18 Held in Philippine Troop Invasion

The Philippine army pushed Saturday to the doorstep of a rebel stronghold where 19 hostages were held, including an American and two Frenchmen, in an artillery-backed operation aimed at halting the cycle of violence and kidnappings in the southern Philippines.

There was no word on the fate of the hostages on Jolo island, 600 miles south of Manila.

“They haven’t been eyeballed,” presidential spokesman Ricardo Puno said early today as the assault continued. “The rebels are clearly moving them from place to place.”

Few official details of the operation were released other than the capture of 18 suspected rebels. Phone lines to Jolo were cut. But President Joseph Estrada admitted in a nationwide address that the mission entailed “grave risks” for both the hostages and his own soldiers.

Although the government termed the attack a rescue operation, it had all the appearances of a full-scale invasion--including aerial bombardments, artillery and armored personal carriers--and was clearly designed to destroy the Abu Sayyaf rebels, who taunted the government by releasing hostages for ransom, then kidnapping more to take their place.

“We have to put an end to the cycle,” Defense Secretary Orlando Mercado told the Reuters news agency. “It has cost us our national pride. It embarrassed us.”

The timing of Saturday morning’s attack on Jolo was something of an embarrassment to Washington because Defense Secretary William S. Cohen was in Manila as part of a wider Southeast Asian visit and had expressed hopes that the five-month hostage crisis would be solved diplomatically. He said the U.S. had no role in the invasion.

“I was given a heads-up [that] action was imminent,” he told reporters Saturday. “No specific details were communicated to me.”

Cohen, however, did not criticize Estrada’s decision to move militarily and said it was up to the Philippines to decide whether to use force.

But France expressed “deep anxiety and disagreement” in a statement released by President Jacques Chirac. The two Frenchmen, journalists Jean-Jacques Le Garrec and Roland Madura from France 2 TV, had been scheduled for release Friday until rival Abu Sayyaf factions started bickering over how to divide the ransom.

The American, Jeffrey Schilling, 24, a Muslim convert from Oakland, was seized in late August after wandering into the rebel camp for unexplained reasons with his Philippine wife, Ivi Osani, a cousin of one rebel leader. She was released, but the rebels threatened to behead Schilling if the army attacked.

In addition to Schilling and the French journalists, the Abu Sayyaf--which professes to be fighting for an Islamic state but is generally dismissed as a professional kidnapping ring--is holding 12 Philippine Christian evangelists, three Malaysians and a Filipino, who was seized April 23 with a group of 20 others, 10 of them foreigners, on a Malaysian resort island.

Estrada’s decision to use force appeared to have been a result of the Abu Sayyaf’s greed.

After releasing the final foreigners--two Finns, a German and a Frenchman--on Sept. 9 from the group kidnapped in April and receiving $4 million in ransom, the rebels returned to Malaysia the next day and snatched three other local workers from another resort island. They were taken to Jolo by speedboat. Negotiations had not yet begun on their ransom, but generally Westerns have fetched $1 million each and Asians about one-third that amount.

“Enough is enough,” Estrada said Saturday, staring down the TV camera, in his national address. “It is clear that the efforts of our government toward a peaceful, long-term resolution to the problems are being scoffed at by the Abu Sayyaf group.”

All told, the Abu Sayyaf’s most recent kidnapping spree has netted the group about $15 million in ransom, $10 million of which was paid by Libya, apparently in a goodwill gesture intended to burnish its international image. Libyan officials denied that the payments represented ransom and said they were to be used for development projects in the predominantly Muslim southern Philippines.

Estrada has been under domestic pressure for weeks to end the Jolo crisis, militarily if necessary. In the past, he has dealt harshly with Islamic separatists, but this time he yielded to international pressure and sought a negotiated settlement to decide the fate of the 21 hostages seized in Malaysia.

When the four foreigners were released Sept. 9, he may have felt constraints were lifted, because the other foreign hostages--Schilling and the two French TV journalists--had gone into Abu Sayyaf territory voluntarily.

On Thursday, one of the Philippines’ most influential groups, the Catholic Bishops Conference, which traditionally condemns violence in all forms, said it “would not blame the government if it carried out action.” The president’s decision to send in the army also seemed to have wide popular support in the Philippines, a mostly Christian nation.

The military on Friday ordered all civilian vessels to leave Jolo harbor in order to clear the way for an invasion. Within 24 hours, it began ferrying in troops backed by helicopters and armor, and planes based at Zamboanga, about 100 miles away on the large island of Mindanao, started bombing the rebels’ jungle lair.