KIDAPAWAN CITY (MindaNews / 6 December)—As the people of Kidapawan watch in horror at news of the bombing in MSU Marawi’s Dimaporo gymnasium, the memories of many of them will be led back to the crossing of Datu Ingkal and the National Highway.
Twice, in the span of five years, terror attacks unfolded on this very prominent corner of Kidapawan too.
The first was on 28 January 2003. A bomb expert was trying to detonate a bomb left on the corner when the bomb exploded, hurting him and 13 others (the bomb expert, Herminio Belasa, lost his right arm). This was just three months after an explosion in the city bus station killed eight people.
Datu Musin Mamintal, a politician from Pikit who once ran as mayor of that town, later surrendered as mastermind, and he was presented before the public by no less than the then president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.
The second explosion happened on the same spot on 5 October 2007, yet again in the wake of a series of explosions (it would be followed by another in November that year at KMCC, killing one person). A child was killed on this particular bombing, and 25 others were injured.[]
As a Mindanawon city, Kidapawan is no stranger to terror attacks. Its own history with incidents of violence inflicted on the public go all the way back to the troubles of the 1970s, when the violence of the Moro armed struggle and the Communist insurgency (and the equally violent militia-dominated government response against it) spilled into the town.
I would identify the earliest recorded major terror attack in Kidapawan as the ambush at Barangay Mateo of 2 May 1974. The ambush saw Magpet Mayor Dominador Apostol and Kidapawan’s Chief of Police Mariano Palmones killed (along with two patrolmen) as they were en route to Kidapawan. Records do not mention who was behind it, but informants indicate it may have been the first known NPA attack in Kidapawan.
This was followed by a long series of bombings, landmine attacks, and sieges over the decades attributed both to the Communist terrorists and to some of the many shades of violent radicalism that mutated from the Moro armed struggle.
Most recent was the 2017 jail siege, which saw a hundred unidentified armed men besiege the provincial jail in Amas. Five of the inmates and a prison guard died with many injured, but the siege resulted in the escape of over a hundred inmates (including the alleged mastermind and intended escapee of the siege, convicted drug lord Melvin Casangyao).
The most prominent casualty of this siege was the first kagawad of adjacent Barangay Patadon, Abdulsattar Manalundong. Kagawad Sattar was killed when the pursuit of the fugitives reached Patadon. Because Kagawad Satar was an MILF field commander, he was initially blamed as mastermind of the incident. But I have had the opportunity to work with her widow, former Kagawad Haydeelyn (who has had to raise their five children alone after his death) and saw that these accusations were not only unfounded, they ignored the fact that it was Kagawad Sattar who first tipped the local government off of a possible siege.
I put on record here my view that Kagawad Sattar was innocent, and that he should be remembered as the very constructive community leader he was before his untimely death.
In the near deranged obsession to project a “peaceful” past, towns like Kidapawan have a tendency to whitewash, and in the process they not only forget the lessons that come with terrible tragedies like terror attacks, they even end up forgetting the human lives that are reduced to statistics because they are not remembered. I am sometimes asked if such deaths—those brought about by acts of public violence—are “senseless deaths.[]