Giving the MILF rebels a slice of Mindanao is not a peace settlement: It’s abject surrender!

We mustn’t be cowed by the ranting and threats of Al Haj Murad, chairman of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front,who is roaring that the Malaysian-brokered "peace talks" could collapse unless the government takes them "seriously." What this firebreathing Murad wants, obviously, is for the government to cede territory to the MILF – a big area which they can control like an independent fiefdom.

The MILF has been insisting, moreover, that our Republic accept their demand that the principle of "ancestral land" be recognize. Murad and his scruffy band must believe we’re all stupid, since once we accept this "ancestral land" baloney, the MILF and their Moro cohorts will claim all of Mindanao as having belonged to their ancestors – and, sanamagan, there goes that neighborhood.

C'mon Murad-baby. We know you fought in Afghanistan along with the likes of Abu Sayyaf’s deceased founder, Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani (now gone to Paradise having been slain in a firefight), terrorist Ramzi Yousef, and 200 other Moros. Probably, Murad in his Peshawar and Afghanistan days got buddy-buddy with one of the leading Indonesian-born terrorists, Hambali – born Encep Nurjaman in the highlands of west Java, where his fundamentalism was honed in the local pesantren (the equivalent of religious madrassahs in that country). Answering the call to help the Afghans repel the Soviet invaders in 1980, Hambali had spent three years in Afghanistan – where he trained in the camps established by Abdur Rasul Sayyaf, and fraternized with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. If you’ll notice, it was after Sayyaf that the "Abu Sayyaf" was named.

This "teacher," Abdur Rasul Sayyaf headed in those days, the Ittihad-e-Islamic or Islamic Union funded by Osama bin Laden and other wealthy contributors. He was, by all accounts, an imposing figure. An Afghan warlord, six-three inches tall, Sayyaf was – unlike most of his countrymen, fluent in classical Arabic, having studied at al-Azhar University in Cairo. He was, in contrast to many Sufi-practising Afghans, a devout Wahhabi in belief. He not only set up training camps for warfare, but an actual school not far from Peshawar, in Pakistan’s northwest region.

The hated Russians were finally chased out of Afghanistan after a war which raged from 1979. General Boris V. Gromov, the commander of the Soviet forces, led his troops across the Friendship Bridge into Uzbekistan, ending in humiliating defeat the nine years in which the Russians had sought to impose their rule. In the conflict, the Soviets lost 150,000 men and had over 30,000 casualties. On the other side, probably a million to two million Afghans had died, 90 percent of them civilians. More than six thousand Arabs had come to join the jihad between 1987 and 1993. Finding no war left to fight, many of them returned to their home countries eager to pursue, with the warcraft and weapons they had acquired, the cause of Muslim triumph in their homelands, abetted by Muslim militants they had met in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

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For instance, bin Laden’s purported Number Two – who appears on websites and television – is Ayman al-Zawahari who grew up in Maadi, a middle-class suburb in Cairo.

In his excellent book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright (who graduated from Tulane University in Louisiana and spent two years teaching at the American University in Cairo, Egypt) says that Zawahiri was bright, took up medicine at Cairo University, and was charged in 1981 for aiding or planning the assassination that October of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. In Afghanistan the destinies of Zawahiri and bin Laden became "irrevocably intertwined" and eventually their terrorist organizations, al-Qaeda and Jihad were merged into one. In many circles, Zawahiri is not regarded as Osama’s deputy but as an "equal." Surely, Murad and his late superior Hashim Salamat were familiar with the two in their Afghan-jihad days.

Another author, Los Angeles Times correspondent Terry McDermott, undertook research in twenty-five countries on four continents, to trace the backgrounds and the antecedents for the 19 hijackers who had commandeered four US jet aircraft to inflict maximum pain on Americans in their own country on 9/11.

In his volume, "Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers; Who They Were, Why They Did It," the writer devouts almost an entire chapter to MANILA (page 144).

McDermott leaves no doubt that the Philippines is a major factor in the terrorist network of evil. He recounts that Hambali had remained in contact with men from his own jihad days, among them Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Mohammed sent Wali Shah to meet Hambali in Kuala Lumpur. Shah and Hambali incorporated a trading company called Konsojaya, pretending to go into the palm oil business. Instead the company was used as a conduit for money Mohammed would raise in the Middle East and send to Asia.

"Ramzi Yousef and Shah," the author revealed, "had been in and out of Hambali’s region several times, working with the Abu Sayyaf in the southern Philippines and visiting Manila often enough to acquire steady girlfriends. In Yousef’s case, the girls included a pretty young dancer at a local go-go club and a sales clerk at a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. Shah developed a long-term relationship with a bar girl, Carol Santiago. Mohammed came in and out of the region, too. He never had a steady girlfriend, as such but asked young women he met to do favors for him. These included opening a local bank and cell phone accounts. He paid them for their time."

"Mohammed, Yousef and Shah returned to the Philippines in early 1994. Once in the country, they split up. Shah moved in with (Carol) Santiago in an apartment on Singalong street. Yousef, using the name Adam Baluch, rented a room at the third-class Manor Hotel. Mohammed, under the name Salem Ali, rented an apartment in the Tiffany Mansions, a new, thirty-five story condominium building in the Greenhills section of the city. The Tiffany had an airy marble lobby, a gym, a pool, and a Jacuzzi spa. One of Mohammed’s neighbors was Joseph Estrada, a Filipino film star who was soon to become president of the country."

"Mohammed bought a Toyota Corona sedan and left in it every morning, dressed in polo shirts and casual slacks as if going to office. They moved in and out of town. They met in public places – conveniences stores, hotels, karaoke clubs, and go-go bars – where they would be inconspicuous. Police had wiretaps on dozens of suspected Islamic terrorists in the city, but they never caught a trace of these three men. Only afterward, searching through the trash outside Shah’s apartment, did they discover that the shredded lease was made through Bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Mohammed Khalifa."

"On an earlier trip to Mindanao, at the southern tip of the island nation, Yousef and Abu Sayyaf leader Abdurajak Janjalani had concocted a seemingly far-fetched plan to assassinate Pope John Paul II, who had announced plans to visit the Philippines in early 1995."

McDermott writes more and more. He must have enjoyed doing his research on the villains in karaoke clubs and go-go bars – but he proved that terrorism isn’t all privation and sacrifice – it has its delicious moments. That reference to Erap, however, wasn’t fair – for what it implied. Tiffany Mansions on Annapolis street is a bit far from North Greenhills (behind the Club Filipino) where Estrada’s house is located. It was in fact Erap, when President, who launched the only no-holds-barred attacks on the rebel MILF, capturing their camps and putting the rebels to rout, in a campaign culminating in the capture of their holy-of-holies, Camp Abubakar.

As for the plot to kill the Pope, you see that the Muslims around the world who’re angrily fulminating and rioting against the current Pope, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, must, in fairness, also took back at "history." So many Muslims plots to kill Pope John Paul II, the patron and sponsor of the present Pontiff, might have irritated the German-born Holy Father into making his intemperate quotation of a Byzantine Emperor in his native Germany. In short, when Islamic fanatics strive to kill our Pope, why don’t Catholics erupt in fury into the streets?

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Summing up, the MILF’S Murad is fortunate he operates in a free nation where his insurgent views can be expressed, and where the GMA government’s Surrender Gang, eager to forge a "peace deal" kowtow to him and his fist-shaking. How can we, for that matter, naively trust the Malaysians to be honest-brokers in the search for "peace," when during the long regime of our dear friend, the former Prime Minister Datuk Seri Mahathir Mohammad, the Malaysians used to train rebels from Nur Misuari’s Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), right in their own territory.

For that matter, the "international" peacekeeping contingent safeguarding the ceasefire in Mindanao comes from Malaysia, Brunei and Libya, admittedly from "friendly" Muslim nations, but Muslims nonetheless. Oh well, the GMA government is striving desperately to be admitted into the circles of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), with observer status.

I don’t believe for one moment Murad’s protestations (I saw him on TV the other night) that the MILF has nothing to do with the terrorist Jemaah Islamiyah and the Abu Sayyaf. Those terrorist training camps are there in MILF "territory" – and our military are handcuffed by politics from going in and attacking them, lest the MILF be angered.

The armed forces are trying to grab the Abu Sayyaf’s Khadaffy Janjalani, the JI’s Dulmatin and Umar Patek in Sulu – while we play footsie with the MILF on the mainland.

What a fine kettle of fish!