Some interesting stats on gun violence and illegal firearms came out this week at the Philippine National Police Headquarters in Manila.  According to Chief Superintendent Reynaldo Rafal, more than half of the 2 million firearms in the hands of Filipinos are illegal.  About 70 to 80 percent of all those illegal firearms are concentrated in the southern islands of Basilan, Jolo and Tawi-Tawi, which form the Sulu Archipelago. Using a quick, back-of-the-envelop calculation, that leaves about 800,000 firearms in Sulu alone.

One has to look at these figures with some skepticism, because no one has actually done a real survey of small arms ownership in the Philippines. “There’s a need to account of all the firearms in the country,” Rafal admitted in a Reuters news story.

The admission that most of these illegal weapons are in the Sulu Archipelago indicates a fundamental problem: weapons will inevitably concentrate in areas where there is little enforcement of law and order.

But this also raises another question: who is profiting from this vibrant gun market?

Anyone who knows the business of buying weapons in Mindanao will tell that you that politicians and high-ranking military officials from Manila and other provinces have fueled the gun market.  There’s even such as thing as a “Dalmatian” order: buy 100 firearms, get 1 free.  The military-grade weapons sold often bear the mark of their origins. Many M-16 rifles will actually say “Property of the Armed Forces of the Philippines”. And certain types of weapons in the hands of clan warriors in Sulu, such as the M60 general purpose machine gun (pictured above) and the M67 recoilless rifle, leave no doubt as to where they come from.

With such a lucrative trade in arms, any talk of peace and security would mean cutting into the bottom line of the business of war.

The first time I met  Police Superintendent Julasirim Kasim, he was busy working out the logistics for his men who were about to patrol the dangerous streets of Jolo, the capital town of Sulu province in the southern Philippines. The only problem was that they were all out of petrol, and some of his men were complaining that the weekly government fuel ration wasn’t enough to even drive around the city  once. The police in Sulu were notoriously ill equipped and ill trained to deal with the province’s violence. Many police officers had to buy their own bullets or moonlight other jobs. When on patrol with them through Abu Sayyaf country, they looked enviously at my bulletproof vest and helmet. They had to rely on either luck or the magical spells they had inscribed on their under shirts.

But there was a buzz in Kasim’s office that day. Word had come from higher up that at team from the FBI would be in town to train some of his men in a few weeks, and with that always came the prospect of better weapons donated by the Americans.

“Balikatan” is the Filipino name for the joint U.S military exercises going on in Sulu, seen by many there as a cover for special operations in region. “Balikatan” has also become the local nickname for the brand-new M-4 rifles with all its bells and whistles that the U.S. has been giving the Philippine military — a source of envy among the police. The police and the military have long competed for the job of security in Sulu. Looking at the shabby state of the police, there was never any doubt who had come out on top.

Kasim himself never walked around with the usual paraphernalia of a Sulu policeman: M-16, wrap around shades, grenades and bandanna. He preferred his blue starched uniform and his Colt .45, always quick to point out that his piece was “Made in America.” He spent 35 years in the service, more than 20 of it in Sulu.

His beat is probably one of the most stressful postings for any police officer: an archipelago of some 300 islands with countless high-powered firearms, used with little hesitation at the slightest provocation. In the  town of Jolo, Kasim had to deal with drug gangs, assassination squads, kidnappers, extortionists, armed robbers as well as the labyrinthine politics of Sulu that demanded patronage and clan loyalty above all else. In the countryside, he was faced with simmering clan wars which sometimes tested his own neutrality. After all, Kasim was a son of Sulu, born and raised there. On top of all this he had to operate within the limits of  a crumbling police bureaucracy: one that started in Manila and trickled all the way down to his desk in Jolo.

Kasim himself suffered from chronic respiratory problems, and last year, while pinned down in a gunfight between two warring clans, the stress affected his breathing and he had to be rescued. Despite his bravado he never was able to convince the warring families to stop their little war. Kasim and his men were simply outgunned. It took a helicopter gunship and a company of Philippine Marines to straighten things out. Once again, the military took charge over a civilian matter: a personal humiliation for Kasim, but more ominously another defeat for genuine civilian rule in Sulu.

While filming for over two weeks with Kasim, he struck me as an eternal optimist, almost to the point of self-delusion.

“Apart from the mortar barrage last night, and the kidnapping of a television crew, all is peaceful in Sulu,” he chirped before his men during the weekly flag-raising ceremony in front of his office in Jolo.  Kasim’s blind optimism perhaps helped him with the impossible task of enforcing law and order in a fundamentally lawless region.

Kasim and three of his men were killed in an ambush last May 7th, on a stretch of road in Maimbung, Sulu, were I filmed with him last year. He was on a mission to rescue an Italian ICRC worker from his Abu Sayyaf kidnappers, according to news reports, when armed men opened fire on his vehicle.

My heart-felt condolences to his family, friends and fellow officers in the Sulu police force.

Copyright © Orlando de Guzman

Jolo’s dark side always seems to first appear in dreams. In my first days of filming Gun Culture, I was woken up three nights in a row with terrible nightmares. The third time it happened, I thought I heard a very loud rattling noise, as if someone was trying to break open the door. At the same time, a voice whispered something close to my ear, waking me up in a fright.

When I told the housekeeper the next morning, he gave me a long, curved kris with an elegantly carved silver and buffalo-horn hilt. “This belongs to my grandfather and it has killed 8 people in battle,” he said. “Keep it under your bed and the ghosts will stop bothering you.” He then instructed me to pull it out of its scabbard and show its blade around the room before going to sleep.

Even for a Filipino who grew up hearing about goblins and spirits – from the half-horse, half-man beast called the ‘tikbalang’ that plays mind-tricks on its victims in the jungle, to the ‘manananggal’ that specializes in eating children’s entrails while they’re sleeping – I have always been firmly skeptical of the underworld. But with the previous night’s scare, and my rising paranoia in Jolo, I decided it was maybe a good idea to take the kris.

“If this technique doesn’t work, don’t worry about the ghost too much if it comes again. The ghosts here can’t kill you. You should worry more about the people.”

On another night, I was woken up by automatic gunfire followed by screams. A domestic fight, I was told the next morning. No one was hurt, and no one seemed bothered about it. The neighbor spent an entire magazine just to let off some steam.

I finally slept well after my friend insisted he stayed in my room, a loaded .45 caliber pistol tucked under his pillow.

Copyright © Orlando de Guzman

I was sitting in the musty office of Sulu Provincial Police Superintendent Jalasirim Kasim when he received an urgent phone call from his bosses in Manila.  I figured it was urgent because he switched into a contrived variant of the English language that could only have evolved in a provincial Philippine police academy.

“Don’t tell anyone”, Colonel Kasim whispered after hanging up the phone, “but a famous Filipino journalist has just been abducted somewhere on the island.”

The Colonel didn’t look that worried.  He seemed more interested in testing out the brand new LED Maglite I’d just given him.

His office handles many kidnapping cases a year.  “I will not call it a kidnapping yet,” said Kasim.  “As of now we should call it an abduction.” 

The semantic difference immediately got me confused.  Surely the only reason to abduct someone in Sulu was to extract a ransom.

“No, there are many reasons to abduct someone,” Kasim corrected me.  If someone doesn’t pay up their debt, you abduct one of their relatives. 

“That’s technically not a ransom demand because that person’s family really owes you the money,” Kasim continued, “And some people kidnap for love.”

By far the most common type of abduction is simply called ‘kidnap-to-marry’. 

“This kidnap-to-marry we get many reports, but no one files any cases against the suspects,” the Colonel said.

The biggest targets are single, attractive school teachers with college degrees, one Sulu resident told me, because they either have stable government jobs or are easily employable.

An actor I know from Sulu who is now living in Malacca surprised me when he told me his dad kidnapped his mom. “My mom was washing clothes by the river when my dad took her. My dad’s dowry then was a .38 caliber pistol.”

Rival clans would sometimes kidnap each other’s daughters and force them to marry. This, I was told, has the positive effect of ridding the area of clan tensions.

 “We’ve tried to advocate against this practice for years,” an exasperated activist from the Mindanao chapter of the women’s rights group GABRIELA said , “but we’ve gotten no where in Sulu.”

A typical kidnap-to-marry police blotter would read like this:

So-and-so, a 5^th grade schoolteacher, was on her way home when 3 armed men grabbed her and took her to a nearby town.  The groom-to-be’s father immediately sent 50,000 pesos down payment for the dowry.

Why do you need so many men carry out a kidnapping? A friend from Sulu looked at me as if I was stupid.  “It’s not that easy to kidnap someone. You have to be successful because if your bride-to-be escapes, you’ll have big trouble in your hands.”

That’s what happened to Arthur Amiril. He tried his luck with the daughter a powerful mayor. Arthur enlisted the help of 5 other men and together they blocked her car, but she managed to escape.  Arthur’s family immediately sent a dowry, but it was rejected.  The incident sparked an 8-hour gun battle between the families that displaced several hundred villagers.

“The mayor’s family broke the law by rejecting my dowry,” Arthur explained, when I finally caught up with him. His only regret was that his ‘sweetheart’ got away.

He was busy manning a checkpoint he set up on a dangerous stretch of road in Jolo, looking for family members from the mayor’s clan. About a dozen young men with knives and M-16 rifles smoked and sipped sodas, listening to our conversation.  This was no official checkpoint.

I asked him if it was true that he pointed his .45 pistol at the mayor’s daughter during the failed abduction.

“No, of course not. You would not point a gun at someone you love, would you?”

The boys with guns cheered and for what passed here as romance.

Copyright © Orlando de Guzman