After Madrid, Manila?
By Marco Garrido
MANILA - Along with the arrest of six suspected Abu Sayyaf members last month, Philippine police netted 36 kilograms of explosives (TNT). According to Central Luzon Police Chief Vidal Querol, that's enough to flatten a two-story structure with a floor area of about 60 square meters. "It can also rip through an average train coach, that's for sure," he adds.
According to one media report in the United States, the arrest came days after the administration of US President George W Bush chided the Philippine government for not doing enough to crack down on local terrorist groups. The reproach follows Washington's reassessment of the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), a self-styled Islamic insurgency that normally engages in kidnapping-for-ransom, and comes amid heightened anxieties over intercepted chatter suggesting possible terrorist attacks. The Americans delivered a similar warning to the Indonesian government weeks before the attack in Bali in October 2002.
With the arrests, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo suggested that the terrorist threat had been averted. "We have preempted a Madrid-level attack on the metropolis," she declared, referring to the March 11 train bombing in the Spanish capital. "The most dangerous terrorist cell of the Abu Sayyaf has been dismantled."
News of the arrests, however, has not been entirely reassuring. The Philippines faces a presidential election in less than three weeks, as Spain did just before the Madrid bombing. Filipinos fear that terrorists may use the proximity of the elections - a turbulent period in any case - to sow even greater chaos. Or, it has been suggested, losing factions in the electoral contest may stage terrorist attacks to throw the process into disarray. Either way it would seem that the worst is yet to come.
The return of the Abu Sayyaf
Last month's arrests have proved to be quite a catch, notwithstanding the explosives cache. Among the suspects apprehended, one has been identified as a Jemaah Islamiya-trained bomb maker, another as one of the commandos involved in kidnapping US missionaries Martin and Gracia Burnham, and another as the cell's purported ringleader, Al-hamsed Manatad Limbong, alias Kosovo, the person involved in the beheading of American Guillermo Sobero and connected with the planting of a bomb in a Zamboanga cafe that killed an American soldier. Kosovo had a price on his head.
He also had a list in his wallet allegedly detailing the cell's intended targets in Manila. Its ambition is shocking. The list includes the US and Israeli embassies, US Senate and House of Representatives buildings, the Philippine Stock Exchange, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, public utilities (oil, gas, telecommunications stations), public transport (train stations, bus terminals, seaports) and public areas (malls, restaurants, churches, hotels).
And to think the Arroyo administration had called the Abu Sayyaf "a spent force" after joint US-Philippine military exercises on the island of Basilan, an ASG stronghold, had seemed to quell their banditry.
The government had even dismissed out of hand Abu Sayyaf claims of responsibility for the February sinking of SuperFerry 14, a tragedy that claimed nearly 100 lives. ASG chieftain Khaddafy Janjalani asserted that a suicide bomber - Passenger 51 on the ferry - had caused the explosion. He cited "taxes", or the failure of the ship's owners to pay extortion money, as the reason behind the bombing. ASG spokesman Abu Soliman broadcast a loftier motivation: revenge for violence inflicted upon Muslim women by the Philippine military.
Although one survivor described the explosion as sounding "like a bomb" and experts put the blast in the area of where Passenger 51 would sit, the government has rejected Janjalani's claims as "propaganda". According to media reports, it even barred US bomb experts from investigating. Authorities have insisted, rather, that a fire in the boiler room or kitchen, and not foul play, was the probable cause of the explosion gutting the passenger ship.
Last month's arrests may herald new evidence. One of the suspects claims to have been Passenger 51 and to have brought aboard the ferry a television set loaded with TNT. It may also warrant re-examining threats written off as braggadocio. After the sinking of SuperFerry 14, Abu Soliman phoned in to taunt the government: "Still doubtful about our capabilities? Good. Just wait and see. We will bring the war that you impose on us to your lands and seas, homes and streets. We will multiply the pain and suffering that you have inflicted on our people."
These developments suggest that the ASG may have grown beyond its mercenary orientation. The group that, according to Philippine intelligence reports, Osama bin Laden once found too parochial to support fully, appears to have refashioned itself along the lines of an Islamic militancy akin with al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiya. The explosives cache seized last month may have been intended as the ASG's qualifying bid for "legitimate" terrorism.
Abu Soliman speaks as if the ASG were rivaling Jemaah Islamiya in seriousness. "The irony about the Philippine government is that ... they are belittling us but they are exaggerating the problem of terrorism in the country and using, as an example, the likes of the Jemaah Islamiya, which is based in Indonesia. But what is in front of them they do not see."
Certainly, with last month's arrests, the government has made gains against the group. Those arrests were quickly followed by the arrests of four more suspected terrorists and the killing of Hamsiraji Sali, an ASG commander with a US-set US$5 million bounty on his head. These gains were offset, however, by the escape of 53 prisoners from a Basilan jail this month. ASG inmates reportedly led the breakout. The wife of one Abu inmate smuggled a gun inside a papaya. This enabled the inmate to shoot one guard and free his comrades. Twenty-eight inmates have since been recaptured or killed; of the 25 at large, 10 are Abu Sayyaf bandits.
A deadly season
It would make sense for the terrorists to strike during elections. To be sure, a terrorist attack would fail to instigate a Philippine defection from "the coalition of the willing". The country's historical ties to the United States run too deep, and it depends on the US for arms and aid far too much to risk a falling out on the issue of Iraq. It is unlikely, then, that the Philippines will follow the example of Spain and Honduras and pull its 51 peacekeepers out of Iraq. Despite some recent public clamor, Arroyo has committed to keeping Filipino troops in Iraq for as long as the US wants them there.
It is also unlikely that a terrorist attack timed to influence the outcome of the elections, by, say, ushering into the presidency an anti-American candidate, would have the intended effect. For one, there is no particularly anti-American candidate for president. Raul Roco, the only candidate who has come out against the war in Iraq, is such a long shot, especially now that he has taken sick leave three weeks before the elections, that a dozen terrorist blasts wouldn't get him elected.
A terrorist attack now would succeed spectacularly in doing one thing: sowing chaos. Election season in the Philippines is a deadly season anyway. During the congressional elections in 2001, out of 238 election-related incidents such as shooting, maiming and kidnapping, 100 people died. This season's tally (since December 15) at more than 50 deaths and 100 injuries is looking to surpass the 2001 toll handily.
With bitter political rivalries extending back for generations, private armies (about 125, mostly concentrated in Mindanao) at the disposal of local warlords, an abundance of weapons (about 328,000 unlicensed fire arms, excluding those in the hands of rebels), and quite active insurgencies (the 12,000-strong Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the 9,000-strong New People's Army, to name the two major ones), the nation already has enough to worry about without terrorism - which, of course, makes election season an opportune time for terrorists to strike.
Worse, a terrorist attack now would be subject to destabilizing ambiguity. Even if the Abu Sayyaf came out and took credit for the attack, opposition factions might use the opportunity to accuse the Arroyo administration of engineering a crisis. This would be their way of instigating an actual crisis.
It has been done before. The 1971 bombing of Plaza Miranda during a Liberal Party rally was squarely blamed on president Ferdinand Marcos. It turned out, years later, that the bombing had been part of a communist plot to widen the split in the ruling class.
Even minus the attack, President Arroyo has been getting flak for last month's arrests. The military has been accused of planting evidence to frame the suspected Abu terrorists. Arroyo has been accused of staging the arrests to prop up her campaign. The president has had to reassure Muslim leaders that she intended no "witch-hunt" against their community.
At least one thing is clear: if the Abu Sayyaf is allowed to attack now on a scale commensurate with their revived ambitions, the road to elections will coincide with the road to chaos.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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