Freed Nuns See Muslims’ Plight as a Key Issue

For five days and six nights, Mother Superior Marie Madeleine Ledesma and her nine Carmelite nuns were held at gunpoint deep in the jungle by 160 Muslim rebels armed with machine guns, rifles and grenades.

There was a price of two million pesos ($100,000) on their heads. The leader of the kidnapers--a disgruntled Muslim government official who has named himself Commander Rommel, after the renowned World War II German tactician--had warned in a letter that if the Philippine military intervened to free the nuns, “we may be forced to harm them.”

But just after dawn Thursday, when the mother superior and her flock were freed unharmed in this Islamic city 510 miles south of Manila, Sister Marie Madeleine, 44, said the past five days had been “a dream come true.”

Catholic Nation Shocked

As they feasted on candy, cookies and cake beneath yellow ribbons, it was hard to imagine that these nuns had been dragged out of their cloistered hilltop convent into the real world in a double kidnaping that shocked and frightened this overwhelmingly Catholic nation.

Looking anything but frightened themselves, the sisters hugged their friends, laughed and beamed as if they had been to heaven itself--and, indeed, every one of them said she was convinced they had.

“For a long time we have dreamed of this--prayed for this,” the mother superior said in an interview with The Times just an hour after the 10 cloistered nuns were released by their captors.

For years, she said, “we just sat on top of our hill and . . . dreamed about the Maranaon people (the ethnic name for the region’s Muslims) coming for us,” in order to create a dialogue between Christians and Muslims. “And then one night, they came and fetched us. We shared with them their food, their lives, their dreams and their love.

“This morning, one of them apologized: ‘Sister,’ he said, ‘We’re sorry for having done this to you.’ But we said, ‘No, no, thank you for the privilege.’

“You know, when we were in the jeep coming back this morning, we said to one another, ‘We are back on Earth. We have left heaven. But we will never be the same. We have touched our dreams.’ ”

Behind the Thursday morning celebration of both captivity and liberation, though, there was a darker reality to what is, at the moment, potentially the most explosive problem facing President Corazon Aquino.

Ignited Tensions Feared

Local religious and military leaders fear that the kidnaping of the nuns and of American missionary Brian Lawrence, who is still being held, may well ignite long-simmering tensions between the region’s majority Muslims and its Christian population, which predominates in the rest of the Philippines.

There have been more than 30 kidnapings in the last six months in the troubled area on the southernmost island of Mindanao.

Lawrence, 30, who was kidnaped Saturday night, just 24 hours after the nuns, is thought to be in the hands of a separate group linked to a longtime Muslim warlord.

In a handwritten note and a cassette tape addressed to his wife earlier this week, Lawrence said the leaders of his captors, who call themselves Commanders Fidel Castro, Kadafi and Khomeini, have vowed to kill him if the government military intervenes.

Quoting Commander Castro, Lawrence wrote, “He says that if the military tries to get me, I will be killed. So let’s not do that.”

Challenged by Aquino earlier this week to solve the problem quickly, the Philippine military deployed an entire battalion of soldiers Thursday night around picturesque Lake Lanao, in the area where both Lawrence and the nuns have been held.

Government negotiators--most of them Muslim clan chiefs and relatives of the alleged warlord, Sultan Mohammed Ali Dimoporo--have been negotiating around the clock for the release of Lawrence, a native of Madison, Wis. His pregnant wife, Carol Anne, said in an interview Thursday that she is praying for her husband’s return and articulated the fears of the region.

“One thing I really hope will not come out of this is tension between the Christians on Mindanao and the Muslims,” said Carol Anne Lawrence, herself a missionary from western Pennsylvania who has been staying in a private home with several other American missionaries in the nearby city of Iligan since the kidnaping.

“It is just a small group of Maranaons who are causing all the trouble,” she said.

Responding to the alarm, Filipino religious leaders on both sides have been struggling to prevent a resurgence of the religious hatred that triggered a bloody Muslim secessionist war in the region in the 1970s, when an estimated 50,000 people were killed.

Despite claims by Aquino on Thursday that the release of the 10 nuns “has added credibility to our policy of nonviolence,” Roman Catholic Bishop Bienvenido Tudtud, the leader of the region’s 20,000 Catholics, said, “I am still afraid this might erupt into something else.”

‘Christians Are Angry’

Already, he said, “the Christians are angry.” He said he received reports from the military Thursday that half a dozen Muslim girls were kidnaped from a nursing school in Iligan, possibly in retaliation for the abductions of the missionary and the nuns.

“The explosion of Muslim-Christian violence is a reality here,” Tudtud added. “I see a very real threat. So I have been telling them over the radio that there is no religious problem here. Rather, I am saying that our hope is (that) the whole of Marawi--Christian and Muslim--is coming together over this problem now.”

It was in that, more than anything, that the 10 liberated nuns said they were rejoicing Thursday. Their very presence in Marawi, a city that greets visitors with the sign, “Welcome to the Islamic City of Marawi,” where just 3% of the 200,000 residents are Christian, was designed to promote better relations between the two faiths.

The idea began at the top, with the late Pope Paul VI, who met with Bishop Tudtud at the height of the Muslim secessionist war in 1975.

“He urged me to create a group of people whose main purpose was to create a dialogue between the Muslims and Christians,” said Tudtud, who has been Marawi’s only bishop since his archdiocese was created 10 years ago.

“We do not aim to convert the Muslims here. One of our principal aims is to become enriched by Islam. And the very reason I ordered these Carmelite nuns to cloister themselves on the hilltop here six years ago was precisely to pray for better relations between our two religions.”

Sister Marie Madeleine has been in charge of the Carmelites ever since. But, for her, the prayers--five times a day, timed to coincide exactly with the Muslim prayers in the half-dozen mosques in the city below the convent--were abstract until her abduction.

“That was the wonderful part of this kidnaping,” the mother superior said. “For years, we have been praying and looking across the lake but never really seeing the people we were praying for. Now our lives of prayer are more meaningful. Now we know why we are in Marawi. It showed us that brotherhood is possible between Christians and Muslims.”

That brotherhood, she and the other nuns interviewed said, was obvious from the very moment they were taken from the convent after their 9 p.m. prayers ended last Friday.

Concerned that the nuns, most of whom had not been out of the convent grounds in more than a half decade, would need some of their personal belongings, the Muslim kidnapers gathered items from the convent they thought the nuns would find necessary: three umbrellas, two guitars, a thermos for hot water and some warm clothes.

‘Like a Vacation’

“There was only goodness in their hearts,” said Sister Marie Madeleine, adding that the kidnapers built fires to keep the mosquitoes away, granted their request to remain together at all times and even fetched pillows for them.

“It was wonderful,” she said. “It was like a vacation for us. We didn’t have to work. We were fed. We prayed when we wanted. We even joked that if we stayed there too long, we would be overweight.”

The only time the kidnapers reprimanded the nuns, the mother superior said, was Wednesday afternoon, when the 10 nuns were walking hand-in-hand across a mountain and the kidnapers learned that another group of Muslim rebels was trying to capture the women.

“We were coming into this beautiful valley,” said Sister Marie Madeleine. “It was magnificent. It was paradise. We were convinced we were in heaven, and we were all giggling and laughing. They asked us to please be quiet or someone might spot us.”

Perhaps the most important lesson the nuns said they learned through their captivity, though, was just how deep the social problems are among the people of Marawi. As reputed warlord Ali Dimoporo said in an interview this week, “There is no law and order anymore” in the area.

Lives Center on Guns

Of the kidnapers, Sister Marie Madeleine said, “They are really people who see no future for themselves. All they have are their guns and violence. They are with their guns day and night. They play with their guns. They eat with their guns. And they have these guns because guns have become the central part of their lives.

“The politicians give them the guns, as they gave guns to their fathers and their grandfathers. And they give them the guns so they can use them.”

Aquino on Tuesday decried what she called “the festering problem” of warlordism in western Mindanao, and the mother superior said she believes her kidnapers were little more than an armed gang-for-hire. There is a tradition here of private armies that are maintained by local political leaders who play politics for keeps.

“They kept talking about kidnaping like it was a game--like tennis,” Sister Marie Madeleine said.

When asked about the motives behind the kidnaping, the nuns confirmed reports by military leaders that the captors, who identified themselves as members of the Moro National Liberation Army, were demanding local autonomy for the Muslim regions of Mindanao and full implementation of the Tripoli Accord. The accord, a peace treaty signed by the Philippine government in Libya to end the secessionist war in 1976, called for such autonomy but has never been fully carried out.

Disappointed in Aquino

The mother superior said that the kidnapers’ leader, Commander Rommel, kept telling the nuns, “ ‘We thought when Cory (Aquino) took over, things would be better.’ But they said they had more rights under (former President Ferdinand E.) Marcos. They said she (Aquino) is under the influence of Cardinal (Jaime) Sin, and Cardinal Sin is anti-Muslim. That’s why they kidnaped us.”

Commander Rommel has since been identified by military leaders as Aragasi Pasandalan, a disgruntled manager of the government’s National Food Authority warehouse in Marawi.

According to Saidamin Pangarungan, the acting governor appointed by Aquino to run the region during her purge of local officials loyal to Marcos, Commander Rommel was trying to use the captive nuns as leverage to escape criminal charges pending against him for allegedly engineering an earlier kidnaping of one of his employees.

“It was very personal,” the acting governor said, “and very political.”

Even the acting governor, though, has been charged with playing politics in the kidnaping. It is he who took credit Thursday morning for securing the nuns’ release through a series of negotiating sessions by his relatives.

“That’s how it works here among the Maranaons,” he said. “It is all very clannish, and we rely on the clan to settle our problems.”

Ransom Accounts Vary

The terms of the settlement became political, as well. At the same time Acting Governor Pangarungan was taking credit for liberating the sisters without paying a single peso of ransom, a rival family clan chief in the region, Muslim Princess Tarhata Alonto Lucman, was telling reporters that Pangarungan had secretly bribed the kidnapers with a ransom of $5,000 and two submachine guns.

She said he had done so to gain the favor of Aquino, who personally commended him for solving the crisis in keeping with her pledge that no ransom would be paid.

The acting governor denied the charge.

The same internal political intrigues are at work in the negotiations to free Lawrence, according to military authorities in the region.

Gen. Rodrigo Gutang, the regional commander in charge of the case, said he is convinced that Sultan Ali Dimoporo engineered the American missionary’s kidnaping to embarrass Aquino and to make it appear as though Gutang is unable to keep order in the region.

Gutang conceded that his efforts to disarm Dimoporo and his private army of several hundred heavily armed Muslim supporters, who call themselves the Barracudas, has become a personal grudge match between the two men. Dimoporo’s men were armed by Marcos, to whom Dimoporo continues to be loyal, and Gutang, who supported the February coup that overthrew the Marcos regime, said he sees the Barracudas as a threat to the stability of the Aquino government.

‘Want to Erase Him’

Gutang, saying there is “nothing personal between Ali Dimoporo and me,” added, “I want only to erase him from the face of the Earth.”

Dimoporo denied involvement in the kidnaping but conceded that the missionary’s fate is in his hands. “I can have his release within a day or two,” he said, adding that he is not responsible for the kidnaping itself because, “this is against the teachings of Islam, and I don’t want to go to hell.”

For Sister Marie Madeleine, though, such internal political struggles are the root cause of the killings, kidnapings and general lawlessness in the region.

“The men who kidnaped us looked up to Commander Rommel because he was the only one among them who was educated,” she said. “The others are not educated, so they will follow any leader.”

Hopes to Meet Aquino

Noting that she hopes her nuns will have a chance to meet with Aquino to discuss the problem, the mother superior added: “I feel something has to be done. Cory really has to listen to the needs of all the ordinary people. They are being used, and Cory is listening only to the more powerful ones--the ones who are using them.”

Nonetheless, Sister Marie Madeleine said she feels the kidnaping has helped somewhat. “We feel we have touched their (the kidnapers’) lives at a very deep level. Before we were just praying for them. More than ever, I believe our prayers will come alive now.”

Noting that now even the Muslim religious leaders are praying for the American missionary to be freed, Bishop Tudtud said he sees a stark irony in the whole affair.

“It is a shame,” he said, “but it seems it takes a crisis to bring the Christians and Muslims together here in Marawi.”

Asked whether he foresees an end to the tension between the two faiths in the near future, the bishop added: “I am afraid I will not see the day. But I believe it is worth spending one’s life trying.”