Terror in Jolo

Through the Isle of Jolo spread a familiar, deadly-chilling fear. On that speck in the Sulu Archipelago, southwesternmost part of the Philippines, the Moros were going juramentado again.

When a Moro goes juramentado, he takes a fanatic oath to kill as many Christians as he can before he is killed himself. He also frequently kills anyone else of his own faith (Mohammedan) who is handy.

Usually it is a lot of trouble to kill a juramentado. The Moros are fierce fellows whose teeth are stained black and their lips red from chewing betel nut. A juramentado has the strength of a man slashing his way, with a wicked, wavy-edged kris, to a Moro heaven filled with sloe-eyed houris. When the U.S. Army first occupied the Philippines, many a soldier was killed after emptying his .38 into a Moro who kept on coming. So the Army switched to .455, which nearly kick a man's arm off but are no respecters of frenzy.

For the past two months, juramentado murders in Sulu have averaged one every other day. In Jolo, the biggest city (pop. 6,000), Moro Aharaji went juramentado after being conscripted, chopped off the head of a Chinese baker, killed one Filipino soldier and slashed another before he was stopped by a policeman's shotgun blast. He fell dead on exactly the spot where the same policeman had killed another juramentado ten days earlier. Townspeople shivered, waited for the next attack.

The constabulary rounded up Moro outlaws who seized on the panic for raids on unprotected villages. But against the real juramentados there was nothing to do except keep trigger fingers limber. No one could say which Moro might suddenly run amuck, or where.

Nor could anyone explain the wave of fanaticism. Since going juramentado has lost some of its religious significance and is now sometimes sheer homicidal mania, it could have been just the excitement of the Moro harvest festivals. Or the out breaks might reflect Moro resentment against conscription or against the despised, diminutive, Christian Filipinos' (with whom the Moros have fought for centuries) settling and trying to govern in Moro territory.

The strange, superstition-ridden Moros are hard to control, harder to understand. The story goes that General John J. Pershing, when he commanded in Sulu, developed a workable formula. Once when the Moros went wild, Pershing asked their Sultan to stop them. The Sultan said it was impossible. Pershing had warships shell the coastal villages. When the Sultan demanded that the shelling be stopped, he was told that the Navy had gone juramentado too. After that, Pershing and the Moros got along much better.

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