible to beat deadlines, processing rolls and making prints in the darkroom, then running to the computer to finish writing the story, all in such a short time.
The only real exciting work I had in Manila was covering that diminutive doctor, the Secretary of Health, Juan Favier, who caught every Filipino’s fancy. My last beat before finally packing our bags for the boat trip back home was the Senate, which was not my idea of fun.
Coming Home
After five years with the Inquirer, I came home to Iligan in the summer of 1997. It was a planned move, agreed upon between me and my wife, even before I joined her in Manila for her specialty training at the Philippine General Hospital. The plan was, after her training, she, a Manileña, would practice in Iligan and we would raise our kids here.
Mindanao was much more exciting. I was free to explore whatever the issues were in my area, both Lanao provinces and nearby places, without the limitations inherent to the beat system. And I could do photojournalism again, in tandem with my writing. Even if it meant giving up my regular employment status as a staff reporter, I was willing to be a correspondent again and be paid according to my output. No regular salaries on the 10th and the 25th, no more mid-year bonus, no more transportation allowance, no more rice allowance, no more 13th month pay, no more Christmas bonus, no more profit sharing. Who would be crazy enough to do that?
After a few months of settling in, I got the scoop of my life.
Firing Squad
In October 1997, I was with other reporters from Iligan, covering a rally at Banggolo in neighboring Marawi City in support of then Gov. Mahid Mutilan, who was about to be arrested because of his alleged involvement in illegal recruitment activities. (The arrest warrant was eventually lifted.) A source I knew since the early ’90s approached us and said: “There’s a firing squad in Masiu anytime now. Do you want to go?”
We knew the late Abdullah “Lacs” Dalidig well. He was among the prominent Meranaw civic leaders who was always at the frontline during protest actions. So off we went with him for the hour-long drive to Masiu, a town by the lake 36 kms south of Marawi, hoping that we would not be late for this once-in- a-lifetime scoop.
We got to the middle of town, beside the municipal hall, at a little past 3 o’clock in the afternoon. The entire town was there, including the elderly, women and children. Maybe over a thousand people came to witness.
We were lucky because we got there in the nick of time. We could see the convicts blindfolded, their hands and feet bound with yellow nylon rope and tied to bamboo poles above and below them. Someone was on a microphone, reading something I could not understand. I was told he was reading the verdict of the MILF’s Shariah court in Meranaw.
I moved among the crowd, taking pictures of people, some even smiling for my camera. I took close-up pictures of the man on the microphone, of the two “convicts”— Egoy Perez, 32 and Salvador “Kura” Dimasangca, 30. They were both mechanics who were accused of frustrated murder by the man they stabbed several times in an attempt to steal his car. The man miraculously survived despite the multiple stab wounds.
I positioned myself in what I thought was the best spot: behind the shooters, who were about five meters away from the convicts. The MILF leader overseeing the firing squad, Jannati Mimbantas, a brother of the late MILF vice chair Abdulaziz Mimbantas and now a member of the Independent Decommissioning Body, was very helpful in making sure I got to the position I wanted.
Once there, I checked my camera: only seven or eight frames left of the 36-exposure roll. Time to change film, because surely the action was about to unfold, with my last roll. I was covering such a big event with only 36 shots, which is unimaginable these days!
As I stood there waiting, I could see my colleagues interviewing MILF leaders. That got me worried because I could be scooped even though I was there. Of the five journalists who were there, I was the only one with a camera. I wished I had a full-time photographer with me, as in my Manila days, so he could take the pictures as the action unraveled, while I interviewed people and really observed how things were going. But with a camera in my trembling hands, I had no choice but to wait for the “decisive moment” every photographer wishes to capture.
Shots were fired about five minutes after we arrived, and I kept on shooting what I thought were the important shots — the moment of impact, both bodies hanging held only by the ropes, someone looking into the wound under the shirt, a close-up of a missed shot that hit an arm instead of the heart, cutting the rope so they could bring the bodies down, the crowd looking at the lifeless bodies on the grassy lawn.
My graphic firing squad photos shocked the country . Oh yeah, I got my 15 minutes of fame (or maybe it was longer, maybe a week) as my stories and photos landed on the front page for days, and even in a two-page spread in AsiaWeek.
But it came at a stiff price. Suspicious characters came knocking on my door, and the brigade commander summoned me to his camp, berating me for publishing the photos. Although my bureau chief, who came all the way from Davao, was there for support, I just kept silent and nodded at the colonel’s pronouncements. It was his turf, after all. “You should have asked my permission first if it’s okay to publish the pictures,” I remember him saying. “I’m sorry, Sir, but I don’t report to you.” But I could only say it in my mind.
The military asked for copies of my pictures, which of course would put me in bad light with the MILF and the people in the area. The advice of my boss (the late Inquirer publisher Isagani Yambot) was to send the prints and negatives to the office and tell the military to go to the Inquirer office in Makati and talk to the publisher. End of story. No military officer in his right mind would do that. They may lord it over ordinary civilians in the boondocks, but they will not dare do the same in a newspaper’s central office in Metro Manila.
Then I was called to the Senate for a hearing, seated beside the Inquirer’s big-shot lawyer who was giving me advice every step of the way. That was the Philippine Senate that I covered everyday just months before, where I knew the reporters and the senators. I felt safe there. It was my turf.
But then I had to go home. Concerned friends approached me to watch my back. I lay low. I even left for Manila to be away from it all, hiding in the office, whiling my time, lucky to be chatting with the techies during the paper’s early stages of establishing its presence on the Internet.
I stayed away from the limelight for six months, always watching my back, especially when exposed outside as I drove the kids to and from school. At this time, a Cebu Pacific plane crashed in the mountains of Misamis Oriental. Yeah, we journalists are bad people, because covering such bad news would have been fun. That should have sent me running to the mountains, camera in hand. But I did not. My editor called to send me for coverage. I said no because I was in hiding. Fortunately, before I left Manila for my hometown, my request to still be a regular employee while covering Mindanao was denied. Thus, my status was that of correspondent, or part-time journalist, paid according to my output, not a full-time reporter who regularly drew a salary and all the benefits. So I could afford to say no to an editor’s request for coverage. Sorry …
For a while I thought I would never go back to journalism again. Looking at my files, I did not write anything from October 1997 to late April 1998, except for a few infotech stories that I did not need to go out to cover. But I could not resist not covering the elections in May. I felt things had cooled down after an absence of six months.
Analog-to-Digital transition
Looking back, the firing squad coverage was one agonizing process of sending pictures during the transition from film to digital.
Masiu is about an hour away from Marawi City, and Marawi is another hour away from Iligan. Shots were fired past 3 p.m. After taking pictures and doing interviews, we left at past 4 p.m., and arrived in Iligan almost at 7 p.m.
My first stop was the photo lab, then I rushed home to write my story while my films were being developed. Promdi journalists couldn’t afford laptops in those days. After sending out my story, I got my prints from the lab an hour later, went back home and digitized the pictures with a flatbed scanner then sent them to Manila through my computer and dial up modem. Broadband was years away. Thanks to modern technology (at that time), I was able to send my pictures to the head office on the same day, albeit well into the night.
By then, the editors were already done with the stories, and the layout artists were just about to close the paper, and send the PDF file to the printing press. The result? The story was buried deep in the inside pages, a few paragraphs in the News Briefs section, without the pictures. The editors and layout artists would have had to do a major rehash of page one to accommodate my story and pictures. But since the pictures were exclusive anyway, I was told, it was okay to publish them a day late.
TOMORROW
Part 3: Covering War, Camiguin Flash Flood Coverage Fiasco, Ridó Coverage
(“Transfiguring Mindanao: A Mindanao Reader” has 34 chapters with 44 authors mostly coming from Mindanao and highlighting broad topics covering the historical, social, economic, political, and cultural features of the island and its people. The book is divided into six parts: Part I is History, Historical Detours, Historic Memories; Part II is Divergent Religions, Shared Faiths, Consequential Ministries; Part III is Colonized Landscapes, Agricultural Transitions, Economic Disjunctions; Part IV is Disjointed Development, Uneven Progress, Disfigured Ecology; Part V is Mediating Truths, Contested Communities, Making Peace; and Part VI is Exclusionary Symbols, Celebrated Values, Multilingual Future. Edited by Jose Jowel Canuday and Joselito Sescon, this book is a landmark in studies on Mindanao.)
Get your copy from the Ateneo University Press, Shopee, or Lazada.
Watch the book launch here.
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