What do the people in the Philippines want to do about the terrorist situation....?
What they want to do, of course, depends on who you talk to. As in most places, 90%+ of the people you talk to would give a knee-jerk response based on their overall political leanings. The remaining few would give a thought-through response. In no case would there be any sort of consensus.
One large group would recommend pouring in troops and kicking ass until terrorist action stops. Another would advise downplaying and reducing ties to the US war on terror, which is seen in the south as a war on Islam, and focusing on promoting political autonomy and economic development in the area. Both approaches have been tried before, and both have met resounding failure.
What can they do?
I’ve thought of this a good deal, and I’m thinking of writing something on it, so you get a long answer. Good way of crystallizing my thoughts.
There’s no easy answer. It’s important to recognize from the start that the root cause of the Muslim separatist movement in Mindanao lies way back in colonial days. The national borders of the region were drawn along the interface of Spanish, Dutch, and British power, and a population whose primary ethnic, religious, and cultural affinities lie to the south was absorbed into the nation to the north. This was immensely complicated by the fact that the colonial power governing the nation to the north was Spain, which had just emerged from an extended Muslim occupation and a series of bitterly contested wars against Muslims in their own home country. The Spaniards were horrified to find “Moors” in their colony, and treated them from the start as vermin suited only for extermination. It is true that the economies of many of the Muslim groups were based on piracy, banditry, and slavery even before the Spaniards arrived, but the non-integration, insularity, xenophobia, and suspicion of any outside governmental entity displayed by modern Mindanao Muslims cannot be separated from the Spanish legacy.
Spain had a powerful influence on Christian Filipino culture, and the Philippine Governments have traditionally treated the Muslims much as the Spaniards did. A centerpiece policy in the 1950s was the settlement of Christians in Mindanao, in an attempt to accelerate development and dilute Muslim control. Land was often snatched from Muslims, who had no concept of legal titling systems. If the Muslims objected, the authorities always took the side of the settlers. By the 1970s the only areas left in Muslim control were those where Muslim ferocity was such that no Christians would dare settle there. The object lesson to the Muslims was that the only way to keep their land was to fight.
By the early ‘70s armed Muslim gangs were forming to resist settlement. The Christians formed militias of their own, armed and assisted by the military, and very soon Mindanao was a war zone. Both sides preferred to vent their anger on the other’s civilian base, and the two groups matched each other atrocity for atrocity. The worst of the fighting took place in the hinterlands, and it was very, very brutal.
So what does all this mean to people today, whether Filipino or American, who want to “do something about it”?
First, a military solution that does not address the underlying causes of conflict will achieve nothing. Any given armed group can be defeated in battle at any given time. This has been the case for years, but as soon as one group is defeated, another springs up. Military crackdowns end up actually encouraging a resort to terrorist methods: if the enemy is too strong to confront in open combat, terrorism becomes the only avenue for resistance.
Second, the “aid and autonomy” solution favored by liberals will, if pursued alone, be useless. Local government in the area has been controlled by Muslims for quite a while now, and it has not improved at all: the Muslim leadership is feudal, inept, and hopelessly corrupt, and they are exploiting their own people as effectively as the Christians ever did. The aid absorption capacity of the region is very limited: the money simply disappears, and any project that threatens to generate the kind of real economic development that would threaten the entrenched leadership is derailed before it starts.
The first necessary step is to accept that there is no quick solution. An effective program to really resolve this situation has to be looked at in a 20-year time frame. To some, that equates to uselessness. I see it as a compelling reason to get started. At the same time, steps have to be taken to mitigate violence to the greatest extent possible, and to distance local Muslim groups from external support from radical elements outside the country, while the core program proceeds.
Military aid and military action are needed, but I believe that the current approach is wrong. The US is training and equipping the Philippine military to hunt terrorists down in the jungle. Unfortunately, the terrorists generally aren’t in the jungle. Their traditional response when pressed, especially if they are not holding hostages, is not to run to the jungle, but to hide the weapons and disperse among the villages, where they are protected by anonymity and the local code of silence. Sending military units into the villages to look for them is not terribly effective, especially since military units in the area have a long history of wanton human rights abuse that only fans the conflict.
I would prefer a military strategy that focuses on limiting provocative contact between the armed forces and the local populace, and on isolating the militants from their sources of foreign support.
One thing that US military aid could do that would be extremely valuable, but has been completely ignored so far, would be the provision to the Philippine armed forces of modern maritime patrol aircraft, fast patrol boats, communications equipment to link them, and the training needed to use them effectively. Right now the Philippine Navy boats are slower than those used by smugglers, and there is no effective coordination between the Navy boats and supporting aerial surveillance. Coastal patrol cannot operate effectively at night. The result is that weapons and people move freely between the Sulu archipelago and the north shore of Borneo. Arms and foreign trainers and propagandists come in, and wanted terrorists skip out of the country with the greatest of ease. I’d bet a dollar to a dime that many of the people we’re targeting on Jolo aren’t there any more: they know we’re coming, so why would they hang around? I would much rather have an effective system in place to control the seas around the area, apprehending weapons and wanted individuals on the way in or out, then a bunch of soldiers kicking down people’s doors looking for them on land. I think it would be a good idea to have US personnel on the planes and boats, to train and also to keep an eye out to make sure that nobody’s taking money to look the other way.
Along the same lines, assistance, training, and modern equipment have to be provided to immigration services around the region to make it harder for known terrorist contacts to move through regional airports. Any such effort will of course be limited by the corruption that prevails among regional immigration officials. We can’t change that, but we can mitigate its impact by giving cash rewards for the apprehension of wanted individuals.
We need to do something about the established arms supply route that brings weapons from Indochina and Thailand to armed groups in Indonesia and the Philippines. The operation is well known: the dealers operate from Malaysia and Thailand. Approved groups place orders and receive delivery by boat: the weapons usually move through the Indonesian duty-free zone on Batam, across from Singapore; once inside Indonesia they are easily moved to their destinations. Payments are made from the Middle East: some say from Iraq, some say from Al Qaeda, some say from Saudi “charities”. The people receiving the weapons generally don’t know who is paying the bills. Could be any or all of those, could also be others, I don’t think anyone outside the network knows for sure. All of the governments in the area have an interest in breaking this system up. The ideal, not easy but not impossible, would be to penetrate the network first. The goal would be twofold: restricting the flow of weapons into the area and tracking back the money to identify the shadowy financiers, who may very well be financing activities elsewhere in the world.
The key internal task is dealing with the MILF, the largest and most established Islamic radical group. The most important thing here, to me, is the effort to maintain enough peace to enable the return of something resembling the rule of law to the conflict areas. This involves walking a fragile line and accepting that the peace will probably be broken at times. The Philippine Government has to avoid yielding excessively to MILF demands, and also has to avoid excessive provocation. This probably means maintaining a continuous state of negotiation without resolution. At the same time, MILF leaders, especially moderate ones, have to be encouraged to run for local office and to set up development projects and NGOs. Money should be provided for these, even with the knowledge that some of it may end up not going where it’s supposed to go. There is an element here of the Marcos “payoff” strategy, but in this case there is a purpose: maintaining peace long enough for the main strategy to kick in, and also giving key people a personal stake in maintaining peace.
Individual acts such as kidnapping, bombing, piracy, brigandage, etc., and groups such as the Abu Sayyaf should not be given the political credibility of the “terrorist” tag, but should be treated as criminal activity. That does not mean that any effort should be spared in hunting down the perpetrators, it just means that every effort should be made to separate these activities from any Islamic cause or religious identification. Calling them terrorists gives these people a credibility they don’t deserve.
Now we get to the non-military end, which I think is the most important one. This is an idea I really like, and have been mulling for a long time: I’ve no illusion about the likelihood of it ever happening, but I think it could be a real positive force in the southern Philippines and elsewhere.
One of the leading mechanisms promoting radical influence in these areas is the net of Islamic charities. These work through mosques, and provide many of the services that the inutile governments don’t: education, health care, and a focus for civic unity. They also preach a radical and violent brand of Islam that feeds directly into the terrorist movements.
I’d like to see a charity established with impeccable Islamic credentials, but focused on the idea that Muslims have to take their place in the world not through violence, but through educating themselves, modernizing, developing viable economies, and taking their place in the world as equals to non-Muslims. The charity would be based in a conservative Islamic state: the obvious choice would be the UAE, probably Dubai or Abu Dhabi. There would have to be no visible US connection. Money would come from conservative Muslim governments, which could be quietly assured that whatever contributions they made would be covered by increased US aid. Contributions could also come from Muslim communities in the US and Europe.
The primary emphasis would be on schools and education. The schools would teach the Koran and they’d teach Islamic history (I wonder how many modern Muslims know that the Caliph of Cordoba, in Islamic Spain, was granting sanctuary to Jews when the Catholics were slaughtering them), but they’d also be teaching no-nonsense reading, writing, math, history, economics, etc. Any Philippine Muslim youth wanting more education than can be locally provided would get funded for study abroad or elsewhere in the Philippines.
There is, of course, the risk that those studying abroad would fall in with Islamic radicals: education is no assurance of moderation. That risk is outweighed, though, by the crying need to break the tradition of insularity and disconnection that characterizes the Muslim regions of the Philippines and allows the traditional feudal rulers to maintain their corrupt and stagnant rule. A pole of power apart from the Islamic radicals and the hopeless traditional leadership has to be created. It cannot be created by the Manila government or by the US. It has to come from within, and that means that eyes have to be opened to what’s going on in the world outside.
The same charity would be an effective vehicle for funding small-scale livelihood projects and entrepreneurial activities. The megaprojects that characterize traditional aid efforts are bait for corruption, and have to be avoided. Emphasis should be placed on providing funding for moderate Muslim leaders to start local newspapers and radio stations (radio is the dominant form of public communication in the area) that can act as a check on the corruption, patronage, and nepotism of local officials.
I could go on at greater length, but that’s sufficient. This would not be an easy process, and there would be no assurance of success. The probability of success, though, would I think be greater than that of any of the current approaches. I don’t see any long-term profit in sending a bunch of green berets into Jolo to chase the locals around the jungle for a while. They will probably get some bad guys, maybe even some leaders that were too dumb to skip off the island, but those will be quickly replaced.
We must at all costs avoid the notion that the Mindanao conflict is about bad Muslims fighting good Christians. The radicals in the Middle East may be exploiting these conflicts, but they did not create them, and we have nothing to gain but enemies by taking sides.
I’m tempted to draw an analogy between this situation and the horrific mistake the US made in dealing with 3rd world national liberation movements during the cold war. The communists did exploit these movements, but they did not create them: they were necessary and inevitable responses to colonial occupation or corrupt and exploitive oligarchic governments. Instead of offering a non-communist alternative to the insupportable governments that people were rebelling against, we treated the rebellions as part of the international communist conspiracy, and took the side of powers that were doomed to fail. A huge amount of unnecessary misery resulted, and the repercussions are still tainting our relations with the developing world. It’s a mistake that we can ill afford to repeat. |
