Isn't everybody sick and tired about all that fuss over Mindanao?

It's just a hostage situation and a sort of vest pocket rebellion being waged in four or five provinces, but both our own media (including us, occasionally, mea culpa) and -- worse -- an excited international media make it appear that all of Mindanao is going up in flames.

Thanks to the widespread hype they have provoked, the Moro rebels and their extremist bandit fringe have accomplished a substantial part of their purpose: they've scared business and investment away from Mindanao, including the "peaceful" areas.

Keeping the people, particularly in Muslim-majority areas, poor and frustrated is their game: it wins recruits for the rebel cause and fuels Islamic fundamentalism and fanaticism. The propaganda line, and the world press has swallowed it hook, line and sinker, is that the "Christian" government is deliberately starving the five million Muslim minority (out of a nation of 75 million) and depriving them of opportunity. If you examine Mindanao more closely, however, the "poorest" provinces and districts, at that, are where Muslim political leaders have held sway, like feudal warlords, for generations.

As for lack of opportunity or advancement, over the years we've had Muslim Cabinet members, senators, members of the House of Representative, a Muslim Justice of the Supreme Court, and Muslims as bureau chiefs and agency heads all the way down the ladder. But look at Muslim-dominated countries: How many Christians have they got in their Cabinets, in the upper echelons of government, and in the top-level bureaucracy? Fair is fair. There are places where you can't even preach or teach Christianity, or ask a priest to say Mass without attracting retribution and risking imprisonment.

Has the government been remiss in failing to "negotiate with the Moro rebels from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) to the cut-throat Abu Sayyaf? Successive governments have been "negotiating" with the Moros since the Spanish colonial period down to America's General John J. Pershing, who finally left Mindanao and went back to the US where he was appointed to lead the American Expeditionary Forces to Europe in World War I. Every "negotiation" has failed miserably to bring peace to Mindanao. There's always been some violence and deviltry erupting somewhere in our southern Wild Frontier.

The world, for instance, may think that the Hezbollah, the Islamic Jihad, the "Black September" terrorists, Abu Nidal's Al Fatah, George Habash's Popularity Front, or the militants of the Intifada "invented" the suicide attacker or suicide bomber.

A book published in 1904, The Gems of the East by A. Henry Savage Landor (subheaded: "Sixteen Thousand Miles of Research Travel Among Wild and Tame Tribes of Enchanting Islands"). Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York and London talks about "crescent-shaped Paticolo" (apparently the same Patikul where the 21 hostages held by the Abu Sayyaf are located).

Narrated Landor, writing about his first visit to Jolo: "The American military colony was in a commotion when we arrived. A soldier had been terribly gashed and killed by a juramentado. These juramentados, as the Spanish word expresses, are religious maniacs, who, after having undergone certain exorcisms in the mosque, proceed to kill any non-Mohammedans and then commit suicide, in order to obtain a happy existence in paradise. This makes it rather unpleasant for those who do not believe in the Koran, for one never knows when one of these devils may be about and treacherously hack one to pieces."

"The Americans had given strict orders that no one should go outside the city without an escort. These juramentados, when they run amuck, show a good deal of grit, and I have known of one man actually attack an entire troop of cavalry, while every soldier was firing at him. The heavy knives and kris of the Sulus (Taosugs) inflict terrible wounds, and on one occasion in Jolo I saw a number of persons who had been killed by one of these fanatics. One had the left side of the skull cut as clean as with a razor, and the sword had also made a groove several inches deep in the shoulder. Another gash sideways had cut the body in two as far as the spine."

". . . I firmly believe that the sherifs or priests select these weak-minded fellows who are murderously inclined and play upon their credulity until they reduce them to a condition of wild frenzy and incite them to commit murder."

Landor added that he believed much of trouble "arose from mutual misunderstanding, and from the unavoidable clash of manners so diametrically opposed as the American and the Sulu."

The juramentados were taught that to kill "infidels," like Americans and Christian Filipinos, was a short-cut to heaven. The Islamic fundamentalists among the Moros today preach very much the same doctrine.

Take Dr. Najeeb Mitry Saleeby's classic work: The History of Sulu.

Saleeby was an Arab, born in 1870 in the town of Souk el Gharb, a few miles outside Beirut in Lebanon. His study of the Taosugs, published in 1908, noted on page 153: "Spain was intent on the complete conquest of Sulu, the assimilation of all the Moro tribes, and the unification of government, religion, and civilization throughout the Philippine Archipelago. This ideal was the hope of all governors of Sulu and formed a concealed motive that prompted their actions and guided their administration."

He pointed out that "the chief difficulties Spain had to contend with in the south arose out of the natural weakness of her system of administration. Her Governors-General changed frequently. The Moro question received secondary attention, and no definite policy or settled course of action was ever systematically worked out and followed. Treaties were made to be broken rather than to be obeyed, and at the end of three hundred and twenty years of protracted relations with Sulu, no satisfactory policy can be said to have been decided upon at either Madrid or Manila."

Saleeby recounted that "the largest Spanish force that ever assembled on the soil of Sulu was that commanded by Governor-General Malcampo in the expedition of 1876; this was estimated at from 9,000 to 11,000 troops. In January 1888, the military forces of the Philippines numbered 12,800 men, of whom 1,400 were Spaniards and the rest natives. Governor Arolas never commanded more than 2,000 troops in his various expeditions and never needed more than that number. A garrison force of 700 men proved sufficient to repulse a general attack on Jolo in 1881. We may therefore safely conclude that a force of 2,000 native troops stationed in Jolo was sufficient for all purposes and considerations . . . and to check the tendency to mischief or rebellion."

So, it's clear that the "Moro question" is not new. What's new is that modern Moro rebels are better armed, equipped, funded and "incited" than before -- with automatic weapons, rockets, RPG launchers, land mines and explosives (and plenty of Islamic backers abroad).

And lots of publicity from the media.

This newspaper as well as foreign publications like yesterday's International Herald Tribune (May 15) ran frontpage stories quoting the former Libyan Ambassador here, Rajab Azzarouq (sent as a special envoy by Libyan President Moammar Ghaddafi to "help" us negotiate with the Moro insurgents) as declaring that the Abu Sayyaf's conditions for the release of their hostages were "reasonable" political demands.

Of course Ambassador Azzarouq will say so. The Libyans have consistently been among the chief supporters of Islamic revolt in the Philippines, and Ghaddafi's son has been here five times to visit Mindanao and offer "charitable" help and scholarships to the Muslims there. Azzarouq himself, who served here as envoy for nine years, remains one of the trustees of these "charities."

Among the "reasonable" demands set down by the Abu Sayyaf for the release, for instance, of the very sick hostage from Germany, Mrs. Renate Wallert, was that the Philippine Army and PNP withdrew from the area around their redoubt.

I guess politicians are the same everywhere. The three German hostages, two French, two Finnish, two South Africans, nine Malaysians, one Lebanese and two Filipinos, are a very small bunch at risk compared with the 20 Dutch victims (plus 541 injured) of a fireworks factory explosion that devastated several blocks last Sunday in Enschede, The Netherlands. And yet, the hostage situation rated page one treatment, while the deadly blast was reported only on page 6.

I suppose, with their domestic politics at white heat, the nine "European" hostages have become a dicey political issue "back home."

The most ridiculous spectacle of all was the interview given by European Union Political Adviser Javier Solana, upon his return to Europe. Solana had the gall to announce, upon his arrival there, that the hostage crisis might drag on a bit longer, but his talk with President Estrada had borne fruit in the fact that now the resolution of the hostage situation would "be political" and "not military." What a blunt confirmation of his own meddling!

Isn't this the same Solana who, as Secretary-General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), led the charge into Kosovo and helped forge the decision to bomb Yugoslavia's President Slobodan Milosevic and his Serbs out of their underwear -- rather than resolve the Kosovo refugee situation and so-called Serb bullying by "negotiation" and through peaceful means? In the all-out air assault launched by Solana and the NATO generals on Kosovo and Yugoslavia, hundreds of civilians were killed. When NATO warplanes destroyed hospitals, blew up civilian passenger trains, riddled refugee convoys "by mistake," the resulting heavy loss of life was blandly described by NATO spokesmen and generals as unfortunate "peripheral damage."

Why, they even rocketed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade to a smoking ruin (killing three Chinese journalists) by "accident." And now Solana and the same guys are agonizing over a mere nine European hostages being held by the Abu Sayyaf?

Somehow their arithmetic, not to mention their logic, is askew.

And what about our soldiers? Are they now going to be forced to withdraw? Somehow it's bizarre that civilians, including opinion writers many miles from the "war front", are the ones deciding what the military should do next. In the end, though, when a rested and rearmed Abu Sayyaf and MILF goes on their next offensive, it will be our soldiers, not the columnists, editorial writers, or diplomatic kibitzers who'll be killed -- leaving behind their own widows and orphans.

This dichotomy is not new or unusual.

I'm under no illusion that, when we were covering the Vietnam War -- hundreds of us foreign correspondents with our D.O.D. (Department of Defense) identity cards -- the soldiers, grunts, and other military combatants, both Americans and South Vietnamese, hated our guts. We made them look clumsy and stupid, and swimming in such blood and gore that, with TV bringing the "war" into the living rooms and bedrooms of America nightly, the American public finally cried "stop."

The other week, in an orgy of self-chastisement, the Americans commemorated the 25th anniversary of the end of that conflict in 1975. But the "old soldiers" must hate us still. The Vietnam conflict was "hell in a very small place," but we helped make it even hotter and more miserable for them (in lofty pursuit of the "news" and "the truth"), and even, at times, compromised their safety by giving away their plans, strategies, and geographical dispositions.

After decades of covering wars, I can only conclude that there can be no reconciliation between a military operation and the coverage of those operations by a free, unfettered, and often annoying press.

It's true, we, too, get shot. We hurt. We bleed. We share the terrors of battle. But only for a time. We come and go. However, the soldiers and Marines are there: still stuck in the field. Still condemned to face the bullets -- as well as the ambushes -- of the enemy.

Should they now withdraw so as to "save" nine European hostages? You decide.

If you ask me, the general public is sick and tired of reading about the "Mindanao War" and the so-called "Moro problem." In the Tribune, correspondent David Lamb called it a 29-year war which had claimed more than 120,000 lives. I've always wondered where they (and, okay, we newsmen) got that fascinating total of lives "lost." But certainly the Mindanao war isn't merely 29 years old. It's three centuries old. It's "yesterday's news" repeated ad infinitum and, definitely ad nauseam, over and over again.