A New War Brings More Suffering to Bataan Town

War has come again to Alberto Mangalingan’s home. The 50-year-old insurance agent has known little else since he was a child.

Japanese and American artillery and warplanes flattened his family’s ramshackle home along with the rest of this impoverished coastal town 40 miles across Manila Bay from the nation’s capital. Skeletal American and Filipino prisoners limped through the heart of Samal in April, 1942, during the Bataan Death March.

Then, 18 years ago, his province became a key battle zone in another war that still threatens the Philippines. And this month, his little house--rebuilt by his parents in the late 1940s with war-reparations assistance after the Americans reclaimed Bataan from the Japanese--was wrecked again.

Acting on a tip from a military informant in this town, the birthplace of the Communist New People’s Army guerrilla force and now one of its strongholds, government troops raided one barrio, San Juan, just after 8 a.m. on Sept. 12. A six-hour battle ensued, and the rebels seized Mangalingan’s house for cover.

By the time the fighting was over, two guerrillas lay dead on the dirt floor of his living room, and the house was shot to pieces.

But Mangalingan says he does not blame the Philippine armed forces for a tin roof that now lets the rain in every day, for the hundreds of bullet holes in the walls and for the expense to repair his home.

He and the other townspeople no longer know, or care, whom to blame. They are just sick of war.

“We are tired of all of this, and really we don’t know where to go,” Mangalingan said. “We have evacuated this place before, but this is the place of my birth, the birth of my four children. And we have no money anyway. So where do we go?

“All we can do is just sit tight here and pray--pray that someday peace will come to this place.”

The firefight in Mangalingan’s barrio of San Juan was a crucial one, military authorities now say. It also was a classic illustration of how the guerrilla war that has raged in the Philippines is taking an increasingly large toll of civilians--the farmers, laborers and small businessmen struggling to survive and to remain somehow neutral in a war zone that grows bloodier by the day.

On Tuesday, the armed forces chief of staff, Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, cited Samal as an example of a recent military success, noting that troops managed to kill eight guerrillas who were taking shelter in civilian homes without killing a single villager.

In acknowledging that six soldiers also died in the Samal raid, Ramos conceded that the insurgency has worsened significantly since the Aug. 28 attempt by mutinous soldiers to overthrow President Corazon Aquino, an attempt that left the Philippine military divided and demoralized.

Before the coup, an average of three soldiers were being killed each day. In the last three weeks, Ramos told reporters, the average was up to 4.4 soldiers killed per day.

“The event of Aug. 28 opened up new opportunities for the New People’s Army to hit government and military targets,” Ramos told foreign correspondents at a weekly luncheon forum. “The number of attacks, the intensity of the attacks and the number of government casualties has gone up. But they (the rebels) are really hurting the people a lot more than the military.”

Main Threat to Aquino

The Communists confirmed in a special issue of their party organ, Ang Bayan (Our Country), distributed soon after the coup attempt, that they had escalated their armed rebellion against the government “to take advantage of the disarray within the ranks of the reactionary forces of the enemy.”

The party organ added that guerrilla strikes could be expected, “not only against military targets but also against such counterrevolutionary infrastructures as communications facilities . . . and other such projects and agencies of the puppet regime.”

The insurgency continues to be the biggest threat to Aquino’s attempts to bring a stable, liberal democracy to the Philippines. And the rebel attacks are increasingly aimed at the capital and its strategic surrounding provinces, among them Bataan. The rebels have blown up five bridges in the last two weeks in the Bicol region south of Manila on the only highway that carries food from the fertile south into the capital, a city of 4 million. On Monday, a heavily armed group of 500 guerrillas hijacked a train along the Philippines’ only rail line, which parallels the same highway.

“It is clear they are trying to disrupt the supply lines to the capital,” Ramos said. “We are very, very watchful.”

Specifically, Ramos cited Bataan--a peninsular province so strategic that Gen. Douglas MacArthur selected it as his final stronghold against the Japanese in World War II--as an example of one of the military’s recent advances against the Communists, who have said that both their party and its armed wing were founded in Samal in 1969.

And, on a recent visit to the province, a Times reporter found that the military has made major gains in a region long dominated by Communist sympathizers and guerrilla fronts.

But in interviews with dozens of townspeople, it was equally clear that the price of those victories, and of Communist victories past, has been paid most heavily by the civilians. And now the target for the anger and frustration that has been building up among the residents of this war-battered town has increasingly been President Aquino herself.

Lyria Vitug worked hard in Samal and surrounding towns on Aquino’s presidential election campaign in January, 1986, when Aquino barnstormed the nation in an effort to end two decades of dictatorship under Ferdinand E. Marcos. So did Vitug’s father and mother and husband and children. Together, they were Aquino’s local campaign committee.

As a result, Aquino swept all but a handful of precincts in Samal in the Feb. 2, 1986, presidential election. So, when Aquino took power three weeks later amid the popularly backed military revolt that drove Marcos into exile, the Vitug family was rewarded. Vitug’s husband, Ricardo, was appointed mayor of Samal.

“We campaigned very, very hard for Cory,” Lyria Vitug said, using Aquino’s nickname. “We liked Cory, but even more, we wanted to get rid of Marcos.

‘Cory Is Weak’

“But now, I think it’s time she should step down. Cory is weak. We here in Samal feel she cannot protect us from either the Communists or the military. We don’t feel her government here. We feel only the military, and the war.

“We are all just afraid.”

It is true that Samal resembles a town under martial law. Last week, soldiers stood guard beside Aquino’s wall portrait in the town’s only courtroom, where some cases have been pending and some suspects in jail for as long as four years without trial. Several more armed soldiers were posted outside the town hall--the result of a guerrilla grenade attack on the building a few days before in apparent retaliation for the government’s killing of the eight rebels in and around Mangalingan’s house.

The military occupation force, though, has been in Samal since Dec. 12--the day after the Communist-dominated National Democratic Front, the guerrillas’ propaganda wing, used Samal as the staging ground for what it called “the declaration of cease-fire.” The event was held to mark the beginning of an official 60-day break in the killing negotiated between the Aquino government and rebel leaders last year.

Sixty-seven New People’s Army guerrillas brandishing M-16 assault rifles marched in two columns from their jungle camps into the heart of Samal that day, as residents cheered and waved from the windows of their simple huts.

The National Democratic Front had bused in nearly 100 local and foreign journalists to witness the event, and, within hours, Ramos announced his outrage at the defiant show in Samal. The next day, the army’s combat occupation force was sent to the town hall.

The soldiers have remained at the town hall for the nine months since then.

Clearly, the wide publicity given the event hurt Samal’s 30,000 residents far more than it helped. Fearing for their lives, many qualified public schoolteachers pulled out, leaving the local elementary and high schools understaffed and ill-equipped. Some children simply stopped going to classes, and Lyria Vitug said she is now sending her two sons to a private, Catholic elementary school in Manila.

For Conrado de Luna, a now-unemployed heavy-equipment operator who has had to seek employment in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere because there are no jobs for him here, the war has never been worse in Samal than it is now--not in all the 14 years since he moved into his wife’s family home a few hundred feet from the site of the recent fire fight.

He said he huddled in his house with his children for six hours when the gunfire started just after breakfast that day.

“The people are just so scared now,” he said. “I voted for Cory because I wanted a change. But as of now, the situation seems like there is no difference from the other regime. Maybe it’s even worse now, because the people here are so hungry and the tension is so high.”

Aleli Panzalan risked her life trying to gather up her children, who were playing outside their plywood hut when the fighting broke out here. She was holding one child in her arms, resting him on her pregnant abdomen, when she was caught in the cross fire and shot in the thigh.

The bullet is still in her leg. Doctors at the local public hospital said it would endanger the Panzalans’ unborn child if they operated to remove it. Nonetheless the treatment cost her 580 pesos ($29). Panzalan’s husband is unemployed, and the couple have had to beg neighbors every day for odd jobs to raise money for the hospital bill.

34 Townspeople Jailed

Thirty-four of the town’s farmers, laborers and tradesmen are paying an even higher price, simply because their houses were located near those that had been occupied by the rebel soldiers when the military raided the town. They were rounded up by government troops, turned over to local police for questioning and, without explanation, jailed and charged with participating in the killing of the six government soldiers.

Among them was 20-year-old Crisostimo Pablo, who drives a motorized tricycle taxi in town. Pablo said that a government soldier hit him five times with his rifle butt and then arrested him because he failed to warn the troops that rebels were inside one of the houses.

“The army asked me to go inside the house to see if rebels were in there,” Pablo said through a translator during an interview in the Bataan Provincial Jail--a facility built for 40 but now housing 81 inmates.

“When I went inside the house, there was a rebel soldier pointing his M-16 at my head. He said he’d kill me if I told the military he was there. What could I do? I left the house and said nothing. Now the soldiers blame me.

“I don’t know what to think. I am angry--angry with the (government) military, angry with the rebels, just angry.”

In a few days, the rice crop in Samal will be ready for harvest, the new prisoners said. Most of them are farmers, and, under Philippine law, there is no bail in murder cases. The crop, they said, will surely be lost, along with their months of labor.

“Most of us voted for Cory Aquino when she ran for president,” said Jessie de Jesus, a 28-year-old electrician who was also rousted from his hut and thrown in jail after the shoot-out in Samal.

“Now we wonder if she even knows we are here.”

Not far from the provincial jail, high atop Bataan’s Mt. Samat, there is a spectacular monument that seems similarly forgotten. It was built after the earlier war that ripped Samal and its province to pieces.

Called the Altar of Heroes, the 700-foot-high white marble cross, known to most Filipinos simply as the Bataan war memorial, as built by Marcos as a towering tribute to the tens of thousands of Americans and Filipinos who died on the Bataan Peninsula during World War II.

Large letters carved into the monument’s marble facade proclaim, “To the Memory of These Brave Warriors Whose Blood Soaked Every Rock of This Land So That This Nation Might Endure, This Humble Shrine Is Consecrated.

“Our Mission,” it concludes, “Is to Remember.”

But it is hard, indeed, to remember in Bataan these days.

A lonely caretaker at the memorial told a rare visitor one recent afternoon that few come to read that epitaph any more.

The lights intended to illuminate the Altar of Heroes are all broken. The elevator inside the huge cross is out of order. And there is no money left to maintain the grounds around it.

“But mostly, the war is in the way,” the caretaker said. “There have been so many ambushes nearby. . . . It’s the war, really, that is keeping the tourists and war veterans away. The military, the rebels, the killing--it’s going on all around us.

“No one feels safe to come here any more.”

New memories, it would seem, are being made every day.