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COMMENTARY Little progress against unrest on Mindanao By Richard Halloran |
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More than 100 years ago, American 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, armed forces of the Philippines, backed by U.S. special operations forces, are fighting on Mindanao against Moros, some of whom are insurgents demanding an Islamic homeland and others who are pirates, kidnappers or terrorists.
American officials claim that the Filipinos and their American 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 U.S. has supported this counterterror work, but first and foremost this is a Philippine effort."
The U.S. ambassador in Manila, Kristie Kenney, noted last month that fighting in the south continued.
"These have been difficult months in Mindanao," she acknowledged 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."
Behind the scenes, however, U.S. officials have expressed frustration over what they considered to be a lack of progress on three fronts:
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 Catholicism on the Philippines and repressed the Muslims for 300 years.
The United States 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 U.S. Army subdued them.
Filipino guerrillas, with some American 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 Defense Minister Ramon Magsaysay, who combined military force with land reform and other civic action, much of it underwritten by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
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. President Ferdinand Marcos was ruthlessly dictatorial for 20 years.
Today, Muslims in the Philippines are divided into distinctive groups, according to a study by the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington. They include the Moro National Liberation Front, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, Abu Sayeff and Jemaah Islamiya.
The two fronts have been armed insurgents asserting claims to ancestral homelands in which Christian settlers have taken political and economic power, marginalizing the impoverished Moros.
The Moro National Liberation Front was founded in the 1960s by student radicals to protest the Marcos government's martial law and attacks on Muslims by Christian vigilantes.
The Moro National Liberation Front, by now a legitimate political party, agreed with the government in 1996 that it would govern the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao.
The Moro National Liberation Front split in the 1980s, with dissidents forming the Moro Islamic Liberation Front based on Islamic religious principles. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front's leaders advocate violence to gain independence.
Abu Sayeff is comprised of "kidnap-for-ransom" criminals who adopted Islamic trappings to gain publicity. The group is believed to get financial support from al-Qaida and Jemaah Islamiya, the Indonesian terrorist organization whose members have trained in Moro Islamic Liberation Front camps in Mindanao.
Richard Halloran is a Honolulu-based journalist and former New York Times correspondent in Asia. His column appears weekly in Sunday's Focus section.
