By Raissa Robles

Following today’s bombings in Basilan, I would like to share this piece I wrote on:

• What an alleged c0-founder  of the Abu Sayyaf  told me about the terrorist group;
• Why a failed peace deal with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front would not result in an outbreak of conflict (unless provoked by the Philippine military);
• Why a peace pact is so difficult to achieve; and
• What the next Philippine president faces in Mindanao.

In Metro Manila, Muslims applying for corporate jobs hide their
religious affiliation for fear this would lead to instant rejection.

In Mindanao, lovely beaches lie deserted and vast areas, rich in oil,
gas and minerals, remain untapped because bandits and kidnappers roam around at all hours of the day.

Overseas, potential investors hesitate to put their money down in a business venture in Manila, following fresh news of another bombing or beheading in the remote southern island of Basilan.

All these are part and parcel of the Mindanao conflict that has bedeviled the young Philippine Republic for nearly half a century.

The festering problem has helped breed a Muslim nationalist movement, which has partly metastasized into a deadly form of extremism that now makes even far-away Manila unsafe from bombings.

Now President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is rushing a peace deal with the
10,000-strong Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) to address the
conflict.

Both sides hope for the best.

“I still would like to come to an agreement” before June 30 this year, President Arroyo recently told the foreign press during a dinner she
hosted. “It’s still within reach. We have formal peace talks now. We have a ceasefire,” she said.

Even the MILF is hoping for a miracle at the eleventh hour.  Chief rebel negotiator Mohagher Iqbal told me:

A peace agreement is still possible. In Northern Ireland, it was signed two months before Prime Minister Tony Blair exited from office in 2008.

Why peace is difficult

But the dynamics of Philippine politics are radically different from that of the United Kingdom. And both sides agree the problem awaits solutions uniquely homegrown.

Over four million Muslims reside in the Autonomous Region for Muslim
Mindanao (ARMM) but untold millions now live in various parts of the
country, scattered by the 1970s war waged by the dictator Ferdinand
Marcos.

The Muslims’ desire for a Bangsamoro homeland intensified when
they rose up in arms against Marcos.

It also forced Muslims to abandon their land, which Christian settlers
then grabbed. Even North Cotabato vice governor Emmanuel Pinol concedes this injustice happened on a large scale in central Mindanao and must be rectified. But he successfully opposed the solution proposed by the Arroyo government in the form of a landmark deal which would have granted Muslims a Bangsamoro homeland.

The Supreme Court scrapped it two years ago on grounds of unconstitutionality. This prompted a violent response from some MILF
commanders who remain at large to this day despite military action.

Why the peace process failed

Why did the peace process – running for 12 years now – fail so suddenly and tragically?

During a recent round table on the issue co-sponsored by the Philippine Institute for Peace, Violence and Terrorism Research, Cesar Pobre, a retired colonel and consultant at the Armed Forces office of strategic and special studies, said the fatal flaw was in keeping most Filipinos completely in the dark and totally disengaged from the peace process.

Lawyer Nasser Marohomsalic, a convenor of the Philippine Council for
Islam and Democracy, also pointed to the lack of a peace constituency
in the country and the high level of distrust by the Christian majority for the Muslim minority who comprise from 4% to 10% of the population.

In a 2005 nationwide study by private pollster Social Weather Stations, only 63% of Filipinos had a favorable perception of Islam – but still a marked improvement from the 43% in 2002 following a rash of high-profile kidnappings and beheading by the Muslim terrorist Abu Sayyaf.

Most Filipinos today have no memory of the Mindanao wars that continue to ignite Muslim passions because the Marcos-controlled media made sure not to report on these. The New York Times reported on February 18, 1977 that the wars had resulted in “10,000 dead and a half a million made homeless.”

The wars touched every Filipino Muslim family with pain and death but
a new generation of non-Muslim Filipinos has since grown up wondering
what the fuss is all about. Because of this, Filipinos in general lack sympathy for the struggle of the Muslims, who in turn deeply resent this.

The peace process is also saddled by additional unwanted baggage, namely Arroyo’s high level of public distrust. According to lawyer-peace advocate Soliman Santos Jr., part of the solution lies in amending the Constitutional provision on Muslim autonomy. But most Filipinos refuse to go that route out of fear that Arroyo would use the occasion to change other sections of the Constitution to perpetuate herself in power.

In a recently published paper, Santos also scored the government’s fragmented and dissonant approach to the Mindanao conflict. Practically the same territory, political and economic powers that the government has been trying to offer the MILF was already handed to the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) in its 1996 peace deal, he pointed out. The MNLF is the mother unit from which the MILF broke away in the 1970s.

MNLF chairman Nur Misuari is to date still trying to pressure the government for a full implementation of that deal.

Misuari’s deal helped lead to the flowering of the Abu Sayyaf, which
resented the secular nature of his brand of autonomy and insisted on a
separate state run along Islamic precepts.

Camilo Montesa, an assistant secretary to the government’s presidential peace adviser, has suggested an integrated approach to the MNLF, MILF and the Abu Sayyaf.  He said:

We cannot continue to deal with the MILF peace process, the MNLF peace process, the challenge to make ARMM work, and the threats posed by extremist groups like the JI (Jemaah Islamiyah) and Abu Sayyaf as if they are separate and unrelated.

While we engage these groups differently, we want to engage them in view of all our other efforts across the other tables [because]in the end, we are talking about the same people, the same aspirations, the same problems and probably the same solutions.

A word of advice from a suspected Abu Sayyaf terrorist

His advice makes sense. In a recent face-to-face interview with Abdul Basir
Latip, suspected co-founder of the Abu Sayyaf whom the United States is trying to repatriate in order to stand trial, this is what he told me when I asked  him – how do you resolve a problem like the 400-strong Abu Sayyaf?

Latip denied to me that he co-founded the Abu Sayyaf. However, because he personally knows and mingles with its leaders and members, he shared the following insight:

This Abu Sayyaf, as I look at their purpose, they are somewhat
disgruntled, discouraged by the acts of the MNLF and the MILF, because they look at these organizations as their inspiration. They were assured that the teaching of Islam will be implemented in Mindanao.

But what happened, when MNLF accepted negotiations to establish an autonomous government and similarly the MILF, these members of the Abu Sayyaf got discouraged because they have changed the real motive of putting up an Islamic government in Mindanao.

Thus, he said, the Abu Sayyaf’s

real purpose is to establish a separate form of government distinct and different form the government of the Philippines…a separation.

He said the Abu Sayyaf’s religious ideology of Islamic revivalism is
shared by a small segment in the MILF.

MILF chairman Murad Ebrahim, though, does not adhere to it. Following the teachings of its late founder Hashim Salamat, the MILF seeks to govern along Islamic precepts, stricter than what is currently practiced in the south but far less radical than what the Abu Sayyaf wants.

Ironically, while the peace process is bound to fail in the immediate
future, things are looking much better for the MILF.

Its rival for political power, the MNLF, is now a shadow of its former
proud self.

The MILF is now recognized as a legitimate revolutionary organization
by the United Nations, the United States, Japan, the UK, Canada, Australia and other western countries, as well as by the Organization of the Islamic Conference comprised of the world’s Muslim states.

It is for this reason that a failure to pass a peace deal will not result in war, as it had in the past. Iqbal told me:

We do not want the international community to brand the MILF as an anti-peace organization.

But the flip side is that the next Philippine president has to deal
with an organization better prepared to bargain hard for the rights of
its people.