The real face of the enemy ?

A daily newspaper (it’s customary to say, at this point, not The STAR) ran a banner headline yesterday which declared: "Real Face of the Enemy." Immediately underneath it, on the left side of the front page, the editors placed a photograph of the new US ambassador, Francis J. Ricciardone. Naughty, naughty.

Actually, the headline belonged to a gruesome photo – appropriately blurred – on the right side of the page, under the subhead: "Video of Abus Beheading Soldiers Draws Strong Objections."

Okay, the transposition was clever indeed.

Incidentally, why should there be such a furor over the government’s release of that two-hour-long video which was aired over two television networks Monday night? It’s time we were all reminded of how murderous and vicious the Abu Sayyaf are. Part of the footage obviously filmed by the Abus themselves depicted those cruel fellows beheading captured Filipino soldiers in Basilan. (The footage was pasted together from clips taken some months ago.)

The trouble with all the ruckus over the participation of American troops in the Zamboanga and Basilan area is that people might forget who’re the bad guys, and begin to think of the Abu Sayyaf as local folk heroes. I don’t understand, really, why Senator Rodolfo "Pong"  Biazon, a former armed forces chief of staff, should be so emotionally upset over the release of those gory videos for television airing. Biazon had growled that the video tape had only succeeded in "assaulting the sensibilities of a lot of people," especially the children.

We must remind Senator Biazon, who has from Day One been critical of the US participation in the Mindanao Balikatan war games (which are more than games, admittedly), that the Abus not merely assault the sensibilities of a lot of people, but they assault them physically, and their pathetic victims are men, women and children.

They’ve kidnapped school children and their teachers, raped, tortured and murdered women (carving off their breasts before killing them), tortured priests like Father Rhoel Gallardo to death in the most heartless fashion, and beheaded many of their captives, whether soldiers or civilians. Among the ones who lost their heads, literally, was American hostage Guillermo Sobero, one of the hostages seized last May 21 from the Palawan seaside resort of Dos Palmas. Poor Sobero’s happily scheduled vacation was disrupted by death.

Were those videos gruesome? The reality is even more gruesome.

In his article published simultaneously in New York and in the International Herald Tribune yesterday, New York Times correspondent Nicholas D. Kristof (who usually writes ill of what he observes in Basilan) reported: "To get a better sense of the Abu Sayyaf, I arranged to meet a few members of the group. The first one I met uses the code name Habib, and he painted a spectacularly unappealing picture of the group. He said that Guillermo Sobero, an American hostage whom Abu Sayyaf killed last year, had pleaded tearfully for his life, but that the leaders beheaded him anyway."

Gruesome? You bet.

* * *

This time, Kristof’s theme was contained in his article’s headline: "Americans are fighting the wrong Philippine war."

The NYT reporter notes: "As far as I can tell, the US mission here has almost nothing to do with Basilan. President George W. Bush offered troops in a White House meeting with the Philippine president before his aides knew where Basilan was . . . The real aim of the American mission is political: to demonstrate momentum in the war on terror, deploy troops in a country where they are welcome, show the flag in Southeast Asia, and find an enemy that can be quickly beaten."

In a later paragraph, Mr. K adds: "One clue that the American aim in the Philippines is a feel-good declaration of victory more than a defeat of terrorism is that there are no US plans to pursue anyone to Sulu. Likewise, US forces have no plans to mess with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which has much stronger ties to terrorism and to Al Qaeda, but which has thousands of fighters and is thus more formidable."

I can fully agree with Kristoff on the paragraph above, about the Americans not being eager to take on the MILF (which has 10,000 to 20,000 insurgent cadres). But don’t worry. It’s early days yet. The Yanks may not relish the idea, but if they keep on tagging along with our Philippine army boys, they’ll eventually come right smack against the MILF. In any event – I’ve said in this corner for the past three years, the Abu Sayyaf and the MILF are virtually one and the same outfit, not to mention being helped along by the remnants of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), from which MILF Supremo Ustadz Hashim Salamat had broken away because he detested the MNLF’s chieftain, Nur Misuari.

The relationship between the Abus and the MILF (indeed, Mr. K is correct when he mentions the MILF’s strong links with Al Qaeda) is similar to that of the Sinn Fein with the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland, those "terrorists" whom Gerry Adams and other leaders have put on a more reputable parliamentary face in recent years. Remember, those IRA lads were the same jolly fellows who rocketed Whitehall in London, blew up the band of the Green Jackets in Hyde Park, and blasted pubs and torched entire streets from Belfast, Omagh and Londonderry to London.

The NYT correspondent quotes "a Philippine military officer" as asserting: "‘Fighting the (Abu Sayyaf) is not the problem; the problem is finding them." That Philippine military officer must be out of the loop, prevaricating or terribly misinformed. For Army and Scout Ranger patrols have spotted the Abu Sayyaf several times since December as I’ve said – but they hesitated to attack since the canny Abu group they sighted was dragging, literally parading, the two American hostages in their midst, Martin and Gracia Burnham.

The problem is not to locate the nasty Abus, as my A-1 sources in the military there have been telling me for weeks, but to get a firm, clear-cut order from the AFP top brass to attack on sight, even if the prisoners – the Burnhams, and let’s not forget the Filipina hostage, Deborah Yap – might be caught in the crossfire. In any event, Deborah apparently has been assigned to another Abu group elsewhere in the area.

And, yes: Mr. K is correct, too, in indicating that Abus can be found in Isabela, the capital town. He even mentions Basilan Governor Wahab Akbar, whom he interviewed, but tacks on that "by all accounts except his own (he) helped found the Abu Sayyaf ‘terrorist’ group that the United States is now trying to exterminate."

We’ll leave Akbar, indeed a former insurgent, to sort out hi own lurid past, but it’s true enough that the Abus waltz in and out of places like Isabela, Lamitan, and Maluso. Aside from their higher-profile leaders, you can’t really tell one Moro from another, nor – for that matter – one Christian or Lumad from another. To Americans, of course, they all look the same, just as during the Gulf War, they couldn’t tell the "I-raquis", Saudis, Kuwaitis, from any other "Ay-rab."

Speaking of countries where they’re not welcome, Saudi Arabia, where there have been 5,000 American servicemen with their military hardware, stationed since "Operation Desert Storm" and the Gulf War ended in 1992, is getting antsy over George Bush’s condemnation of next-door Iraq as belonging to the "axis of evil."

No way will the Saudis, now playing host to more than two million Islamic pilgrims doing the Hajj in Mecca, permit the Americans to utilize their base in Saudi Arabia to launch an attack on Baghdad.

* * *

The latest TIME magazine issue (Feb. 25) carries an article on a similar theme, but written more sympathetically. The piece by Phil Sabriskie (with inputs by Anthony David in Manila, Nelly Sindayen – a genuine Taosug, mind you – in Zamboanga, and Mark Thompson in Washington, DC) is entitled, "PICKING A FIGHT."

The subhead says it all: "The US takes its war on terrorism to the Philippines. But is it taking on the right guys?"

TIME’s Zabriskie writes: "What is not written in the ‘terms of reference’ signed last week between Washington and Manila: let’s turn a blind eye to the country’s real terrorist threat to the north, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF)."

The article points out that "Manila’s generals have known for years that the MILF is the real challenge. in the region. It has a couple of hundred guerrillas on Basilan, compared to the 80 hardcore stragglers that now make the Abu Sayyaf. And on the island of Mindanao, the vast heartland of the Southern Philippines, it has up to 12,000. Its dedication to carving out an Islamic state from the predominantly Catholic Philippines is real (Abu Sayyaf turned that ambition to lucre years ago.) It’s got guns, training camps, an ideology – and, it now appears, more current and substantial links to international terrorist groups including Kumpulan Mujahideen Malaysia (KMM) and its benefactor, Jemaah Islamiah, which is emerging as Southeast Asia’s al-Qaeda subsidiary."

Adds TIME: ". . . One reason is that Abu Sayyaf is a more squashable threat. Although its Basilan contingent has evaded 6,000 poorly trained Philippine troops for the past year and currently holds two Americans hostage, it’s an operation that can be wrapped up in months, rather than years."

Subsequently, the article underscores that "More importantly, (President) Arroyo is in peace talks with the MILF, hoping to avoid a much larger conflict in Mindanao. That requires Manila – and now Washington – to deliberately ignore the MILF’s very dark side. It has trained Pakistani, Arab, and Indonesian jihadis. Rohan Gunaratna of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrew’s University in Scotland estimates that 400 to 600 foreigners have passed through its camps since 1996."

* * *

Indeed, the administration of GMA has been too soft and too naive in its dealings with the MILF. The truth is that her predecessor, former President Joseph Estrada, now in "jail", had been winning the battle against the MILF, giving the Armed Forces free rein in capturing all of the rebels’ fortified camps and redoubts in Mindanao, in an all-out offensive that culminated in overrunning their "sacred" headquarters, Camp Abubakar.

But Estrada waffled and undid all his gains, and the military’s morale, when he yielded to "pressure" from France, Germany, Finland and the European Union, and the Malaysians, in the case of the Abu Sayyaf’s foreign hostages (snatched from the Malaysian resort island of Sipadan). For months, with the Europeans particularly bullying him on the issue of not assaulting the Abus (exposing their hostages to harm, and possibly death), former President Estrada made us look like a bunch of sissies.

The Abus were able to collect ransom payments amounting to more than $20 million from Libya’s Strongman Moammer Ghadaffi, the Germans, the Malaysians, and heaven knows who else. In the end, even Estrada and his chief negotiator, ex-Cabinet member Robert Aventajado, were accused of having gotten a "share" of the ransom money!

Now, GMA’s government has apparently given the MILF back practically all the "camps" captured at great cost in blood and treasure, by our Armed Forces, and made us look like a gaggle of Keystone cops and stumblebums with regard to the Abus, with the danger of harming their fresh set of hostages "staying" our military’s hand.

The American troops may be just the newest sideshow in this tragic and frustrating chronicle of urong-sulong and appeasement.