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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbe who wrote (85030)	8/9/2000 3:29:48 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

There are indeed many parallels. I saw a big one here: to listen to Russians, you would think that the Chechens invented kidnapping; that there is something inherently "predatory" about Chechen culture and the Chechen people; that the whole enterprise is aimed specifically at them -- at "destroying" the Russian ethnos... Christian Filipinos are convinced beyond any attempt at reason that their Muslim compatriots are inherently criminal; I can't count the number of times I've been told. in all seriousness, that no Muslim can stand behind a non-Muslim without surrendering to the overpowering urge to stab the him in the back. This has a lot to do with the Spanish colonial presence: the Spaniards were less than delighted at sailing halfway around the world and coming up against the Moors at the other end (the Christian Filipinos still call the Muslims Moro, from Moor. They waged a relentless, if totally ineffective, war against the Southern Muslims; they never exercised effective control over the main Muslim havens, but they did leave the Moro with a deep-seated place in the demonology of Christian Filipinos. The Americans had a good bit of trouble pacifying the area; the failure of the .38 pistols then issued to stop the attacks of Muslim juramentados (the period equivalent of a Norse berserker or today's suicide bomber) led to the army's adoption of the .45 automatic. The conflict also gained some notoriety with the "battle" of Bug Suk, in which US forces killed 600 or so Muslim men, women, and children, wounding none, capturing none, and suffering no casualties. When the country gained independence, successive governments tried to dilute the Muslim presence by settling Christian migrants in the area, eventually provoking a full-scale war in the early '70's. Since then the prevailing policy has been to buy them off by giving the principal leaders government positions with access to funds. The MNLF (Moro National Liberation Front), eventually broke up, the troops becoming personal retainers of the chieftains who got the government jobs. These, of course, fought regularly among each other, and the losers took up the traditional occupations of piracy and banditry; smuggling, the third traditional occupation, had already been monopolized by the chieftains that had taken government jobs. In effect, there has never been any effective law in the region beyond the law of the gun, and at this point no faction has enough men or guns on site to impose effective control. Secession is not really a very viable alternative: there are three main and a dozen smaller Muslim tribes, and if they are not fighting outsiders it doesn't take them long to start cutting each other up. Even within the tribes there is conflict among clans; I have never seen such a thoroughly feudal place. Unlike the Chechens, they don't kidnap each other: any Filipino Muslim with enough money to be worth kidnapping has large numbers of armed retainers, making kidnapping impractical. The kidnapping started about ten years back, and the victims were always Chinese. The Chinese always pay ransom, and they got no help from the police, who have been known to indulge in kidnapping and protection themselves. The kidnapping of Chinese was tolerated, and became a veritable industry; ransoms were spent largely on arms. In the last year the whole situation has come out in the open, and almost any non-Muslim is at risk. The Christian settlers are forming armed vigilante groups, many of which indulge in extreme versions of folk "christianity" (which gets quite militant - some time back anti-communist vigilante cultists killed an Italian priest suspected of left sympathies and ate his brain); this raises the potential for Indonesian-style violence. I don't see any solution. When I said Chechnya was probably "worse" I was envisioning full scale military actions, air strikes, napalm, tanks rumbling through ravaged towns. Muslim Mindanao (half the island - the other half is very different, though equally "interesting") isn't like that. Except for the fact that practically every male over 12 carries a gun, the villages look pretty much like poor villages elsewhere in the islands. You wouldn't know there was a war going on unless it broke out in front of your face, as it occasionally does. Strange place, strange time. Also quite far away from where I am now, fortunately, though the timing, and the weakness of the government, pose the potential for unpleasant ramifications... BTW, the emerging consensus is that the bombing in Indonesia was related less to the Mindanao situation than to Wahid's problems in Indonesia (also serious, and unsettling to the region). I see that I'm rambling, so I'll stop....