They don’t know Digong

The notorious bandit group Abu Sayyaf will pay dearly for beheading Canadian hostage Robert Hall to embarrass incoming President Rodrigo “Digong” Duterte.

Clearly, they don’t know Mano Digong.

Unlike President Noynoy, whom the Abu Sayyaf bandits consider a weakling, Mano Digong is capable of matching—or even surpassing—their violence and cruelty.

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The only way for the government to deal with those Moro bad boys is to be like them.

The Tausugs, who are Muslims from Sulu, respect non-Muslims or Christians who can match their penchant for violence.

If a Tausug beheads your brother, you should retaliate in kind; no ifs and buts about it.

Abu Sayyaf bandits are mostly Tausugs.

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Retired Lt. Gen. Salvador Mison, who’s now a top executive in a big company, knows the Tausug psyche only too well.

When Mison was commander of an Army brigade in Jolo in the 1970s, an inter-island ship carrying more than a hundred passengers was hijacked by members of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF).

The rebels held the ship passengers hostage and demanded ransom for their release.

Mison tried to talk them into releasing their captives but the rebels threatened to kill everyone if their ransom demand was not met.

The next day, then Colonel Mison boarded the ship and told the hostage-takers that he had all their relatives—mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, wives and children—in custody.

“Kill your hostages and I will kill all of your loved ones,” Mison warned.

The hostages were promptly released.

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I hate to recall the atrocities committed during the MNLF rebellion from the 1970s up to the 1980s.

But perhaps the Abu Sayyaf, which was nonexistent at that time, could learn a lesson from the distant past.

When the MNLF went rampaging in Mindanao in the early 1970s, nobody could stop them.

The Marcos government, caught unprepared, hurriedly trained battalions and battalions of soldiers in Luzon for deployment to Mindanao.

A group of hardy farmers in the Cotabato provinces, mostly Ilongos from Panay Island, held the fort for the government so that Cotabato, with its predominantly Christian population, could not be overrun.

The capture by the MNLF of Cotabato would mean that other adjoining Christian provinces and cities in Mindanao would be next to fall.

The Visayan farmers were not as well-armed as the MNLF rebels who had sophisticated arms brought in from the Middle East via Malaysia.

But the Christian farmers, who called themselves “ilaga” or rats, surpassed the MNLF rebels in bravery and violence.

When the MNLF beheaded and killed Christian captives, the Ilaga retaliated in kind and on a bigger scale. For every dead Christian, they killed 10 Moro civilians.

The Ilaga also conducted a bizarre ritual in front of captured MNLF rebels: They disemboweled their dead MNLF captives and ate their cooked innards.

Uneducated Moros at that time believed that if any of their body part was missing when they died, they would not be able to enter heaven.

As a result, most MNLF members lost their will to fight the Ilaga.

If I know Mano Digong, the incoming Duterte administration would not be averse to copying what the Ilaga did.

I hope I’m wrong.