Philippine Muslims Still Waging Age-Old Resistance

For more than 400 years, the Philippines’ predominantly Muslim southern provinces have resisted, at a bloody cost to all concerned, outside domination. No one--not Spanish and U.S. colonialists, Japanese occupiers or the Manila government--has ever been able to fully integrate the area into the broader nation.

Given that history, Philippine President Joseph Estrada’s decision to launch a major military assault on Jolo island last week to free 19 hostages and destroy the Abu Sayyaf rebel movement is a high-risk gamble that is unlikely to end fighting in the war-torn region--particularly if he merely declares victory when the hostage drama is over.

“Everyone will tell you there can be no military solution in the south,” said Sen. Rodolfo Biazon, a former commander of the armed forces who spent much of his career battling Muslim separatists on the island of Mindanao. “You have to improve the conditions of people who feel they are have-nots, and that entails political and economic solutions.”

After two French hostages escaped their captors and were rescued by troops early Wednesday, Estrada said he would call off the offensive if the other hostages were released. Abu Sayyaf, an Islamic group, made no formal reply and continued its flight into the jungles with its captives, including Oakland resident Jeffrey Schilling.

In a radio interview broadcast today, Schilling said: “I’m fine. I’m well.” He appealed to the Philippine government to halt its military assault so that negotiations can resume. The interview, conducted by satellite phone, was the first confirmation that Schilling was still alive.

For the 400,000 residents of Jolo island, being in a war zone is hardly a new experience. The seaside town of Jolo was twice razed by Spanish armadas, and the current war in the south has dragged on at various levels of intensity for about three decades, claiming more than 120,000 lives.

Estrada has shown no tolerance for the separatists’ aspirations--”Independence only over my dead body,” he says--but he has paid more attention and delivered more economic development to the southern provinces, where most of the nation’s 5 million Muslims live, than any other recent president. But the region remains the Philippines’ poorest, at least in part because of the continuing warfare.

Spain gave up trying to convert the provinces to Christianity during three centuries of colonial rule. At the beginning of the 20th century, the U.S. had no better luck getting the Moros, as Muslims are called here, to acquiesce to foreign authority.

“The enemy numbered 600, including women and children,” Mark Twain wrote of a 1905 battle on Mindanao, “and we [Americans] abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby to cry for his dead mother.”

U.S. soldiers at the time found that their small-bore guns were ineffective against Muslim warriors who charged with their bodies wrapped in rattan strips--a primitive and far-from-perfect version of the bulletproof vest. To counter such attacks, the Americans eventually introduced a more powerful, .45-caliber pistol.

After a period of relative calm following World War II, Islamic strife flared again in Sulu province, where Jolo and scores of other islands and islets are located, and in the rest of the far south when President Ferdinand E. Marcos declared martial law in 1972 and ordered all citizens to turn in their weapons. Feeling threatened, the Moro National Liberation Front, or MNLF, began attacks against the armed forces and eventually grew into a force of thousands before signing a treaty with the government in 1996.

Abu Sayyaf, or “Father of the Sword,” was founded in 1991 as a spinoff of the MNLF, with the announced intention of fighting for a “pure” Islamic state. But financed by kidnappings--including $15 million in ransom for the release of 20 hostages over the past three months--and tarnished by human rights violations, it degenerated into what is widely regarded as a band of criminals.

“The Abu Sayyaf rebels are simply lawless elements,” Eid Kabalu, a spokesman for another militant Muslim group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, or MILF, said this week. “They are giving Islam a bad name.”

In May, the army overran the stronghold of an Abu Sayyaf faction on Basilan island, causing the guerrillas to link up with the group’s mainstream elements on nearby Jolo island. Soldiers also threw the MILF into disarray by capturing its rebel camps on Mindanao.

The offensives, and the current one on Jolo, seriously disrupted the Islamic rebels’ military capabilities but have by no means ended the south’s long history of bloodshed.