Knotting problems
October 5th, 2002
Declared defeated in so many words by the President of this rumored Republic herself, as well as by her subalterns in the military, the Abu Sayyaf (or its ghost) appears to have planted a bomb in Zamboanga the other day, injuring several people and killing one American soldier and two Filipinos, one of the Filipinos being the bomber himself—or so say the police.
This is the same kidnap-for-ransom group—a foreign terrorist organization according to the United States State Department because of its past (and now nonexistent) links with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network—for which some 600 US troops were deployed in Zamboanga and Basilan from January to July this year during the Balikatan military exercises.
The Arroyo government had tried to make it appear that the presence of US troops in the Abu Sayyaf-infested province of Basilan and their inevitable involvement in the conflict there were not really of any moment beyond its demonstrating Philippine cooperation in the US war against terrorism—and incidentally earning the cash- strapped, deficit- plagued government military and other assistance.
The return of US troops nevertheless led to a national debate on its implications, and to the resignation of Vice President Teofisto Guingona Jr., a key figure in the government coalition, as secretary of foreign affairs.
Mrs. Arroyo’s fierce determination to invite US troops back to the Philippines was a turning point in the still continuing loss of civil-society support for her administration. It demonstrated how misplaced the hopes had been in 2001 that, despite her disturbing record of political opportunism, her presidency would be unlike that of Estrada’s by at least displaying some effort, no matter how tentative, to redress the grievances of the marginalized in Philippine society.
Before the hard-nosed pragmatists of the Philippine media describe this as a bleeding-heart approach to a real problem, let me add that Abu Sayyaf terrorism of course needed an immediate police and even military response.
As the governments of Corazon Aquino and Fidel Ramos reluctantly admitted between 1986 and 1992, however, the use of force against rebellion and those forms of banditry that rely on the poor for recruits as well as support is not enough to put an end to them. These governments thus opted for negotiations with the armed social movements and the promise of economic and social reform.
Even the unlamented—though now being reinvented—Marcos regime displayed a glimmer of that recognition. Fought to a draw by Nur Misuari’s Moro National Liberation Front in the late 1970s, the martial-law government established the Islamic courts and a government bank for Muslims, sent Imelda Marcos to the Middle East to soften Muslim countries’ support for the MNLF, paid lip service to the need to develop neglected Mindanao and appointed Muslims to minor government posts.
The entire history of Philippine armed movements and rebellions—even that of banditry and what were once dismissed as common lawlessness—indeed demonstrates that, for the most part based on the desperation of the poor and powerless as well as their hopes for better lives, these movements are symptoms of the vast injustice and human misery our flawed social, political and economic system breeds. There is in fact no dearth of research on precisely this subject. (The Arroyo government could do worse than to access the works of the Australian National University’s Philippine-born political scientist Reynaldo Ileto on the subject.)
Rebellion and lawlessness among the people may indeed require police action in the short term. But it is also more urgently a call for reform. It is certainly no justification for the intervention of foreign troops. It is significant that despite his Mindanao troubles and international support for the MNLF, it did not seem to have crossed the mind of Marcos to ask for US troops under the terms of the Mutual Defense Treaty. Instead he chose negotiations together with initiatives to deal with Muslim grievances.
Of course the Aquino and Ramos governments as well as the Marcos regime were driven not so much by altruistic intent in choosing reform and negotiations as by their sense that only by reforming it could the system that had been so kind to them survive in the long term.
Judging from its emphasis on the military solution and, worse, its inviting foreign troops to intervene in solving a purely domestic police problem, the Arroyo government on the other hand does not seem to be as similarly informed. If it ever was, it has discarded what should by now be conventional wisdom in favor of the military Establishment’s purely military approach, in which “civic action” consists of window-dressing projects in the shadow of brutal military offensives.
The civic-action component in the Basilan campaign was in fact planned and implemented by US troops, and seemed to have consisted of road construction primarily. Although trumpeted as meant to encourage the movement of goods and people on the island, these roads and other infrastructure have been described by the US think tank Strategic Forecasting as components of US plans for “permanent facilities” in that part of the Philippines. (The return of US military bases in some form or the other would be in repudiation of the Senate decision in 1990 to remove US bases, as well as in violation of the constitutional ban on foreign troops.)
What these all amount to is that the Philippines has paid and is paying a high price for a prize—the destruction of the Abu Sayyaf—no one is really certain has been won. The US-based Filipino scholar Neferti Tadiar in fact argues that it’s not just the erosion of national sovereignty that’s part of the price the country’s paying.
Addressing a gathering at the University of California at Santa Cruz in April, Tadiar described the return of US troops to the Philippines as having “fortified the militarist state-regime of the Arroyo government and its counterinsurgency war against its own people. It has allowed the reconsolidation, reappropriation and new theft of the lands, resource and products of the people in the areas of militarization by local and foreign crony capitalists of the regime.”
The prospects for the militarization of the rest of the country—and its inevitable consequences—have in fact never been as pronounced as in the present. Although its success in Basilan is at least debatable, the purely military approach to quelling insurgency has already been adopted in word and deed by the Philippine government and military.
Given a different, though not original name (Operation Gordian Knot) by the new Armed Forces chief of staff, Miriam’s brother Benjamin Defensor, the “new” strategy is actually as old as Philippine colonial history, the only thing new about it being the likely involvement of US troops.
It consists of the same combination of military offensives against insurgent groups and efforts to deny them their mass support. The experience of centuries—rebellions in the Philippines have been part of the social and political landscape for 300 years, to which the response has been classically repressive of common folk—shows that it is in carrying out the second where the gravest abuses are committed. In both past and recent history, social movements draw their support and recruits from, among others, the victims of those very abuses.
Although declared, à la Abu Sayyaf, as “on the run” and “desperate” and their ideology as “passé” by AFP chief Defensor (whom we presume has an academic background as distinguished as his sister’s for him to arrive at that conclusion), the armed wing of the Communist Party, the New People’s Army, has launched at least two spectacularly successful offensives against government forces.
These limited offensives at least indicate that the NPA is still very much around, and in places previously regarded as immune to its presence.
What’s even more crucial, however, are the implications we can draw from the persistence of the Abu Sayyaf and other armed groups, and the NPA’s own recently demonstrated capacities.
These suggest, among others, that it will take more than military operations with names drawn from Greek mythology, or even direct US troop involvement, to achieve the Arroyo government’s intent to wipe out before 2004 those armed groups that draw their support from their promise of a better future for the marginalized. In a country where words are often the substitutes for fact, declaring them defeated, passé, dead or on the run will nevertheless not make them so.
(TODAY/ABS-CBNNEWS.COM, October 4, 2002)