A look back at Marag Valley: Folks tell tales of violence, abuse

By Larry P. Fabian

MARAG VALLEY, Luna, Apayao – Once the hotbed of rebellion against the Marcos dictatorship in the early seventies, Marag Valley now sees its future in  tourism as the province gears for brighter future.

Barangay Marag, located within the Municipality of Luna, boasts of a thickly forested landscape with hidden rock formations and limestone caves that had once been the perfect spot for rebels to set up camp and training grounds for new recruits fighting on what they believed was a corrupt government.

Romina Morales, a resident of the village recalls how she and her family had to evacuate to the inner jungles of the valley after having had experienced what they called “military injustices” in their community.

“It was too much for us to bear, some of our neighbors were abducted by the military for suspicion of being rebels and then seeing them the next day piled up dead inside one of the artesian wells used by the community,” Morales said.

“We feared the military because they could easily accuse anyone in our neighborhood for being a rebel, then the next thing, we see are their dead bodies,” Morales added.

Morales denied she or any of her kin ever took arms against the government during those times of turmoil. “I nor any of my family members never fought against the military or joined the rebels because fear was all over us. That was why we had to move to the most remote part of the forests,” she said.

In these forests, they ate ferns and other edible plants that they could find. “It was a heavy burden for us to find rice. We had to walk many kilometers to the nearest store just to purchase a kilo of rice since we left our rice fields unattended for fear of being suspected and snatched by the military on suspicion of being a rebel,” Morales laments.

“When the military helicopters started dropping bombs in 1986, things got worse as these carpet bombings affected all of our lives,” Morales recalled.

This trauma was shared by most of the community members during those times.

As another survivor recalled, he spent months at the evacuation center in Pamplona, Cagayan in the early 90s after he was brought there by a humanitarian group which had found him wandering aimlessly after his family’s house was heavily strafed in the crossfire between military forces and the rebels. Both his parents died in that incident.

The survivor, who asked to be called Ricky, could remember: “I could not even take a look at a man in a military uniform, for fear that he will shoot at me with just a stare.”

He said he was a young boy when that happened in 1992, and without the people who evacuated them in Pamplona Refugee Center, he would have been long gone.

Years have passed and the rice fields are once again teeming with the color of greens and animals are being pastured near the forest edges in Marag. The river is bountiful with fish.

Asked about what would the people in Mamasapano, Maguindanao feel with regards the recent clash between government and a Muslim armed groups that killed 44 Special Action Force personnel, Morales shrugged and just said, “I pray to God all these killings would stop, because the civilians there, like us are also deeply affected.”

Morales added : “The residents in the area are the most affected because they are the ones who are most helpless. I hope the leaders would soon realize that their lives are also important.”