Government Refused Ransom Demands : U.S. Missionary’s Early Release an Aquino Victory

MARAWI, Philippines â€”  The rumors had been going around town for months: an American would be kidnaped.

It started soon after the United States bombed the Libyan capital of Tripoli on April 15, about the time that the green graffiti began appearing on walls in this overwhelmingly Islamic city--�Reagan the Great Satan,� “Death to the Americans.�

The Rev. Brian Lawrence and his wife, Carol Ann, heeded the warnings.

The evangelical Christian missionary couple had been studying the local language and customs at a local university for the last 18 months. They knew that dozens of Filipinos and a handful of foreigners had already been kidnaped in the region this year. And then, the Americans bombed Libya.

“Our neighbors told us if we were inside before 6 p.m. and didn’t open our door for anyone, we would be OK,� Carol Ann Lawrence said in an interview Thursday. The couple also placed three heavy-duty padlocks on their front door.

But on the night of July 11, not even the padlocks could help Lawrence, 30, a native of Madison, Wis., who came to the heart of the Philippines’ Muslim territory on the southern island of Mindanao in January, 1985, to help spread the word of his God.

At 10 p.m., more than a dozen heavily armed Muslims bashed down the Lawrences’ fortified door with a bench. They stormed into the house and charged up to the second-floor bedroom, where Lawrence had carefully hidden his wife, four months pregnant, in the closet.

“Only one,� Lawrence told the men in the local Maranaoan language, as they scanned the room for his wife. Eventually, the kidnapers gave up the search. And those were the last words that Carol Ann Lawrence heard her husband speak--until Friday.

On Friday, after a week in captivity, the bearded missionary emerged from the jungle in a T-shirt and blue jeans, healthy except for mosquito bites, unharmed and only a bit tired. He had a tearful reunion with his wife at a military camp here.

He had been held by a heavily armed gang, which has been variously identified with either a Muslim insurgent force on Mindanao island or a private army of a powerful political warlord whose 20-year rule in the region is being challenged by the government of President Corazon Aquino.

Aquino Victory Seen

Lawrence’s release ended a weeklong kidnaping drama that stirred nationwide fears of a resurgence of Christian-Muslim violence. The outcome was yet another victory for the new government in its battle to stabilize the Philippines after the February coup that brought Aquino to power.

Lawrence was released without the government’s handing over any ransom or making political concessions to the kidnapers.

Philip Kapan, the U.S. charge d’affaires, sent a message to Aquino, thanking her and adding that her “commitment to justice and nonviolence has won her the profound respect of the people and the government of the United States.�

But for Lawrence, his wife and the handful of other American Christian missionaries who have been working quietly, deep in the region that serves as the religious capital of the Philippines’ 5 million Muslims, the incident was a lesson in faith, in local politics and in what it is like to be a Christian and an American in a place that shuns both.

‘They Never Hurt Me’

Lawrence said he had no complaints about his treatment, although his kidnapers had threatened to kill him if the Philippine military attempted to rescue him.

“You know how people are, they try to scare you,� he said. “My kidnapers always treated me very well, they were very kind to me, they never hurt me physically in any way.�

The kidnapers’ jungle hideaway was hardly comfortable, the missionary said, but his captors went out of their way to look after him. They brought him a mattress, a toothbrush and toothpaste, he said. They gave him warm clothes and plenty of bread, fish and rice.

Lawrence, who has been living with his wife in Marawi in preparation for a life as a missionary in a remote Muslim neighborhood far outside the city, also said he enjoyed practicing his language skills and learning lessons, both political and social, from the men who held him.

His captors, numbering about 20, were armed with automatic rifles and grenade launchers.

Even before her husband was freed, Carol Ann Lawrence made it clear that the kidnaping has, if anything, deepened her respect for the Filipino Muslims.

She is also a devout evangelist, from western Pennsylvania. Almost reluctantly, she agreed to be evacuated, along with three other American women missionaries, from the Muslim-dominated region soon after the kidnaping.

She returned to Marawi for her husband’s return Friday after spending the week in a private home run by their New Jersey-based religious group, International Missions Inc., in the Christian-dominated city of Iligan 20 miles to the north.

Wife Not Angry

“I’m not angry with them� (the kidnapers), she said. “I think I feel more sorry that they had to resort to such a thing. . . . Through this, I feel even more of a warm feeling toward the Muslims. After this happened, everyone was so kind, so concerned.�

On the whole, she said, she appreciates even more the position of the Maranaoan Muslims, the largest ethnic group among the Filipino Muslims, who have been struggling for decades for more rights and autonomy in a nation that is more than 85% Roman Catholic.

“I can understand the struggle of the entire Muslim population,� she said. “In any country, there are minority groups, and minority groups tend to be overlooked.�

Lawrence’s kidnaping was hardly an isolated incident in Marawi, the informal capital of the nation’s Islamic minority, the descendants of Muslim missionaries who came to the Philippines in the 14th Century from the neighboring Islamic states of Malaysia and Indonesia.

The tradition of kidnaping in Marawi began in the early 1970s, when the region’s militant Muslims, feeling shortchanged by the Christian-dominated government in Manila, formed the Moro National Liberation Front and staged a bloody, five-year war of secession against the government and its military.

The war claimed more than 50,000 lives before then-President Ferdinand E. Marcos signed a peace treaty with the secessionist leaders in Tripoli, Libya, in 1976. But the conflict left cultural scars and traditions of violence that remain today--among them the tendency to kidnap government officials and religious leaders as a way to gain additional rights or money for the Muslims.

Foreigners Prized

Foreigners have been most highly prized by many kidnapers because generally they have fetched the most in concessions from a government worried about international opinion. And, with the advent of fundamentalism among the Muslims in the Middle East, Americans became the most prized targets of all.

The secessionist war also spawned religious death squads with names such as the Barracudas and Ilaga (“rats�). These death squads since have been incorporated into the private armies of local political warlords--clan chiefs to whom Marcos handed over local power in exchange for their signatures on the Tripoli Accord.

In recent months, the kidnapings have escalated; there have been 30 of them in the region in the nearly five months since Aquino assumed power. Most local military and religious leaders say the kidnapings are politically motivated attempts to embarrass the Aquino government and the local officials she has selected to bring order to the region.

Among the most prominent of the now-deposed, pro-Marcos officials in Marawi is Sultan Mohammed Ali Dimoporo, who served for nearly two decades as the region’s iron-fisted governor until Aquino ordered him removed from office in March.

A Splinter Group

Although the government did not officially identify Lawrence’s kidnapers, local military officials said they were members of the Barracudas, a splinter group from the Moro secessionist army that is also believed to be Dimoporo’s private army.

In a tape cassette sent to his wife by Dimoporo’s relatives, the young missionary named the leader of his captors as Commander Fidel Castro. The military has identified Commander Castro as Ismael Dimoporo, a distant relative of the reputed warlord. And the region’s military commander, Gen. Rodrigo Gutang, said the kidnaped missionary was being held in the heart of what he called “Dimoporo territory.�

In an interview with The Times on Thursday, Dimoporo vehemently denied that he was involved in the kidnaping.

“I am a religious man,� the aging politician said. “I pray five times a day, and I know the prohibition (imposed on) the Muslims: Even in war, do not molest or kill religious people. I have only a few years left. I believe in life after death. I would not like to go to hell.�

4 Motives for Kidnaping

But Dimoporo was able to quickly recite the four major motives of the missionary’s kidnapers: to protest the American bombing of Libya; to make good on the Moro National Liberation Front’s threat to escalate trouble if Aquino failed to grant the Muslims more autonomy; to embarrass the Aquino government, and to extort ransom.

Dimoporo also conceded that he has strong influence over the men who kidnaped the missionary--men he said “could well be� members of his Barracudas gang. And he said he deliberately delayed aiding the government in securing Lawrence’s freedom because he wanted to prove that only he is capable of governing the region.

After the release Friday night, Dimoporo said he was “very happy� about the missionary’s freedom, adding that he hopes the kidnapers are sentenced to death.

In the end, Lawrence’s release was secured through negotiations by Muslim Princess Tarhata Alonto Lucman, the leader of another powerful clan in the Marawi region. Princess Tarhata is both an outspoken supporter of Aquino and an avowed political enemy of Dimoporo, who continues to profess loyalty to Marcos.

The princess’ role in solving the kidnaping was seen as another indirect victory for Aquino in the region, and an aide to Dimoporo indicated Friday night that he was privately furious with the result.

Political Intrigues

Such local political intrigues, though, are hardly unknown to the Lawrences, members of a five-person team that International Missions Inc. assigned to the Muslim region of Mindanao two years ago.

“We are convinced it (the kidnaping) is totally political,� said Lea Froats, 32, a nurse from Reno, Nev., a member of the mission who has been living in a tiny barrio in the region for the past two years. “It has nothing to do with the fact that he is a missionary. The kidnapers just wanted to make a point.�

Froats conceded that her group’s work--�the long-term goal of our mission is to start churches,� she said--is controversial in an overwhelmingly Muslim region where Muslim-Christian relations are so strained that its three Catholic churches do not even display crosses.

“Our attitude in this area is we’re here to minister to the people and those who are interested,� Froats said. “We’re not street preachers. We’re not trying to force people. What we want to do is teach health care. Brian (Lawrence) has a degree in environmental sanitation. Carol is a teacher.�

Froats and the two other members of the team, Donna Schaber of Akron, Ohio, and Phyllis Oblander of Lancaster, Pa., are all nurses.

Welcomed in Barrio

The proof that their work is neither religiously inflammatory nor unwelcome, Froats said, is in the way she and her two fellow nurses have been welcomed in the barrio, where they live with the heads of a Muslim family they refer to as Mother and Father.

When they evacuated the barrio after Lawrence’s kidnaping, Froats said, “everyone was in tears.�

It is that sentiment on the part of the vast majority of the region’s Muslims, Carol Ann Lawrence added, that has persuaded her to remain in Marawi, after the kidnaping incident.

Living their entire lives as missionaries in the region, she said, is a decision that she and her husband had made independently. They came to Mindanao separately, met here, married and continued their work together.

“We were planning to stay as long as we could stay,� she added. “This has not changed.

“The one thing that will last for eternity is people--helping them to live eternally with God, . . . and I decided that I wanted to do something with my life that would change something for eternity.�

Lawrence seemed less certain Friday about his own future. Asked whether he intends to remain in Mindanao, he said, “Give me some time to think about it.�