KIDAPAWAN CITY — Division chiefs of different line agencies in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) are worried of setbacks in governance and their delivery of services to far-flung communities if the military would continue to cordon the surroundings of their operations center in Shariff Aguak, Maguindanao.

Some 200 soldiers, backed by armored combat vehicles, have been preventing people since Monday from going in and out of the 5,000-square-meter compound, where the ARMM’s liaison office and the residence of the region’s chief executive, Datu Zaldy Ampatuan, are located.

Among those trapped in the compound is ARMM’s health secretary, Tahir Sulaik, and more than a dozen regional officials who have not been implicated in the Nov. 23 massacre of 57 people in Barangay Salman in Ampatuan, Maguindanao.

Sulaik said he was to discuss with the ARMM governor the expansion of their health services to conflict-stricken areas in Basilan and Sulu and the disposition of health workers in the two provinces when the soldiers arrived and announced that they have established a security cordon around the compound.

“Now I cannot go out to oversee so many pending health missions in many parts of the autonomous region because soldiers are preventing us from leaving the compound,” Sulaik said.

Allen Usman, who is the ARMM’s agrarian reform secretary, said he was to recommend to their regional governor and their executive secretary, lawyer Oscar Sampulna, possible solutions to land conflicts in vast rubber cooperative farms in Basilan when soldiers restrained them at the premises of their liaison office.

“We’re like detainees here now. The problem is we don’t know what criminal case do we have,” said Sampulna, who is a diabetic and has a heart problem. Sampulna, a former military lawyer, said they would not complain of being placed under “house arrest” if ordered by the court.

Division chiefs of different line agencies in the autonomous region, among them the social welfare and public works department, said their emissaries tasked to have vital documents signed by ARMM Governor Ampatuan cannot accomplish their jobs as a consequence of what is for them “forced shutdown” of their liaison office in Shariff Aguak.

“Takot din kaming pumasok at mag-transact doon sa loob kasi baka di na kami palalabasin ng mga sundalo matapos kaming papasukin,” said an employee who asked to be identified only as Roy.

Physician Beth Samama, chief of Maguindanao’s Integrated Provincial Health Office, said a medical team on their way to provincial hospital in Shariff Aguak from Cotabato City was stopped by soldiers manning a roadside checkpoint.

“They asked too many questions and literally prevented us from proceeding to our destination for a long time even if we already introduced ourselves as non-partisan health workers,” a member of the medical team, who asked not to be identified, told reporters.