Islamic Rebels in Philippines Train for War, Plan for Peace

In the mountains above Cotabato, at the end of a dirt track hidden in thick jungle, the wilderness parts and Camp Abu Bakr emerges as the spartan enclave of rebels who fight for independence in the name of Islam.

Their war, long forgotten by most of the world, has dragged on for nearly 30 years in this predominantly Roman Catholic country and taken at least 120,000 lives--but not the dream that one day, here among the shanties and military outposts, in a place where music, smoking and alcohol are banned and a rifle is the symbol of manhood, there will be an Islamic state whose people answer to Allah.

Camp Abu Bakr is the largest of 46 camps the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, or MILF, runs on Mindanao island, the poverty capital of a poor nation. Sprawling across hundreds of jungle- and stream-laced acres, the camp has taken shape over the years as a private redoubt, with a school and mosque, shops selling bananas and soap, clusters of one-room wooden homes with neither electricity nor running water, a military academy and a mom-and-pop munitions factory.

“If you have money, getting weapons is easy,” said Benjie Midtimbang, the military training director. “We buy them from smugglers, international dealers, even the Philippine armed forces.”

“The ammunition and some of the basic weapons, we make here at Abu Bakr,” he said. “Look at our RPG [rocket-propelled grenade launcher]. See how light it is. See how we lowered the trajectory so the grenade shoots straight instead of in an arc. It’s an effective anti-personnel weapon. Very deadly.”

From somewhere in the coconut palms the call to prayer comes, and a dozen teenage recruits scamper off to wash and pray. They will train here for 45 days, then slip back into their home districts to spread the word of God and, presumably, to carry on the struggle.

But for them--and the other 12,000 or so men the MILF has under arms--a crossroads in the generation-long conflict may be at hand. Despite distrust on both sides and the fact that the government’s patience is wearing thin, the MILF and Philippine President Joseph Estrada have agreed to prop up a shaky February cease-fire and begin peace talks. For the stability of the Philippines, the stakes are high.

“If this opportunity is lost, I’m not sure there will be any more second chances to solve the problem peacefully,” said Ghadzali Jaafar, the MILF’s vice chairman. “But if the government thinks we are not capable of fighting, they will demand our surrender. So we are preparing for peace--and getting ready for war.”

The war itself is a peculiar one that neither side is keen to see escalate into bloody pitched battles. The army, which has 50,000 troops on Mindanao, and the guerrillas maintain fairly static lines, sometimes only a few hundred yards apart, and government troops make no attempt to attack Abu Bakr. Some checkpoints along the roads outside the city of Cotabato are run by government soldiers, some by Muslim rebels.

Long periods of relative calm are broken by exchanges of small-arms fire that erupt for no apparent reason. They in turn often lead to heavy fighting. Thirty-four people were killed and 100,000 displaced from their homes in one such flare-up not far from here in January. Two weeks later, on Feb. 4, MILF leader Hashim Salamat agreed to the cease-fire.

Salamat is a 57-year-old Islamic scholar whose life is cloaked in mystery. He lives with his wife and five children in an undisclosed location deep within Abu Bakr’s jungles. Many of his troops have never seen him. Most Filipinos don’t know what he looks like. For 15 years he roamed the Middle East. For 20 years he never gave an interview.

The son of well-to-do parents, he left Mindanao at 16 to make the pilgrimage to Mecca expected of Muslims. He studied at Al Azhar in Cairo, the world’s oldest Islamic university, and returned to Cotabato as a librarian, setting up the MILF in 1978. A few years later he slipped away to avoid capture, spent time in Afghanistan, hobnobbed with radical Arabs and slipped back into his homeland in 1997.

Now he stays in touch with other rebel camps on foot, sometimes hiking 14 or 15 miles a day through the hilly terrain. “This is not an easy job,” he said in an interview at the camp.

Salamat has a scraggly goatee, speaks flawless English in a soft voice devoid of inflammatory rhetoric and has a library of several hundred books on history and religion in the simple bungalow that serves as his office. A score of uniformed rebels, armed with old U.S.-made M-14 and M-16 rifles, stand guard outside. Visitors are few, and following the trail to his office, through rain-swollen gullies and across narrow foot bridges, is a quiet and lonely journey.

“Ever since Marcos’ time, governments have been promising us everything--everything but independence,” Salamat said in late February in reference to the 20-year dictatorship of the late President Ferdinand E. Marcos, who was overthrown by a “people power” uprising in 1986. “Look around, and what is the everything they’ve delivered? Do you see roads? Electricity? Economic development? Factories? The everything is nothing.

“Many people tell us Mindanao could be one of the richest places in Southeast Asia, though we’re not experts on that. But the national government exploits us. It logs our forest, takes our resources. It’s taken billions of pesos out of the region and given us nothing in return except poverty.”

Salamat is vague about the MILF’s funding. In the 1980s, wealthy Saudi militant Osama bin Laden--indicted for last year’s bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people--provided money for “humanitarian and religious purposes,” he said, but that funding has ended. Money comes from countries and friends in the Middle East, he said, adding that none of his men are veterans of the Afghan war. He defends the use of teenage volunteer soldiers because “they are the sons of martyred fighters and they don’t mind if they are martyred like their fathers.”

Philippine military intelligence sources in Manila dispute many of Salamat’s claims. They say weapons come mostly from Pakistan, that at least 1,000 MILF guerrillas fought in Afghanistan, that recruits are lured with monthly salaries of $270 and that Bin Laden continues to be a generous contributor. “Cash is cash,” National Security Advisor Alexander Aguirre said. “It can go to charities or to some other uses like the military.”

Mindanao--which was never conquered during the Philippines’ 381 years of Spanish and American colonization and Japanese occupation--has a tortured history as a hotbed of Muslim and Communist rebellion and insurgency. Of its 17 million residents, 5 million are Muslims, who are referred to here as Bangsamoros or Moros.

Investors and tourists took flight when weapons poured into the Muslim-dominated southern part of the island in the early 1970s and fighting followed. While the Philippines as a whole was making notable economic progress, war-torn southern Mindanao grew poorer and more violent. One current guide book advises: “Avoid buses carrying soldiers as they are especially likely to be shot at.”

In 1996, the government negotiated an end to the war with the oldest and largest of the Muslim separatist groups, the Moro National Liberation Front, by granting Muslims a large degree of autonomy in four island provinces. The agreement, however, was not negotiated with or accepted by the MILF, a breakaway, more sectarian organization.

Though the national front has been peacefully integrated back into society, the autonomy deal seems to be souring. Nur Misuari, governor of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao, has lost Muslim support because of his penchant for the good life in Manila and five-star international hotels. He says his far-flung travels are necessary to raise money for the island he seldom visits anymore. His spotty track record and alleged abuse of government funds earmarked for Mindanao have enabled the MILF to capitalize on Muslim discontent and extend its reach and influence in the countryside.

“The Muslims do have a point on their grievances, but I’ll tell you this: We want this problem solved. We’re fed up,” said Tony Santos, president of the Cotabato Chamber of Commerce. “The war is strangling us economically. Let me show you what I mean.”

Santos drove through the scruffy streets of Cotabato and turned down the road to the Philippine army’s 6th Infantry Division headquarters, which two terrorists--a Pakistani and an Egyptian, whose political affiliations remain unknown--attacked in October before being killed. Next to the base stood the civilian airport that used to handle 7,000 passengers and 81,000 tons of cargo a month.

In the tower, the air-traffic controller stared at a blank radar screen; on the ground, the emergency fire brigade smoked and played cards. Santos drove onto the cracked and crumbling runway. The airport was open for business, but no plane had landed since mid-January, when pilots began boycotting Cotabato because, they said, the condition of the runway posed a safety threat.

“So we can’t get goods and people in and out of Cotabato,” said Santos, who owns a hotel that has few guests. “You have to drive to General Santos city to get a flight, but that’s three, four hours by car, and last January the highway to Santos was closed by fighting for three weeks. That leaves us isolated, cut off from the Philippines like we don’t exist.”

A few days later, nearly 600 miles northwest of here in Manila’s Malacanang Palace, President Estrada summoned his top security advisors to discuss the Mindanao problem. He was unrelenting on the MILF’s key demand--”independence only over my dead body,” he said--but agreed that economic development was the key to finding peace. “We can start by getting that runway fixed in Cotabato and reopening the airport,” he told an aide.

Estrada flew to Mindanao on Feb. 25 to announce several development projects that he hoped would promote peace, but a planned meeting with Salamat was called off at the eleventh hour when the rebel leader insisted on bringing 300 security guards with him on the 30-mile trek from Camp Abu Bakr to Cotabato. Both sides, however, said they were committed to pursuing peace talks at a high level.

“I’m really determined to fulfill my promise to give top priority to developing Mindanao,” Estrada said. “I’ll spend three months a year there if I have to do it. But why Hashim put so many conditions on our meeting is beyond me. He wanted this, he wanted that. Why don’t we forget that stuff and just sit down and talk?

“We’ve been tolerant with these people for a long time,” he said, “but I don’t know how much more patience I’ve got left.”