The Maguindanao massacre was an act of a monster, a maniacal and sinister plot of the devil. As one TV interviewee who had been in the massacre scene had said, the incident ‘ay hindi gawa ng tao’. And even without the camera showing crumpled vehicles and dead bodies dug up by a backhoe from a fresh mass grave, and the mutilated bodies with cut ears, gouged eyes, bullet hole on the head, and ‘bukas na zipper at aring niratrat ng bala’, the face of Andal Ampatuan as shown on TV without handcuffs was somehow enough to illustrate the point. I can’t imagine what the man (or monster in the guise of a man, or the devil himself in the person of Andal Ampatuan) was thinking when he allegedly ordered the massacre of some 64 men and women. I can’t imagine what the Ampatuan family was thinking when the idea of killing people was allegedly hatched by them. Are Andal and cohorts really human?
I didn’t know personally any of those massacred. But I was outraged by the barbarity of their deaths. The guys may not be perfect when they were alive. But they never deserved the kind of death they’d had. As one widow lamented, hindi lang pinatay kundi binaboy ang kanyang asawa.
Watching the massacre scenes on TV was numbing. Many times, I wasn’t aware that I was shedding some tears. I was thankful though that I was watching TV alone. Ganito na ba kagarapal ang tao? Possibly, the same scenes could be seen in Iraq or Mombay. But Iraq is a war zone. And the Mombay incident was a terrorist act. The Maguindanao massacre was an act of politicians and militiamen who were supposed to protect the people and whose salaries were paid for by the people they’ve killed. Ganito ba kagarapal sila? Can a sane person really do the act in such a magnitude?
The TV stations were good enough to blur out images of the decapitated, and sometimes they showed black and white footages to blot out the abundance of gore. But such self-censorship just magnifies the details especially when the scenes were followed by the close-up of a smirking Andal Ampatuan wearing a headband ala Rambo. Tao ba talaga siya? Because I agree with the interviewee that the massacre ay hindi gawa ng tao.
The word 'massacre' is heavily used in this post because I could'nt find a graver word. Perhaps, terrorism is graver than massacre. But terrorism could be simply 'kidnapping'. While massacre means gruesome death and lots of gore.
The only way for the Ampatuans to revert back to being humans is for them to feel the same pain that their victims had felt under their barbaric acts. The Ampatuans must be put to prison for life. And they must be thankful that they live in a civil and modern society. Else they are skinned alive, or stoned to death, or chained standing on a colony of red ants and scorpions until they die, or decapitated, or buried alive, or fed with fresh dog poo till they bark, or immersed in a cauldron of boiling oil, or fed to the crocodiles., etc., etc, etc…
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