Tales from Marawi
Yes, it tugs at one’s heartstrings to see people risking their lives for others. And it did when I watched on TV news of a group of policemen who stayed behind enemy lines in Marawi City to protect several civilians.
For three weeks, they kept marauding selfstyled Islamic militants at bay.
One of the policemen received a text from his wife, urging him and his colleagues to leave the civilians behind. She knew that they would be given safe passage. But the five cops stayed put.
They told authorities about the carnage they witnessed while in hiding, the houses and buildings that were aflame as members of the Maute group and government troops clashed.
Last Monday, they decided to make a break for it.
One of the civilians got hurt, his leg grazed by a shrapnel when the bandits shot at them while they made the two-kilometer dash to freedom.
Other than that, they emerged from their ordeal virtually unscathed, albeit shaken and overwhelmed with emotion.
PO1 Lumna Lidasan, one of the police officers, broke into tears when he recalled how he and the four other Marano policemen decided to throw in their lot with the five civilians. They didn’t have to. But Lidasan, in a CNN Philippines report, said they could not bear to leave them behind, knowing full well that if discovered by the Maute group the civilians would either be killed or held hostage.
What Lidasan, PO1 Ibrahim Wahab and their three colleagues, who were not identified, did was go above and beyond the call of duty.
That they happen to be Muslims and the civilians Christians is irrelevant.
Many Christian residents and workers in Marawi are alive today because they were protected by friends and colleagues who are Maranao Muslims.
Thirty-three Dansalan Junior College teachers owe their lives to former ARMM deputy governor Norodin Alonto Lucman, who opened his doors to them and several other residents who sought refuge in his house.
“We are committed to the protection of Christians in our province. That is the legacy of our departed elders to instill in our lives in our hearts and minds the need for Muslim-Christian harmony in this country,” the 71-year-old Lucman said in a press conference.
Perhaps, what’s happening in Marawi needed to happen. The whole country needs to see that sectarian violence has no place in our society. That Muslims and Christians can co-exist. Peacefully.
People also need to be reminded that majority of our Muslim brothers and sisters do not share the ideology of the Maute group or the Abu Sayyaf. That there are people like Lidasan, Wahab and Lucman, who don’t think twice about saving their fellow Filipinos.