Fr Michael Sinnott's abductors were almost apologetic for abducting him, he tells CLIFFORD COONANin Manila
FR MICHAEL Sinnott has lost the beard he grew in 32 fear-filled days as a hostage of an Islamist terror cell in the southern Philippines, and the 79-year-old is sprightly and witty as he describes his terrifying weeks in captivity.
“For the first 10 days, we were in a swampy area with black mud oozing up out of the ground. It was a small place. I could not get any exercise. It was an area about one metre by three metres. If I leaned over one side of my hammock, there was water, and if I leaned over the other side my knee would be touching the guard. There was nothing to do except say a few prayers, and I found that very hard,” he says.
He is wearing a light-blue shirt, and trousers that he borrowed from Maj Gen Benjamin Dolorfino, the top military official in the region, and a pair of Birkenstock sandals. He looks extremely well, almost miraculously so given the experience he has just gone through.
“The days were long and the nights were longer. It got dark at around 6 o’clock, and you were in your hammock at six. But I slept well enough.”
Released after what looks like the intervention of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), Fr Sinnott confesses to feeling tired, having not slept much in the day since his release, but he is happy to discuss his ordeal and does not shy away from questions.
He is remarkably charitable to his kidnappers and betrays no trace of anger or bitterness about his ordeal or the people who abducted him.
You feel that this has less to do with Stockholm Syndrome, where kidnap victims develop a sympathy for their kidnappers, than it does a natural affinity he has developed for the local people of the island of Mindanao that he has built up over decades of working here as a missionary.
Like many of the Irish missionaries in the Philippines who have spent long years in the poor southeast Asian country, he speaks English with a slight local accent. He is visibly proud of the school he established for young people with learning and hearing difficulties. On the flight to Manila, the cabin crew and many passengers were overjoyed when they heard that “Fr Mick” had been released – Catholic missionaries command huge affection and respect in the Philippines.
Kidnapping is a fear among missionaries here, but the danger is normally confined to the outlying territories, not in built-up areas like Pagadian. Fr Sinnott never thought abductors would carry out something in Pagadian itself.
“At around 7.30 in the evening I was walking up and down the driveway, which I do after dinner since I had my heart operation. I saw two young girls who work in there lock the gate, then next there was a flurry of activity and four men surrounded me, three behind and one with a gun in front of me,” said Fr Sinnott.
“They were quite rough during the abduction. They caught me very roughly and threw me in the pick-up. I caught my side on a spare tyre there when they threw me in. I thought – this can’t be happening to me, I thought I was safe in my own grounds,” he said.
“In the boat they assured me they wouldn’t kill a priest. They said we have nothing against you personally.”
The missionaries’ fears are real. In 1997 Fr Des Hartford was held by Islamic militants for 12 days, and in 2001 a priest from Waterford, Fr Rufus Hally, was shot dead during an attempted abduction.
Fr Sinnot said his kidnappers were almost apologetic for abducting him. “They said it wasn’t their decision to kidnap an old man like myself. The kidnappers couldn’t have been better under the circumstances. They did things for me that I should have been doing myself,” he said.
Mostly he was given white bread sandwiches. There was no fruit, something the man who has lived so many decades in the Philippines clearly missed. He was given mineral water to drink every day, and there was a small stream nearby which the kidnappers used for water for cooking and to wash clothes and to bathe.
More than 170 languages are spoken in the Philippines, so communication even on an island like Mindanao is never a given.
“They spoke among themselves in a dialect I didn’t understand. The guard spoke Bisayan to me, which is a dialect I do understand.
“I didn’t get sick during the time. It must have been due to all the prayers that people were offering for me,” he said.
“The heat was very bad in the second place. Your forehead would be wringing wet with perspiration. But they had a constant supply of mosquito deterrent,” he said.
Going by the daily lectures that Fr Sinnott was given, it seems the kidnappers were a group of fundamentalist Muslims from the Lumad people, one of the indigenous tribes in Mindanao who were converted to Islam in the 14th century. Fr Sinnott said his captors had told him they were fighting for an independent Islamic state.
His guards at one point were a 40-year-old man and an 18-year-old.
“The young fella says, ‘I have an Armalite when I should be pushing a ballpoint pen’,” he said.
After 10 days in the swamplands, his captors decided it was time to move to the mountains. “They decided that they had too many cellphones, and they believed the army knew where they were, so at 6.30 in the morning we were taken away by fast boat. They told me I was going out to freedom, but it wasn’t true. I knew it, I was disappointed.”
Walking through the jungle, they had to cut through the undergrowth, and there was water up to their knees. “They helped me when I was tired. I’d done some hiking in my years here, but it was hard,” he said.
In the mountains, conditions were better and he could get some exercise and move around more.
“I had no contact with the outside world. One day we got a newspaper, because they wanted to use it to show I was alive. I read it from cover to cover that day.”
This was the newspaper the kidnappers used in a video to make their ransom demand. They wanted to show the date to prove Fr Sinnott was still alive – in late October, rumours were swirling that he was dead.
This was largely based on the fact that he had no medication – after open-heart surgery four years ago, the missionary was on a daily regime of drugs.
“I had no medication for 10 days. I wrote out a list of medicines that I was on, and they came back with a bag of things. The only one I recognised was paracetamol. At one point before I got the medication I thought I detected an irregular heartbeat,” he said.
Fr Sinnott comes from Clonard in Wexford town, which he says used to be the outskirts when he was growing up but is now nearly the middle of town.
“I was back 18 months ago, I’m due home in the summer.”
While he is keen to get back to his work in Pagadian, he will probably return home soon. During his captivity, on October 30th, his niece Eithne passed away, and despite his calm demeanour, he is grieving. But physically he is well.
“I feel fine now, though how I’ll feel in a few days I don’t know. I would like to stay on a few years, as long as I can be of use. They won’t kidnap me twice – it’s hard to hide an old man.”