What 24-hours of Torment Can Do to A Life:

(Two women human rights workers bare their experience while in captivity by the military)

General Santos City --- Not a single bruise could be found on any part of the body of the two women staff of the non-government organization Disaster Response Center (DIRECT) as attested in a medical certificate when they were finally surfaced at a police station in Tulunan, North Cotabato, at about nine in the evening of November 5, twenty-four hours passed since they were declared missing.

But the two women who are just in their early twenties, Lorelie Naiz and Mary Bernadette Solitario, sat staring in the blank and could hardly talk at the police station where six men finally brought them there. One of the men who brought them to the police identified himself as George Reyes of the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (ISAFP).

The interview with Naiz and Solitario was conducted more than a week since the incident happened but even until such time, both could still almost not believe that they are free and that the ordeal they went through had long been over.

Lorelie said she used to be a lively and cheerful person. But after what happened, she finds herself to be in a seemingly constant state of somber mood.

Bernadette, for her part, would sometimes want retreat to a very far place, where she said, she may be able to hunker down all by herself.

Both dread dusk, as it is that time of the day when they are reminded of the onset of the night of torture they suffered in the hands of their captors.

They get nervous whenever they see tinted vehicles, they tremble at the sound of revs of a motorcycle engines, much as they see burly-looking men in military fatigue uniforms.

The two were abducted in the afternoon of November 4, 2006, on their way to Batang, a village in Tulunan, North Cotabato where they were to assist evacuating families, a day after an encounter between the military and the AFP had occurred near the area.

Batang is one of the four project areas of their partner NGO, Manila-based Citizens Disaster Response and Rehabilitation Center (CDRC), under the "Aid to the Uprooted People Programme-AUPP-Philippines" which is being supported by the European Union, Delegation of the European Commission to the Philippines.

While DIRECT is based in General Santos City and Alabel town in Saranggani Province, among their project areas are located in Tulunan, North Cotabato (still part of Region XII), such as the one that Solitario and Naiz had intended to go to on that fateful day.

Those motorcycle-riding men

Naiz said eight men in civilian clothes, on board four motorcycles held them at about 3 pm in Bituan village, on their way to Batang.  When the men asked them to pull off the road, Naiz asked what they wanted because they were in a hurry to reach the place.

None of the men however, replied. Instead, they seemed to be ignoring her questions and pretended they were texting. Their motorcycles did not bear plate numbers.

For a moment, Naiz, said she wanted to console herself that Tulunan Mayor Nestor Taasan had anyway, already vouched for their safe entry to the area, having coordinated with him earlier.

But when she pressed further, one of the men yelled at her, "Paghilum. Pusilon hinoon tika run! (Shut up, or else, I will shoot you!")

Naiz, at that point, wasted no time. She managed to text a few words for the mayor telling that they were being held. She also sent the text message to her father.

Soon a maroon pick-up, with no plate number came. At that point, the things they brought with them, only handbags, were confiscated, including their cellphones, a camera and one used roll of film.

They were dragged into the vehicle. Inside were four burly-looking men, the driver, another man at the driver's seat and two men, on each side of the door. There was also a long firearm.

Naiz said she tried to speak to the men at first telling them that they are NGO workers and that the mayor had been waiting for them in Batang. But they wondered why the men inside the pick up just regarded them with the utter indifference, the same as how those motorcycle-riding men were ignoring their queries earlier.  

 When she pressed on, one of the men cut her by saying, "Relax lang! (Just relax)."

 Lorelie said, at the point, she hesitated anymore asking further questions afraid that she might just provoke them. Thus, began the terrifying silence as the vehicle that carried them moved along back wood dirt roads and on to long, empty highways of the town.

When they turned their back, they saw that the four motorcycles were following their vehicle all along, until they disappeared at a bend going to the direction of the 27th Infantry Battalion Military Detachment in New Panay village in Tulunan.

It was growing dark then as dusk came. Soon, they were on the road going to Makilala town in North Cotabato. They were brought to the Military Detachment of the 39th Infantry Battalion. They were blindfolded and interrogated in separate rooms.

Hearing Voices

To this day, the two women complained of having difficulty going to sleep. They said it's as if the voices on the night they were in the hands of their captors at the 39^th IB would keep on ringing in her ears, refusing to leave.

"NPA ka amina na lang gud! (You are an NPA. You must now admit it!)

"NGO worker ko. Unsa pa may gusto ninyo nga isulti nako?!" (I am an NGO worker. What should I tell you?!)

"Ah kanang inyong opisina prente lang na sa NDF!" (Your office is just a front of the NDF!"

"Among opisina, naa nay project sa area ilalum sa funding agency nga European Union." (Our office has a project in the area being funded by the European Union."

"Kanang European Union, communist country na!" (That European Union is a communist country!)

"Sayang ka Lor, gwapo ra ba imong lawas…" (What a waste? You have a beautiful body."

"Malooy mo, unsa may among sala?! (Take pity on us. What have we done?!)

"Kung pwede paulia na mi ninyo…! (Please, have pity, let us go...)" 

At first, Lorelie thought, she could still parry their questioning. But as night dragged on, the voices were still as strong as ever and the chuckles of the men lurking around her were as Lorelie puts it, just tormenting.

Methods of Terror

"I felt so already weary and bone-tired that I wished I had collapsed, or drowse off from exhaustion, the better to evade the incessant grilling that night. But my senses just refused to shut off," Lorelie recounted her ordeal.

"They also threatened to push me into a cliff, and pretended they had already finished digging out my grave. Then, they also took a picture of me her holding a signboard with a note that I am a "liaison of the New Peoples' Army," she recounted.

"I want to avenge them. Those men were brutes, ultimate jerks!" Naiz said, her voice already breaking.

Meanwhile, Bernadette, recalled of being led into an open shack by a cliff, blindfolded.

"There, they started asking me, my name, my age, where I studied, where my parents are and where they live. Then the question if I am an NPA, a communist. They even accused that I was bringing a hand grenade, and that my father is a bomb maker," she said.

Bernadette said, they asked the question many times and even threaten to tie her feet, her hands and her neck with a rope. They also rolled a paper and hit it on her head.

"At one point, I asked that I may be allowed to urinate. But the men would not go away, and so unable to hold it any longer, I tried groping my way a little farther. But the men were just around. I could even make out their laughter. I didn't realize that I was standing on a verge of a cliff and I thought that they were soon going to finish me off by pushing me down," she said.

"As night dragged on, there seemed to be no end to the questioning. And every time I fake falling off to sleep, they would tap me rudely so I may wake up and face up to their questioning again," Bernadette further recounted.

"Then they would tell me that Lorelie had already owned up to being an NPA and that it was my turn to admit.  Later, another voice would tell, "Humana ko pre. Ikaw na pud didto. (I'm done. It's your turn there.)," she continued.

But the ordeal did not stop with the mind games their captors played on the two the entire evening.

When morning came, they were forced to take some food. But Lorelie had been throwing off. Bernadette too could not eat out of exhaustion.

Both said they could hardly believe when they saw each other the next day. Somebody told them that they were going to be released. But then, Bernadette thought it seemed too good to be true anymore. They almost felt resigned to the worst.

But one of the men who came upon them mockingly told of how many had been looking for them already. Lorelie thought, it must be her cellphone which she heard kept ringing several times that night.

"Maybe they were going to salvage us. We just sat there, not talking at all. We were already very tired," Bernadette described how they were when both of them were put in the same maroon pick-up the next day.

But then, there were led again into another room where, for the first time, they said, they heard voices of women.

"For a while, it felt like a brief respite. But later, they turned out to be the same brutes!" Lorelie said as she recounted what these women, who first introduced themselves to be "their comrades" in Tagalog dialect, did," Lorelie said.

"They ordered us to strip off our clothes because they said, we might be hiding something. We were still in blindfolds. And we felt hands removing our bras, and pulling down our panties. And all the while, we were hearing men's chuckles from all around," Lorelie recounted.

Bernadette, realizing that she was menstruating, asked that she be allowed to change her undergarment.

"But, they forbade me. I was not even allowed to do this thing, on my own?! Helpless against them while those hands were removing my panty, was just degrading and humiliating!" Bernadette said.

Lorelie said, one man then came to them, and asked that they bear with them. "Pasensya lang jud mi. Naa lay trabaho. (Please bear with us. There is just work for us to do.)," were his words as Lorelie told. "Pasensyahe? Sa ilang gibuhat nga hapit man gani mi mangamatay? (Bear with them? With all that they have done to us? They even almost killed us!)," Lorelie said.

They were then told that they were going to be brought for medical-check up.

Outrage

The story of Lorelie and Bernadette, according to human rights groups in Region XII is another one added to the baffling symptoms of what have become of the present administration's policy nowadays, against what it perceives as its enemies.

Karapatan Region XII secretary general Shamrod Abdulaziz, Jr. sees this incident as part of the series of continuing human rights atrocities that the country now see under the 'All-Out War' measure taken by the Arroyo administration against 'insurgency.

The Arroyo government has declared an "All Out War," a supposed "endgame" strategy against the reds in June.

But after almost five months now since the announcement, the killings among political activists have continued. From the count of 684^th when a peasant activist from Misamis Oriental Tito Marata was shot dead a day after GMA made that declaration, the numbers of dead political activists now has reached 765^th, as of last Saturday's count.

Abdulaziz said this incident against the two CDRC staff volunteers is just among the "clear proofs that the Arroyo government is training its war, not against the armed, but against civilians, even those organizations who are supposed to be helping people who are victims of the abuses which are the AFP's own making, anyway."

 
Abdulaziz said that the perpetrators of the abuse against Naiz and Solitario are clearly elements of the Philippine Army contrary to the version they were circulating, that NPA men abducted the two.

The fact that that the eight motorcycle men who stopped Naiz and Solitario on their way to Batang village were seen heading towards the 27^th IB Military Detachment in New Panay, Tulunan, North Cotabato and the fact that they were brought to the 39^th IB Military Detachment in Makilala, North Cotabato and that Naiz and Solitario were turned over to the Tulunan Police Station by men, one of them identified himself as an ISAFP element were, according to Abdulazziz, glaring evidence of the military's culpability.

Abdulaziz pointed that Nais and Solitario were violently seized and detained by the military without any lawful basis and without any judicial authority to justify their violent capture.

"They were tortured, which is a blatant human rights abuse and one that is prohibited and not justifiable in any way, as a tactic, a method of securing any information especially by state armed forces of any country in the course of their work," he pointed.

"These military men did it not just because they were sadists per se, but because this is the policy now being carried out in the military against who it suspects as its enemy. This is proof that the Arroyo administration is now carrying out a policy of terror!" Abdulaziz said.

"What the AFP element did was clearly an act that is unlawful and highly immoral, and one that betrays any claim of legitimacy that the Arroyo government is trying to put on its 'All Out War' strategy. If at all, it has only unmasked further a stratagem that shows no sympathy at all for human rights and human dignity, truly, a mark of her fascist regime," he lashed.

Meanwhile, Gabriela spokesperson in General Santos City, Dr. Emely Lagare called what happened to Naiz and Solitario as "an incident that counts among the long list of record of state violence against the Arroyo administration as it violates human rights and as it forcibly insists on linking legal groups with the NPA."  Gabriela is a National Alliance of Women's Organization.

Lagare has condemned the 27^th and the 39^th IB and called them "instruments of violence against women."

"There may be no trace of physical violence on Ms. Nais and Ms. Solitario, but the effect of mental torture and sexual harassment that they experienced and tried fighting against in the whole time that they were in the hands of experts in psychological operations of the 27^th and 39^th IB are deep and lingering," Lagare said.

"So they could fully recover from the traumatic psychological experience, they have to attain justice," Lagare added.

Lagare challenged the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) and other agencies of the government to investigate and file cases against the 27^th IB and 39^th IB.

Naiz and Solitario with the help of human rights advocates Karapatan and Gabriela, have filed the case with the Commission and Human Rights and the City Prosecution in General Santos last November 8.

At present, they are in custody of an organization which they deem not to disclose, for security reasons.###