PHILIPPINES:500,000 people have been affected by fresh conflict over the resource-rich island of Mindanao, writes Blaine Hardenin Lapayan
AFTER YEARS of calm, the oldest insurgency in Asia has flared into a brutish war, with burned villages, slain families, artillery bombardments, vigilante death squads and hundreds of thousands of displaced people.
The match was lit last month when the Philippine government abruptly backed out of an all-but-done peace deal it had been quietly negotiating for years. That enraged Muslim rebels here on Mindanao, a lush and resource-rich island where Muslims and Christians have been elbowing each other for power and land for more than four centuries.
On August 18th aggrieved Muslim rebels attacked this mostly Christian village of 4,000. The rebels looted rice, burned out 22 houses, while killing 13 Christian villagers, according to a government tally. The youngest victim was 10; the oldest, 95.
Tipped off about the raid, Muslims in the village fled before the rebels arrived. But if they come home, they face the vengeance of a Christian vigilante group called the Ilaga, which last operated in the 1970s. "The Ilaga have risen from the dead," said Roger Vacalares. "They have automatic weapons. We need that kind of group."
With attacks like this one, a savage cycle of fear, fighting and intimidation has begun again in Mindanao. The International Committee of the Red Cross is appealing for increased aid to feed, house and care for 500,000 civilians it estimates have been affected.
The Philippine government insists that its dispute with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) over the expansion here of a semi-autonomous political entity for Muslims can be resolved only by talking, not by fighting. But President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has renounced the autonomy agreement negotiated by her appointees - after its legality was questioned by the country's highest court and after its once-secret provisions for Muslim autonomy proved unpopular among the country's Christian majority.
The president has dispatched 4,000 additional soldiers and police to Mindanao. Her government is demanding that three rebel commanders, who it says are responsible for "criminal" attacks on Christian civilians, be turned over before peace talks can resume.
The Philippine military has attacked rebel encampments with artillery and air bombardment, destroying many villages.
The hunt for the commanders is a major military operation. They control about 5,000 soldiers, nearly half of the MILF's army, said Gen Alexander Yano, chief of staff of the Philippine armed forces. "Because the MILF cannot control its renegade commanders," Yano said, "we will do it for them. They committed crimes, and they will have to pay for that."
In early August, after years of talks, the rebels were on the brink of securing an autonomous zone in Mindanao. Now they are furious that the agreement was abandoned and are refusing to hand over anyone to the government.
"It was out of frustration that the commanders did what they did, and it is unfortunate," Mohagher Iqbal, the MILF's chief peace negotiator, said in a telephone interview.
He said his group will investigate the commanders' actions and use "due process" before it considers disciplinary action.
Muslims had established themselves on Mindanao long before Spaniards arrived in the 16th century to colonise the Philippines and convert its people to Catholicism.
But the Spanish never really controlled Mindanao, the southernmost major island in the Philippine chain. Americans, who booted out the Spanish at the turn of the 20th century, won control of the island after a lengthy military campaign, but resentment and some conflict continued.
The bad blood got much worse in the 1960s, when Manila encouraged hundreds of thousands of Christians to settle in Mindanao.
As their numbers mushroomed - now about 80 per cent of the population of 18 million - historical Muslim claims to the land were stepped on by settlers and by outside logging and mining interests.
As they became second-class citizens in what they regarded as their homeland, Muslims organised armies and began to fight back. The conflict approached full-scale war in the 1970s.
In 1996, a peace deal creating a small autonomous zone for a Muslim rebel group was signed. But elsewhere on the island, conflicts continued. In 2000, the government again tried all-out war to stamp out the MILF. It failed.
Since 2003, negotiations to create a larger, more autonomous zone for the Muslims had been the priority of insurgents and the government - until last month.
Since 2002 Manila, assisted by the US military, has focused on a much smaller and more violent Muslim group called Abu Sayyaf, with links to al-Qaeda. It specialises in kidnapping, extortion and bombings, and has little popular support. In 2005, the MILF even helped with the eviction of Abu Sayyaf leaders from Mindanao.
But on the eve of the signing ceremony in Malaysia, the Supreme Court of the Philippines questioned the constitutionality of granting a large measure of autonomy to the MILF.
The court stopped the government from signing the deal, pending legal review. Since then, as fury has grown among Christians, the government has gone out of its way to denounce the deal it had been crafting for years.
On a recent Sunday in Lapayan, Rita Lapi wandered on the charred ground where her house used to be.
She had lived here with her son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren - until Muslim rebels doused the house with petrol and set it ablaze. She and her family, along with hundreds of other terrified Christians, fled the village for the nearby seashore amid gunfire in the early hours of August 18th.
Lapi (64) has lived with Muslims in this village all her life. They made up about 10 per cent of the population. But they have all fled now and are living in displaced people's centres or with relatives.
She said Muslims will never be allowed to come back. She welcomes the return of the Ilaga, the armed Christian vigilantes who have begun to patrol Lapayan at night.
About six miles away, in the courtyard of a small school that has become a makeshift centre for 85 displaced Muslims, Latifah Carain (22) was in her ninth month of pregnancy a few days ago.
Her village, too, was attacked in mid-August by MILF rebels. She and other Muslims in the area had been quietly told in advance to get out. Two weeks after she fled, she said, Christians burned down her house.
Her husband has since gone back to the village to tend cows and cornfields, but she and her three young children have stayed behind in the school, where they are living on international aid. After she has had her baby, she said, she might go home.
But there is no house to sleep in, and she is afraid of her neighbours.
- (LA Times-Washington Post)