Correspondents still looking for a real ‘war’

Our longtime media associates in Zamboanga tell me that there are 300 – yep, three hundred – foreign correspondents over there, frantically looking for something to write, or some TV sound-byte or photo opportunity that will catch the attention of the editors back home.

Some are luckier than others since they’re assured of space in their newspapers, no matter what they churn out, whether it’s about "dirty tactics", death squads, miserable local hospitals without medicines, facilities or even anaesthesia, while millions of bucks are squandered on military confrontation and other warlike activities.

Alas, much of this is true– and foreign journalists don’t even have to look any further for information and inspiration than our own freewheeling, muckraking newspapers and radio-TV which dredge up everything, from sewer to Palace. It’s both the curse and the magic of a free and democratic society. I guess: and to top it all, making it easier for every foreign media-person who "parachutes" in to seek instant "wisdom" and expertise, about 30 to 40 percent of our reporting here is conveniently in English – or at least English of sorts.

Most of the foreign media, when they’re not making an occasional sortie across the straits to Basilan island itself, are billeted in the Orchid Garden Hotel near the Edwin Andrews Airbase and the Zamboanga International Airport. They’re here to cover what the CNN, in a Washington, DC-datelined story, yesterday even described as the biggest American military deployment "outside of Afghanistan" – in a war zone, I’m sure the CNN tacitly meant to say since there are 47,000 US military personnel in Japan (now being visited by their President George W. Bush) and 38,000 in South Korea.

Sanamgan, really. Would you call 660 US troops or even 1,000 an Afghanistan-style military deployment? In my old war-correspondent days, we used to call such thing... well, an "excursion."

But journalists have to say something. But, a las, sometimes there are wrong.

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The trouble, as I see it, is that newsmen and photographer can’t always be sending home pictures of US servicemen (and US Special Forces) arriving, huge cargo jets and CHINOOKS landing, American interacting with their Filipino military counterparts, and so forth. They’ve got to find more exciting photo snaps and "inside" stories to dispatch.

The grenade blasts in the crowded Jolo market amd in the moviehouse in Zamboanga provided some relief from the tedium, and will, I suppose, be interpreted by some as having been provoked by the American "buildup " or some such angle. Maybe yes in part –but, or reflection, actually no. Grenade attacks have been part of the Mindanao scene for decades now, with grenades and other explosive devices being thrown into Churches while Masses were going on, time and again into market places, exploded aboard ferry boats — not just in Mindanao but in the Visayas and Luzon, even in Metro Manila.

One of "World Trade Center" bomber Ramzi Yousef’s bomb experiments while he was in the Philippines (first, training the Abu Sayyaf in bomb-making and terrorist techniques in Basilan) was to plant a nitroglycerin device in a Cebu City shopping mall, then, on December 1, 1994, sending his agent Wali Khan Amin Shah, to plant one of his home-made Mark II bombs under seat in the Greenbelt moviehouse in Makati. Shah rang up Yousef who was holed up in Manila to tell him the bomb was in place. But when it exploded at 10:30 p.m. that night, there were only slight injuries to an amorous couple seated nearby and a few other movie patrons.

Alas, when you’ve got the Moro rebels actively trying to create mayhem, and the National Democratic Front and New People’s Army insurgents as well (Communist bombs, grenades and ambuscades are as deadly as any Islamic Jihad’s in Mindanao), there are bound to be explosions and flying lead in many places. And don’t forget the CAFGU bravos and some Christian militias bent on revenge. They’re lethal as well.

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As for Basilan, it’s easy to dish out sermons about how neglected, poverty-stricken, and plagued by violence, that ill-starred island is, including military and "civilian government" sponsored violence, to add to the brutality and viciousness of the Abu Sayyaf and other insurgent bands.

It’s always been a wild and wooly island. Believe me, oldtimers like this writer know the turf. For most of their married life, my sister Marcy and her late husband "Marno" David broke their backs developing the 180 hectares he inherited from his family into a rubber and coconut plantation. Most of their children, now grown-up professionals with kids of their own, were born there or in a next-door Zamboanga, and went to school there. Over the years, I had to (aw, shucks) smuggle firearms and ammunition to them because their farm was in the heartland of Basilan — in Galayan, Maluso (right smack in the area where the Abu Sayyaf was subsequently "born") — and they were frequently under attack by marauding Taosug bands. Until 20 to 25 years ago, the Yakans were relatively peaceful, but were eventually politicized and infused with Muslim religious zeal, and became fierce mujahideen in Nur Misuari’s Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF).

During the former Ramos Administration – would you believe? – my widowed sister woke up one day to receive notice that her 180 hectares have been taken by the Department of Agrarian Reform and divvied up among her alleged "Moro tenants", with the land titles distributed to them. (She never had any tenants, whether Muslims or Christians — and all of her farm workers had, incidentally, been Catholics.) But there you are: she lost everything in a flash, and the funny part of it is that she was "paid" in almost worthless government bonds (not the rich Code-NGO PEACe variety).

This little anecdote is trotted out so visiting journalists can begin to understand that not all the "injustice" is being meted out to hapless Muslims, but to Christians as well.

As for chronic poverty, ignorance and government neglect, that’s true enough. Yet, a word of caution. Sure, the government in faraway "imperial" Manila neglects Mindanao. Among the worst-neglected, again, admittedly, are Muslim majority areas. Yet most of these municipalities and provinces are run by Muslim mayors and governors – and their own politicians have traditionally run their places of rule like the old Datus and chieftains, as feudal fiefdoms, pocketing the funds, and to keep their "subjects" in line, striving to prevent their local populations from getting an "education." Gee whiz, Christian dynasts and warlords in other parts of our country do the same thing, too, so it’s not a religious but a profane practice.

To be sure, the administration of ex-President Fidel V. Ramos after he made "peace" in 1996 with MNLF Supremo Misuari (now in jail for renewed rebellion), gifted Misuari with billions of pesos in his newly-created Southern Pace and Development Council (SPDC) budget, then FVR threw in another P30 billion or more after further rewarding the same Misuari the governorship of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). Even Nur’s own ARMM governors (sub-governors, really) kept on asking where the money went. Now that there’s a new ARMM Governor, Parouk Hussin, I trust we’ll discover some, but probably not all, of the truth.

By the way, in the recent plebiscite on expansion of the ARMM, Basilan (which is half-Christian) voted to be included in the expanded ARMM.

Basilan has a Muslim Governor, it mustn’t be forgotten: Wahab Akabar, and its Congressman and former Governor, Jerry Salepuddin, used to be an MNLF rebel himself. (He’s still a militant).

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Zamboangueños have been asking, why that now-famous photograph of two American servicemen in civvies one even in shorts, toting their automatic weapons in front of a Zambo bank, created such a stir. Armed men roving Zamboanga without "authorization" from our military and our government? They exclaim: "What’s the big deal?"

Everyday, my Zamboanga friends have been reminding me during the past few days, heavily-armed Moros roam the streets and frequent discos and eateries in Zamboange without being challenged or arrested by our armed forces or the Philippine National Police (PNP).

This is deplorably true. I’ve written about these armed men strutting around Zambo several times in this column, and asked why this is so. No wonder the MNLF balik-rebels were able to stage a short-lived but violent uprising in Zamboanga City last November which the 160 MNLF troublemakers (mostly attired in army and police uniforms, mind you) shot up the place and mortared everything within range, while taking more than 108 civilians hostages and ranging as far as Pasonanca until a deal was made with the military to permit them to march out of town, waving their firearms and thumbing their noses at our government officials and our Armed Forces. That’s Zamboangueños feel the Americans have every reason to tote their own firearms wherever they go, but in uniform, if you please.

You never know whom you’ll encounter downtown, or near the Lantaka hotel or the Orchid Garden. Those dudes they see hanging around in military looking or police uniforms may not be our guys - but on the "other side."

I hope those "legendary" Special Forces bravos will be able to sort it out.

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Having spent many years in several countries as a foreign correspondent myself, I know that foreign journalists and media persons must rely on "local sources" and local stringers.

During the war in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, we had excellent "sources", "contacts" and fellows doing errands for us. After the capture of Saigon by North Vietnamese tank and infantry units and Vietcong in 1975, a couple of our best and most informative legmen or contacts emerged in North Vietnamese military uniforms, with badges of impressive rank. That’s the problem faced by most foreigners, and even us locals: it’s difficult to tell friend from foe.

Having returned to Vietnam twice in the postwar years, I’ve seen the almost fantastic transformation of even the North Vietnamese in Hanoi from hardline Marxists to almost capitalist entrepreneurship, while maintaining, of course, the old Party line. In the south, Saigon is once more being called very openly "Saigon", while officially it’s supposed to be Ho Chi Minh City. (Uncle Ho sleeps peacefully in his marble-columned temple in a Hanoi which boasts 5-star hotels).

The Vietnamese, and it’s a good thing, have even become very buddy-buddy with the returning Americans.

This is all well and good, and I’m glad because Vietnam, the country of my youthful reporting career, is perhaps my "second home." But let’s not forget the terrible retributions and repressions that followed the fall of Saigon and went on for decades.

A few South Vietnamese officers I know never survived the "hospitality" of their Communist conquerors in prisons like the "Hanoi Hilton." One of them, luckier than most, a former major, emerged after eight years of torture and captivity. His right leg had shrunk to half the size of his left, because that’s the leg by which he was attached by an ankle chain to a steel rod, and he had to do everything within the length of that chain, eating, drinking, defecating, etc. Yet, he survived and was permitted (with his family), under a deal between Washington DC and Hanoi, to emigrate through a Thai refugee camp to the United States.

As for me, I’m today one of the bosses who send young reporters out to risk their necks in hairy situations. I’ve had my share of "wars", not just in Mindanao, or Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, but in Indonesia (the 1965 GESTAPU coup and its horrible aftermath), Mexico City (the massacre of student demonstrators), "Black September" in Jordan in 1970, part of the 1971 Indian-Pakistani war, including the emergence of Bangladesh.

I prefer to turn a deaf ear to the bugles of battle - but, often, I’m still tempted to go - anywhere the action is. Can’t teach an old war dog (or is it warhorse?) new tricks.