The enemy comes into view
Muslim group's captured camp is symbol of gruesome conflict
Glen Martin, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, July 7, 2003
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Lanao del Norte province, Philippines --
SECOND OF TWO PARTS
.A relic from a war three decades ago, the Huey helicopter groaned and shuddered as it climbed to its cruising altitude of 2,000 feet.
From open bays on either side of the ship, soldiers in olive drab fatigues manned 7.62 mm machine guns. A variegated terrain unfurled beneath them: rugged jungle and lush rice fields interspersed with stands of coconut, rubber and banana trees.
But the beauty of the landscape was lost on the soldiers, for it hid an enemy: guerrillas of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).
In this northern part of the island, the 4th Infantry Division of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) has been taking on the MILF from a base in the provincial capital, Iligan. One of its primary missions is to track down a wily rebel leader who has been launching audacious hit-and-run attacks against troops in the area.
The day before, in a firefight supported by helicopter gunships, the government had tallied a major advance in its campaign, capturing the base camp of its long-sought quarry -- Abdul Rahman Macapaar, also known as "Commander Bravo," the foremost MILF commander in Lanao and one of the Philippine government's most-wanted men.
Now they were flying out to the camp on the first day of June to retrieve the ordnance seized in the raid. But Commander Bravo and most of the rebels had escaped, so the AFP troops kept their weapons at the ready as they progressed inland.
This conflict has more in common with the war in Vietnam than with the recent battles in Iraq or Afghanistan. Like Vietnam, it is a war of attrition, a war of ambushes from deep cover and sharp, quick firefights. Tanks and armored personnel carriers have little role to play here.
Large portions of Mindanao are controlled by the MILF, a well-armed separatist group of about 13,000 fighters that aims to turn the island into a Muslim republic. Travel through the interior has become extremely perilous, and strangers who traverse MILF territory face kidnapping for ransom or worse.
This is the immutable Philippines, where the pace of life is determined by the planting and harvesting of the rice crop, the crowing of the gamecocks at dawn and the lowing of the carabao in the evening, on their way back from the fields.
But everywhere along the road leading to Iligan are recent signs of the war with the MILF: A marketplace burned in the village of Kabasalan. A bridge blown up at Labangan, now patched and guarded by stony-eyed soldiers. Bullet holes on buildings in Maigo, where a rebel attack killed several civilians.
Warfare between Philippine government forces and Muslim separatists on Mindanao has been waged for decades. But it has taken on new urgency with allegations that the MILF -- an offshoot of the larger Moro National Liberation Front, which made peace with the government in 1987 -- has links with Jemaah Islamiyah, an Indonesian group allied with al Qaeda.
The United States has stepped in to help Arroyo quash the rebellion, offering $356 million in the next year, including $30 million for counterterrorism equipment, as well as $30 million in development assistance and support for peace negotiations with the MILF.
The carrot-and-stick approach appears to be paying off. Government forces have captured a number of key rebel bases, and efforts are under way to hold peace talks under the auspices of Malaysia. But several previous attempts to broker a peace pact have failed, and hopes of a deal are tempered by the awareness that an attack by either side could derail the process.
On the flight out to Commander Bravo's base to bring back the captured weapons, the AFP packed some body bags.
A local farmer had taken soldiers to the grave of Cpl. Johnny Ompoy, a government militiaman who had been captured -- and reportedly executed -- by the MILF in March.
Bravo's camp was a complex of plank buildings, nipa huts and bunkers set in a pleasant prospect of forested gorges and rolling hills covered with maize. The ordnance and equipment captured by the AFP were impressive: belts of .50- caliber machine gun ammunition, mortar shells, grenade launchers, rocket launchers, medical supplies, a night-vision scope, finely made Russian binoculars.
But some weaponry was conspicuous by its absence: mortars, for example, typically used to great effect by the MILF. Also, the heavy machine gun that went with the captured belts of .50-caliber ammo. And most pointedly, the personal weapons: The M-16s -- many with M-203 grenade launchers -- the MILF are known to employ. In short, there was no doubt Commander Bravo was still very much in business.
Recovering the body of Cpl. Ompoy was a grim business. He had been buried on a steep slope in a copse of hardwoods. The soldiers dispatched to retrieve him were stoic and efficient; they even leavened their task with muttered wisecracks, displaying the black humor that sustains combat troops the world over.
But as Ompoy's decomposed body came into view, they became quiet. The faces of some were impassive; others showed disgust, anger, hatred. Ompoy had been one of their own. As the soldiers wrestled the body into a bag, a couple turned aside and retched discreetly.
Overseeing the disinterment was Col. Francisco Simbajon, a short, stocky, avuncular career soldier whose arms and torso bore deep scars from small-arms fire, the result of three encounters with the MILF and the New People's Army, a communist insurgent group that is also warring with the government.
"Here you see the sincerity of the MILF," Simbajon said bitterly. "They say they support human rights, that they observe the rules of war. This shows their true side. They are criminals, not liberationists."
The MILF claims that Ompoy was shot trying to escape, and they point out that several other soldiers captured at the same time were ultimately released after negotiations.
"We are a legitimate group fighting for our rights," MILF spokesman Eid Kabalu said in a cell-phone interview. "We would never participate in such criminal acts."
The government is "waging a psychological war, not a real war," Kabalu said.
"They say they are inflicting 'heavy casualties' on us, but that is far from reality. Our morale is high, and we are well supplied. We have support from the masses. We are defending our homeland, not waging an aggressive war. And we are always willing to talk peace."
Throughout the 1990s, Mindanao's Islamic rebels seemed ascendant. An especially violent gang of insurgents known as Abu Sayyaf (Father of the Sword) essentially ruled the Sulu archipelago and Zamboanga City, while the MILF and allied groups controlled large portions of Mindanao's interior.
That began to change about 18 months ago when the Philippine military got the green light from the government to root out the MILF's camps and a U.S.- Philippine joint operation delivered a major blow to Abu Sayyaf.
"It quickly dawned on the MILF that their strategy of military confrontation was not sustainable, so they've adopted a new tactic," said a high Philippine government official and expert on Mindanao, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"They're drawing international attention, claiming genocide, and mixing in some Palestinian terrorist technology," he added, alluding to bombings earlier this year in Davao, in southern Mindanao, that killed 38 people and wounded 150. The government says police have solid evidence linking the rebels to the blasts, and two suspects are in custody.
MILF leaders have blamed Mindanao's terrorist attacks on renegade elements of their organization known as "the lost commands," a maverick group called the Pentagon Gang and even government forces hoping to foment public outrage against Moro rebels.
Kabalu -- who has a $100,000 price on his head -- also said government claims that the MILF gets support from al Qaeda-linked foreign groups "are far from the true picture."
That link has been in the spotlight lately. After being implicated at a terrorism trial in Indonesia, a self-declared MILF operative and bomb expert confessed that he and a member of Jemaah Islamiyah, an Indonesian group with known ties to al Qaeda, had helped plan a pair of deadly bombings in Manila in 2000.
But Kabalu denied any connection.
"These (claims) are simply part of Arroyo's attempts to get Bush to declare us a terrorist organization," he said.
The United States has declared Abu Sayyaf a terrorist group, but not the MILF. The Philippine government has threatened to apply the label to the MILF but has held off so far because it wants to lure the rebels to the negotiating table even as it continues its military offensive.
"The military is exercising its mandate against violators of the law, but at the same time there is considerable pressure for negotiations," said Parouk Hussin, governor of the Muslim Autonomous Region of Mindanao, a quasi-state in southern Mindanao created under a 1996 treaty that allows Muslims some liberty in formulating domestic law.
"There is no way out but through the negotiation table," said Hussin. "If the parties involved want to keep shooting, let them shoot -- but they need to talk at the same time."
Eight hundred miles north of Lanao on the exquisitely landscaped grounds of the U.S. Embassy in Manila, plenty of thought is being given to both talking and shooting.
U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Francis Ricciardone said the United States is prepared to support a peace process with the MILF while simultaneously helping the Philippine government confront insurrectionists.
For that strategy to prove successful, Ricciardone acknowledges, there may have to be essential changes in Filipino society, where the gap between poor and rich yawns wide, with almost no middle class to bridge the chasm.
Ricciardone noted that the 1996 treaty that created the Muslim Autonomous Region also pacified most elements of the Moro National Liberation Front, the MILF predecessor, by providing agricultural capital assistance and training to former combatants. That program could also be applied to the MILF, he said.
The major question: Will the wealthy elite that controls the country's economy support such reforms?
"The U.S. can't force this country's privileged classes to share their wealth," Ricciardone said. "Any effective solution will take determined leadership and good governance, and it's going to have to come from the Filipinos themselves."
Arroyo, however, seems to be taking another approach -- seeking funds from outside sources.
In addition to the $30 million in U.S. funds for development and peace negotiations with the MILF, she has secured millions of dollars in pledges this year, including $74 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development and $33 million from the World Bank, all earmarked for Mindanao.
Announcing the World Bank package, she said: "I believe that unless we as a people come to terms with Mindanao, we will never attain our full promise as a nation."
However, some question whether the strategy of pounding rebel positions with one hand while proffering aid with the other will succeed in neutralizing such a well-established insurgency.
"You can stop Saddam in Iraq, but you can't stop the guerrillas in Mindanao, " said Sebastiano D'Ambra, a Catholic priest and the founder of a Christian- Muslim dialogue movement in Zamboanga. "It's too difficult to see the real targets here. And what the government says and does are two different things. They say they respect human rights, but they have committed major human rights violations in the war zone."
While prospects for ending the long-running insurgency are uncertain, the future for the war's primary victims -- the displaced peasants who live or die by the amount of rice they can grow each year -- remains bleak.
At the peak of recent fighting in Mindanao, about 400,000 farmers were forced to flee their homes to evacuation centers. Tens of thousands still remain in these refugee camps.
One such center is about an hour's drive from Iligan at Kolambogan, a small,
idyllic town framed by coconut palms on the shore of the Bohol Sea. Here, a couple hundred refugees subsist on communal meals of rice provided by the government.
"We've been here since April 24," said Bombza Anatolio, a small, slight man with a deeply seamed face who gently rocked one of his children in an improvised hammock as he talked.
"I'm just a farmer -- that's all I know," Anatolio said. "When we left because of the fighting, we left our crops, our animals. Even if we're able to go back soon, what will happen to us? We'll have nothing."
For the moment, though, Anatolio has more pressing concerns.
"My baby is sick. Very, very sick," he said, nodding at the child in the hammock. Jaundiced, thin and obviously frail, the toddler lay with half-closed eyes, breathing shallowly.
"The government can give us food, but no medicine," said Anatolio, despair cracking his voice. "We need to go back to our land to survive, but we can't go back. There is the fighting, always the fighting. It never ends."
Sunday: U.S. Special Forces are playing a crucial role in the fight against Muslim insurgents.
Today: An exclusive visit to the captured camp of ""Commander Bravo,'' a key leader of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, provides an inside look at the war between Philippine forces and the rebels. To read more on the continuing strife, go to sfgate.com
THE BATTLE FOR THE LAND OF MINDANAO HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS
To one degree or another, the conflict in Mindanao has been going on since 1565, when Phillip II of Spain sent Miguel Lopez de Legazpi and 1,000 mercenaries from Mexico to wrest the islands from Muslim sultans who had ruled since the 12th century.
The battle has waxed and waned since then, but the fight had always been over land.
Since the Spanish intruded, Muslim farmers have seen their holdings whittled away by invaders.
They were further alienated by the U.S. military conquest in the early 20th century. Some of the bloodiest fighting of the U.S. occupation took place on Mindanao.
Through the years, Mindanao has remained overwhelmingly rural and undeveloped compared to the rest of the Philippines.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Manila encouraged Christian immigration to Mindanao,
pushing the native population off their lands and exacerbating an already acrimonious relationship between Moros (Muslims) and Christians.
The tenor of the long-running war on Mindanao changed around 1980 - when Allah replaced land as the central fighting tenet.
At that time, agree government officials and the country's Islamists, many Filipino Muslims went to Afghanistan on "scholarships" from wealthy Middle Eastern patrons and fought as mujahedeen against the Soviet invasion.
"That was a radicalizing experience for them," said a high Philippine government official and expert on Mindanao, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"The struggle in Mindanao - particularly in the interior, where the great majority of people are farmers - was always more about indigenous people who happen to be Muslims rather than the other way around. Land and security were the bedrock issues."
But Afghanistan, said the official, created a cadre of seasoned fighters who had become deeply imbued with the Wahhabi doctrine that is driving Muslim fundamentalism around the world.
As these men assumed leadership positions in the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the rebels drifted toward more fundamentalist policies. Today, the group's inner circle - including its leader, Salamat Hashim - is dominated by Islamic scholars.
/ E-mail Glen Martin at glenmartin@sfchronicle.com.