Ramadan starts with no gunfire

NORTH COTABATO— A week before the start of Ramadan, Saguila Kandong had stacked up on bullets for his Armalite rifle.

The 54-year-old Kandong is a member of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) in one of the towns of the province.

“It has become our tradition to greet the start of Ramadan with gunfire,” he said.

By Kandong’s account, the firing of guns should have started on Thursday in his village.

But not a single shot had been fired on that day and no one will fire his gun, too, on Friday, he said.

“Well, the kanduli (thanksgiving banquet) pushed through on Thursday but no more firing today and on Friday,” he said.

Kandong said what made him decide not to fire his gun was President Duterte’s declaration of martial law.

“You’ll never know. My village is not an MNLF camp so if we fired our gun, the soldiers might come,” he said.

Kandong said his neighbors and fellow MNLF members were also not firing any bullet.

Amir Tugas, who lived in an adjacent village from Kandong’s, was a Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) member.

Like Kandong, he, too, did not dare fire his gun.

“It’s better this way,” Tugas said at the pre-Ramadan feast that he and Kandong attended, adding that his father had told him how soldiers came in their village in 1972 and searched all over the place.

“The situation might get repeated if the Army heard us firing our guns,” he said.

In nearby Maguindanao, guns appear to have been silent, too.

“If there was any gun fired, it might have been in far-away villages that we never heard any,” said Abdul Kapiton, who worked in a banana plantation near Datu Paglas town.