More than 100 years ago, US forces in the Philippines were seeking to pacify or, when that failed, to subdue Muslim Moros on the southern island of Mindanao and the island chain running southwest to what is now Indonesia.
Today, the armed forces of the Philippines, backed by special operations forces of the US, are fighting in Mindanao against the same Moros, some of whom are insurgents demanding an Islamic homeland and others who are pirates, kidnappers and terrorists.
US officials claim that the Filipinos and their US allies are making progress. A senior State Department official, Scot Marciel, said in Washington last month: “The Philippines has improved its economic performance and made substantial progress fighting terrorists who threaten it. The US has supported this counter-terror work, but first and foremost this is a Philippine effort.”
US Ambassador to the Philippines Kristie Kenney said last month that fighting in the south continued.
“These have been difficult months in Mindanao,” she said to a largely Filipino audience.
“Yet, I think not one of us has lost hope for the future of Mindanao, for a future that is peaceful and prosperous, a future that benefits all of the Philippines,” she said.
Behind the scenes, however, US officials have expressed frustration over what they consider to be a lack of progress on three fronts:
The government of Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has no political plan for civic action to resolve differences with the Muslims. The Supreme Court ruled last Tuesday that a proposal to give Muslims greater autonomy in Mindanao would violate the Constitution and could cause a partition of the nation.
The Philippine armed forces, despite several years of US backing, have been reluctant to press the campaign against the Moros and Abu Sayeff terrorists.
“We know where they are within a kilometer,” said a US official with access to intelligence, “but the government won’t go after them.”
Rampant corruption in the government and private industry saps efforts to battle the terrorists and insurgents. The Philippine press prints a daily stream of reports on alleged corruption such as the police raiding a big construction firm last week to seize computers loaded with pirated software.
The roots of the Muslim unrest in Mindanao were planted in the 14th century when Arab missionaries and traders converted people there to Islam. That was about the same time that people in what are now Indonesia and Malaysia became Muslims and the eastern wing of Islam.
Then came the Spaniards who imposed Catholic Christianity on the Philippines and repressed the Muslims for 300 years. The US took the Philippines from Spain in the Spanish-American War and sought, at first, to make peace with the Moros. When the Moros resisted, the US Army subdued them.
Filipino guerrillas, with some US help, fought Japanese invaders during World War II, an experience that carried over with the Hukbalahaps, or Huks, who were backed by Soviet communists. They were defeated by Philippine defense minister Ramon Magsaysay, who combined military force with land reform and other civic action, much of it underwritten by the CIA.
Magsaysay was elected president in 1953 but died in an airplane crash in 1957. Much of the hope for a unified, well-governed Philippines apparently died with him as most of his successors, except Fidel Ramos, were either ineffective or corrupt. Former president Ferdinand Marcos was ruthlessly dictatorial for 20 years.
Today, Muslims in the Philippines are divided into distinctive groups, a study by the US Institute of Peace in Washington says. They include the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), Abu Sayeff and Jemaah Islamiya.
The MNLF and MILF have been armed insurgents asserting claims to ancestral homelands in which Christian settlers have taken political and economic power, marginalizing the impoverished Moros.
The MNLF was founded in the 1960s by student radicals to protest the Marcos government’s imposition of martial law and attacks on Muslims by Christian vigilantes. The MNLF, by now a legitimate political party, agreed with the government in 1996 that it would govern the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao.
The MNLF split in the 1980s with dissidents forming the MILF based on Islamic religious principles. The MILF’s leaders advocate violence to gain independence.
Abu Sayeff comprises “kidnap-for-ransom” criminals who adopted Islamic trappings to gain publicity. The group is believed to get financial support from al-Qaeda terrorists and Jemaah Islamiya, the Indonesian terrorist organization whose members have trained in MILF camps in Mindanao.
Richard Halloran is a writer base in Hawaii.
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