MANILA, Philippines—They say no story is worth dying for—yet journalists can sometimes be lured to real dangers that can cost us our lives. We can be very trusting, perhaps because we expect to be trusted in return.

In a place like Sulu, journalists come mainly for stories arising from its long history of war and violence.

Sulu gave me my first exclusives in the world of Moro rebels, setting me off on a journalistic career now spanning almost two decades.

But it was also there that I had the most agonizing chapter of my life, when I was kidnapped by a group of gunmen in Indanan town on Jan. 20, 2002, on my way to do a follow-up on the hostage crisis involving American missionaries Martin and Gracia Burnham.

My abductors—men wearing military fatigues bearing the insignia of the “Tabak First Infantry Division”—seized me on the beach of Barangay Tandiong and held me hostage for 98 days.

They thought I was delivering the ransom money for the Burnhams. “What ransom are you talking about?” I asked.

I did not get any response. Instead I was slapped in the face, and pushed around till I hit a rock. I was ordered to undress and change into an outfit they threw at my face. Someone pointed a gun at my forehead to stop me from asking further questions.

Then they made me board a boat, tied my hands, and forced me to lay flat on my face. They took me to an island, which they said was still part of Tawi-Tawi. We scaled a mountain and they kept me in a hut.

For meals, I was often given rice, sardines, and coconut water. A week later I was relocated, again by boat.

Text messages

One day, they blindfolded and interrogated me regarding the text messages I was still getting on my mobile phone. Later in the night they pushed me into a shallow pit—and then someone pissed on me.

In the next few days, they kept asking me about the ransom. The torment only subsided when they turned me over to another group around the first week of February.

The uneasy calm allowed for some conversation between me and a man named Lakandula, one of their leaders.

“When will you, reporters, stop writing stories about the fighting in Sulu? Is that all what you reporters are after?” Lakandula then wondered aloud. “You write your report and that’s it. It’s all just work for you. Is that it? Just another ‘scoop’ from Sulu?”

I remember the two of us having this exchange inside a hut, and outside we could see a group of women passing by.

“Do you see those women, their children? Every day they have to walk for several kilometers to draw water from the river. Why? Because they don’t have a source of water near their homes.”

Flashback

These moments came back to me on Monday, after I got a call from a radio network deskman asking whether I’ve heard the news that ABS-CBN reporter Ces Drilon and her crew have gone missing—again in Sulu.

I phoned my sources in that province, mostly local officials, and received confirmation about Ces and her crew’s fate.

A journalist following his or her instinct would file that story right away. But remembering what had happened to me, my unsolicited advice at this stage is to keep pertinent details of the negotiation confidential—if indeed there’s already one—to ensure the safety of Ces and her crew.

When I returned to Sulu in August last year, more than five years after my kidnapping, it was at the invitation of a local official who asked me whether the media, this time around, could still do something about Sulu’s “image crisis.”

Media’s role

I was then asked to deliver a talk on the “role of the media in peace and development.”

Ironically, my host who made such a request was once a fearsome warrior himself, Abu Ambri Taddik, a former commander of the Moro National Liberation Front. He was the first MNLF leader to have granted me an interview, way back in 1992.

In his invitation letter, Abu Ambri wrote: “The encounters will not stop at once for as long as rebels do nothing else in the mountains and the military continues to launch offensives against them.

“But is there nothing else about Sulu that is worth reporting?”

The question practically echoed that of Lakandula, leader of the Tausug group that put me through a 98-day ordeal.

For that day inside the hut, Lakandula, pointing to the group of women on their way to the river, wanted to know: “Haven’t you thought of how you can help them?”