‘Nearly 100 Indons trained in Abubakar’

Close to a hundred Muslim insurgents from Indonesia were trained in guerrilla warfare and handling of explosives at Camp Abubakar, the former military school of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in Maguindanao, before the camp was overrrun by government forces in July 2000, MILF and military sources confirmed yesterday.

The sources also disclosed that the last batch of Indonesians who trained at the MILF’s Abdurahman Bides Memorial Military Academy was even utilized by Al-Haj Murad, the separatist rebel group’s vice chairman for military affairs, to fight government forces along the Secretary Narciso Ramos Highway.

Rebel sources and some members of the Muslim religious community confirmed that more than a dozen newly trained Indonesians perished in their futile attempt to repel Army and Marine combatants that broke through MILF positions along the highway.

After 19 days of intense artillery and ground offensives, Camp Abubakar, fell into government control.

Most of the Indonesians who trained in the guerrilla school, then handled by a foreign-trained rebel Benjie Midtimbang, were members of the Free Aceh Movement, a secessionist group fighting for the independence of Aceh province in Indonesia.

Sources from Central Mindanao’s political community, among them incumbent local officials in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), said it was for the MILF’s training of Indonesians at Camp Abubakar that former Indonesian President Wahid and the rebel group’s leader, Hashim Salamat, came close to a meeting in Maguindanao.

Salamat and Wahid were classmates and even stayed in one dormitory while studying Islamic theology at the Al-Azzar University in Cairo, Egypt in the early 1960s.

Indonesian military officials assigned in Mindanao during the late 1990s to help the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) monitor the implementation of the September 1996 peace pact between the government and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) had earlier confirmed Wahid was supposed to urge Salamat to stop training Indonesian insurgents.

The Indonesian officers, one of them an army colonel, said Wahid balked from pursuing his planned meeting with Salamat following intense opposition from the Estrada administration who expressed apprehension that the MILF might use the Wahid-Salamat meeting as a propaganda to attract international attention.

Sources from the ARMM government, among them highly placed officials, said they knew of the entry of dozens of Indonesians through the southern backdoor, from Sabah, Malaysia, until the late 1990s.

The Indonesians, according to the sources, headed straight to Zamboanga City, where they boarded Super Ferry boats for Maguindanao’s Polloc Port, only about 30 kilometers from Camp Abubakar.

Muslim religious leaders in Maguindanao said some of the Indonesians trained at Camp Abubakar entered the country through the South Cotabato-Sarangani-General Santos City (Socsargen) area.

The foreigners, according to sources from the police and Army’s intelligence communities, arrived aboard fishing boats owned by Filipino businessmen in the Socsargen area whose vessels operate in the Indonesian waters, near the Sulawesi region.

A fishing magnate based in Socsargen, who asked not to be identified, said some of his workers had indeed allowed Indonesians to board their boats from Indonesia on their way to General Santos City in exchange for hefty bribes.

"That’s why we are very strict now just to prevent this malpractice of our workers because our operation gets affected whenever authorities would find foreigners on board our vessels during surprise inspections," the fishing magnate said.

Military and police sources in Manila also confirmed the MILF has direct links with Jemaah Islamiyah (JI).

The sources, however, refused to make public its findings but claimed that in all major terror attacks occurring worldwide, they have substantial evidence that all bore prints of MILF-trained terrorists.

"It’s not within our level to present these proofs. Perhaps in due time all our findings will be made public," the source said.

The same source also disclosed that recently, at least 40 foreigners from several Arab nations have trained under the MILF in their enclave in the Liguasan Marsh, that sprawls the boundaries of North Cotabato and Maguindanao.

As this developed, three Indonesians have been placed under military custody after a bomb was discovered in a public market in General Santos City Tuesday.

The three Indonesians, identified as Alejandro Panggelawan, 20; Jerry Mias, 19; and Charles Sasanton, 19, were picked up for questioning after authorities discovered the bomb at the market terminal.

Another denial

On the other hand, the MILF denied yesterday the claim that they had trained JI militants on trial for deadly bombings in Indonesia.

The MILF also rejected an allegation that they had contacts with putative JI leader Abu Bakar Bashir, a detained Indonesian cleric on trial in Jakarta.

"We deny any involvement or any contact between the two organizations," MILF spokesman Eid Kabalu said on ABS-CBN television.

"There is no need for the MILF to establish linkages with organizations" whose objectives he said were not the same as that of his 12,500-member group, which has been waging a 25-year war for secession in the Mindanao region of the southern Philippines.

The JI has been blamed for the Bali bombing that killed more than 200 people last year.

Alleged JI militant Suryadi Masud, a witness at Bashir’s trial, told a Jakarta court on Tuesday that he had been told the cleric had visited a Muslim rebel camp in Mindanao.

Masud, himself on trial for the bombing of a restaurant in the Indonesian city of Makassar last year, said he had trained at an MILF camp in Mindanao — as had several JI suspects now detained in Singapore.

Prosecutors are attempting to prove that Bashir heads the JI and that he tried to topple the Indonesian government through a terror campaign.

Masud said he heard of the Bashir-MILF link from Fathur Rohman al-Ghozie, an Indonesian militant serving a 10-year prison term in the Philippines for terrorism.

Kabalu said he believed the information about the alleged links was from official sources in the Philippines who he said were attempting to tar the MILF by linking it with a foreign group listed by the United States as a foreign terrorist organization.

President Arroyo has suspended peace talks with the MILF and ordered punitive military strikes that she said were designed to dislodge "terrorist cells" embedded within certain MILF units in Mindanao.

"The MILF training camp, the Camp Abubakar training facility has never engaged in such kind of activity," Kabalu said when asked if the MILF had trained foreign bombers.

"We never teach our men on the field on explosives and other bombing activities," he said, describing the training there as "purely military and guerrilla tactics."

"We are proud to claim that maybe we are ahead of anybody else in Southeast Asia as far as guerrilla tactics are concerned."

He said the only way the JI militants could have taken part in the training at the MILF camp was by disguising themselves as MILF members. "That might be possible, but very remote," he said.

The Armed Forces said the MILF must show proof that they are not linked with international terror groups.

"Verbal denials would not be enough. There must be more concrete proof from the MILF that they are indeed not involved in terrorism," said Armed Forces spokesman Lt. Gen. Rodolfo Garcia.

Garcia pointed out the contradiction between MILF’s denial and the admissions made by arrested terrorists. – With Mike Frialde, Jaime Laude, AFP