ABU SAYYAF & BANGSAMORO STRUGGLE: A Background to the Mamasapano Encounter

San Juan/Abu Sayyaf

THE “INVINCIBLE” ABU SAYYAF AND PERMANENT U.S. INTERVENTION

IN THE PHILIPPINES

Reflections on the Bangsamoro Struggle for Self-determination

by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

[The 1789 Reign of Terror] is the rule of people who themselves are terror-stricken. Terror

implies mostly useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure

themselves.

---Friedrich Engels, letter to March, 4 Sept. 1870 (Marx and Engels 1965)

Beginning January 2002, hundreds of U.S. Special Operations

Forces have been stationed in the Southern Philippines as part of

the US “global war against terror” after 9/11. This deployment

was called “Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines,” part of the

invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. In October 2004, then

President Bush singled out the Philippines as one front (the

other two are Iraq and Afghanistan) in the US attempt to assert

its hegemony in the Middle East, Asia, and throughout the world

(Docena 2008).

Last October 2010, US Ambassador Harry Thomas flexed

imperial muscles by demanding that the Philippines must

eliminate, not just reduce in size, the Abu Sayyaf (ASG), a self-

San Juan /Abu Sayyarf

styled Islamic sect which is always linked to Osama bin Laden and

the Indonesian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) responsible

for the Bali bombing in 2002 (Bloomberg 2010). In 2001 the ASG

beheaded one of three American hostages seized from a Palawan

resort, while in 2004 it bombed a passenger ferry on Manila Bay,

killing over 100 people. Both groups are always connected with Al

Qaeda. Thomas said that “we are at a critical threshold” and the

US will continue to send military advisers and aid (such as

25,000 helmets and fast-deploying rubber boats, among others),

“as part of its security engagement with Manila” (Agence France-

Presse 2010). At the same time, Philippine Defense Secretary

Voltaire Gazmin stated that there was no fixed time-table for the

presence of US troops in the Philippines involved not only in

military campaigns but also in”peace and development,” as

verified by US undersecretary of State Wiliam Burns (Siam Daily

News 2010). Based on photos taken by Agence France-Press of US

troops entering combat zones riding Humvee armored jeeps fully

armed, then Makati mayor Jejomar Binay commented that the Arroyo

administration was “apparently subcontracting the job of leading

the fight against Muslim insurgents to the Americans” (Tribune

Online 8/16/2007).

Various websites have confirmed the active participation of

the US military (roughly 580-620 members, as of 2009) in combat

operations against the ASG and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front

(MILF) where 15 soldiers have already been killed, “including the

ten who were lost in a 21002 helicopter crash” (Yon 2009). Civic

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projects (managed by US-AID and other agencies such as Military

Information Support Teams) such as road building, schools,

textbook distribution, medical programs, and information

outreach, are accessories to the military and police operations,

part of the twin policies of drying up the sanctuaries and

killing or capturing the hardcore members of ASG.

A month before Thomas’ warning, the US and the Aquino regime

staged a demonstration of the threat with the October 21 bombing

in Matalam, North Cotabato, attributed to the JIL and a new

terrorist sect called Jihadist Ulama intended to replace the ASG.

Obviously this recurrent hype about security threats occurs every

time there is a move to review the onerous Visiting Forces

Agreement (VFA), a travesty of Philippine sovereignty which has

kindled mass outrage. The latest attempt to amplify the panic is

the US State Department’s attempt to tag remittances from

overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) as possible funding sources for

the ASG. The Department’s October report cited the group’s appeal

for funds via the Internet You Tube video of late ASG leaders

Abdurajak and Khadaffy Janjalani (killed in 1998 and 2006,

respectively) as its basis. No concrete evidence has been offered

to substantiate the suspicion. This provides a ploy or ruse not

only to renew the VFA but also for the US to intervene in the

formal and informal banking and finance sectors of the country

through which billion-dollar remittances are channeled to keep

the local economy afloat (Esplanada 2010; Madlos 2010). One

should also mention the widely publicized indictment of Filipino

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citizen Madhatta Haipe, allegedly a founding member of the ASG,

in a Washington federal court. Extradited to the US in 2009,

Haipe pleaded guilty to four counts of hostage taking in a 1995

abduction of 16 people, including 4 US citizens, near Lake Sebu,

southern Mindanao (Inquirer 2010). What this bureaucratic legal

exercise is meant to accomplish is clear: the Phiilippines is not

a safe refuge for anyone who threatens to challenge the long

tentacles of the imperial power of the United States.

US Caught In the Quagmire

A direct U.S. colony for about half a century, the

Philippines remains a neocolonial formation, with a client

collaborative regime (Petras 2007) subordinate to U.S. interests.

This singular status of clientship or subordination is erased in

current historiography. Consequently, the fallacy of treating the

US and the Philippines as equal partners in inter-state relations

results in gross misjudgments and absurd expectations.

The strategic US military bases in Clark and Subic Bay,

Philippines, was evicted by the Philippine Senate in 1991.

However, by virtue of the anomalous Visiting Forces Agreement

(VFA) signed by then President Estrada in 1999, the US succeeded

in establishing a Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines

in Camp Navarro, Zamboanga City, the headquarters of the Armed

Forces of the Philippines’ (AFP) Western Mindanao Command. This

allows the US to participate in counter-insurgency operations

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against the Moro fighters in the Moro Islamic Liberation Front

(MILF), the communist-led New People’s Army (NPA), and factions

of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) that refused to

accept the Arroyo regime. Both the NPA and the Abu Sayyaf Group

(ASG) are classified as “terrorist” organizations by the U.S.

State Department.

For now, the ASG has become the target of US surveillance by

unmanned spy planes (drones); this intelligence gathering

directly aids in the AFP’s combat operations. In 2002, for

example, a Moro peasant in Basilan suspected to be an ASG

follower, Buyong-buyong Isnijal, was shot by US Sgt. Reggie Lane;

no serious investigation was made about this incident despite a

Congressional resolution. In Feb. 2008, one of the few survivors

of the Maimbung massacre in Sulu, Sandrawina Wahid, witnessed US

troops engaged in the Philippine military’s assault on the town

where eight civilians were killed, including Rowina’s husband,

two teenagers, two children, and a three-month pregnant woman.

Another incident hit the headlines recently when a Philippine

Army captain Javier Ignacio was killed while investigating the

previous murder by US military personnel of a Filipino employee

Gregan Cardeno. Hired by US company DynCorp International,

Cardeno was assigned to the Liaison Coordination Element, a unit

of the US military, based in Camp Ranao, Marawi City (Carol

Araullo, “Streetwise,” Business World, 11-12 June 2010). The death of

Cardeno exposed the clandestine unit engaged in work that appears

in violation of Philippine laws and its sovereignty; the

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activities of DynCorp and other secret companies have likewise

not been disclosed, contradicting the US Embassy claim that the

US Special Forces are confined to openly conducted

civic/humanitarian projects such as building roads, schools, etc.

On September 29, 2009, two American soldiers were killed by

a landmine planted by the MNLF in Indanan, Jolo. These two are

now considered the first casualties since the Balikatan exercises

in 2001, although several US soldiers died in fighting in Sulu

three or four years ago. This was a reprisal for the Philippine

Marines’ bombing of Muslim devotees in religious rites on

September 20 in the same town. A local observer, Prof. Julkipli

Wadi noted that the US muted this incident to avoid jeopardizing

its humanitarian stance. Wadi cites the October 2009 visit of US

embassy officials to the MILF leadership in Sultan Kudarat,

Mindanao, where these officials were lectured by the MILF deputy

chieftain Ghazali Jaafar; according to Wadi, Jaafar told them

that “Washington must help in the resolution of the Mindanao

problem by addressing the root cause, which is political,

emanating from the grant of US independence to the Philippines,”

which “immorally and illegally incorporated the Bangsamoro

homeland” (“US Strategic Avoidance,” MindNews, 20 October 2009).

Wadi described US soldiers entrenching themselves in many parts

of Zamboanga, Basilan, Jolo and parts of Tawi-Tawi, and asks “how

long would US authorities pursue the policy of strategic

avoidance by hiding under the veneer of counterinsurgency and war

on international terrorism while entrenching deeper in the

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hinterlands and seas of the Sulu Archipelago without being known

by the American public?” Obviously, aside from propping up the

neocolonial Filipino elite and thus advancing its global

geopolitical strategy, the US would like to take advantage of the

natural and human resources of Mindanao and Sulu, and its ideal

location as a springboard to intervention in Indonesia, Malaysia,

Singapore, Thailand and the whole of Indochina as a means of

encircling China, their ultimate competitor.

Certainly, U.S. power and legitimacy or cultural authority

are at stake. But the preponderant use of military power and

logistics undermines any pretense of humanitarian motives.

Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich reminds the US public

that in 1903, Theodore Roosevelt ordered General Leonard Wood to

pacify the Moro province, home to about 250,000 Filipino Muslims

then. In March 1906, at Bud Dajo, Jolo, just to cite one

incident, the American pacifiers killed 600 Muslims, including

many women and children—a “disagreeable” by-product, what is

called by the Pentagon “collateral damage” (“Caution: Moral

Snares Ahead,” Los Angeles Times, 22 Jan., 2002). It is not just

moral snare or hubris that explains this propensity to

complacently offer thousands of human lives to the altar of

Empire; it is the logic of capitalist expansion, the motor of

profit gained from alienated labor/lives, that propels white

supremacy and its civilizing mission—the hallmark of US imperial

presence in Mindanao and Sulu, an an amoral hegemon whose crimes

against humanity elude the MILF leaders, thus their naive plea to

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Washington to assist their cause by mediating the conflict

between them and the Arroyo regime.

But there are other players in the scene, of course.

In 1987, the Moro historian Samuel K. Tan expressed his belief

that the national community remains divided between the Christian

“national community” and what he calls the “cultural

communities,” referring to the Moros and the non-Christian Lumads

and Cordillera peoples. Is democracy coming to an end in the

emergence of “a nation of multiple state-systems”? Tan is

critical of the Christian sector’s drive to create a “Christian

nation in Asia regardless of the implications to the cultural

communities,” as evinced in the program to unite the Philippines

on the basis of an ideological secular basis summed up in the

slogan “one nation, one spirit” (1987, 72). What Tan ignores is

that the secular neocolonial state as it has historically evolved

cannot fully exercise its sovereignty over all the communities

without the aid of US political, military and diplomatic

assistance. It is indeed an instrument to foster global

capitalism’s welfare. Moreover, the problem of unequal power is

not primarily a question of culture but of control over resources

and land, ultimately a question of political leadership and

organization. In any case, the fate of the “three communities” is

now a matter of international or global concern, as evidenced by

the sordid plight of OFWs languishing in jails around the world

and by Filipino progressives appealing to the UN Human Rights

Council and the World Council of Churches on behalf of thousands

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of victims of extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances,

torture, and a reign of impunity for crimes against humanity by

the U.S.-funded military and police forces of the Arroyo regime

and its oligarchic allies. Since the end of the Cold War, the

upsurge of counterhegemonic forces against US imperial dominance

in Asia, Africa and Latin America cannot be ignored or under-

estimated.

At least since the Tripoli Agreement of 1976, the Moro

struggle for autonomy or independence has become

internationalized. With the entry of the OIC (Organization of

Islamic Conference), the MNLF and MILF have become dependent on

the mterial and political support of Islamic countries. The

mediating roles of Indonesia and Malaysia as key members of the

OIC need no further clarification. The preponderant US role

remains ineluctable. What is occurring in the Philippines as an

arena of class and national struggles should be analyzed in this

historical geopolitical context to understand properly the

significance of the Moro people’s struggle for self-

determination.

In the last twenty years, particularly after the

reinstatement of “elite democracy” with the fall of the Marcos

dictatorship in 1986, the US re-asserted its total domination of

the Philippines with the Aquino-Ramos regime. While Corazon

Aquino’s “total war” on the Communist-led New People’s Army

continued under U.S. direction (sanctioned by numerous treaties

and executive agreements), the power of the nationalist movement

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since formal independence in 1946 demonstrated its subterranean

force in the expulsion of the U.S. military bases in 1992. It was

the loss of these bases that confronted US imperial planners, a

loss immediately solved by means of the “Visiting Forces

Agreement” initiated by Fidel Ramos, a general tutored by the

Pentagon. But this agreement required justification or

legitimacy, which explains the “Abu Sayyaf” phenomenon and the

elaborate overt and covert intervention of the U.S.—directly,

this time, via the Pentagon, US State Department (via US

Embassy), US Institute of Peace, US-AID, and others (see Chaulia

2009)—in the initially secessionist/separatist insurgency led by

the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

The Missing Link: CIA Frankenstein

What is most intriguing is the persistence of the “Abu

Sayyaf” (ASG) terrorist group as an integral part of an expanding

US military presence in the Philippines. Not a day passes when

somewhere a news report of the Abu Sayyaf is found with always a

mention of its Al-Qaida link, origin, or connection. For example,

the Feb. 2005 BBC “Guide to the Philippine conflict” lists down

the MNLF, MILF, the NPA, and the Abu Sayyaf as the “main rebel

factions” in Mindanao. It recites the oft-repeated factoids: The

ASG split off from the MNLF in 1991 under the leadership of

Abdurajik Janjalani (killed in December 1998), succeeded by his

less doctrine-driven brother Khadafi Janjalani, whose death in

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September 2006 precipitated the disintegration of the group into

multiple factions. From a thousand combatants in the beginning,

it has shrunk to 400 or less members

Given its record of kidnapping-for-ransom, massacres, and

bombings (often mentioned is the October 2004 bombing of the

Superferry 14 in Manila Bay, with 116 people killed, the ASG has

acquired a high-profile “terrorist” aura. The kidnappings in

Sipadan, Malaysia, in April 2000 and the May 2001 raid on a

Palawan resort and the subsequent rescue of Grace Burnham,

catapulted the group into the status of media celebrity.

Meanwhile, the Al-Qaida connection has been reinforced by

association with the Indonesian group Jemaah Islamiyah (JI)

noted for the 2002 Bali carnage. The April 13, 2010 raid in

Isabela, Basilan, by ASG members disguised as police commandos,

led by Puruji Indama, revitalized its 2 decades of deadly mayhem.

All accounts agree about the origin of the ASG in the US

Central Intelligence Agency ‘s (CIA) role in training mujahideens

from various countries to fight the US proxy war in Aghanistan

against the Soviets (1979-1989). In May 2008, Senator Aquilino

Pimentel described the ASG a “CIA monster” trained by AFP

officers in the southern Philippines and directed by

informers/spies such as its former leader Edwin Angeles

(Santuario 2009). In his book Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, American and

International Terrorism, Jon K. Cooley documented the CIA training and

funding of the ASG—freedom-fighters such as Osama bin Laden

engaged in jihad against the communist infidel—around 1986 in

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Peshawar, Pakistan; one of the veterans was Abdurajak Janjalani

(Santuario 2009; Bengwayan 2002). Accordingly, Prof. Mahmood

Mamdani of Columbia University calls the CIA-created ASG and bin

Laden’s followers as “alternatives to secular nationalism,” and

fundamentalist terrorism as an integral modern project, for which

US imperial aggression around the world is chiefly responsible

(2002).

A recent writeup of this “al-Qaida-linked extremist group”

now claims that its present leader, Khair Mundus, has been

receiving funds from Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. It is alleged

that he once transferred these funds to Khadaffy Janjalani in

2001-2003. No less than the US State Department alleges that

Mundus, while in police custody in 2004, “confessed to having

arranged the transfer of al-Qiada funds to an ASG chief to

finance bombings and other attacks” (“Abu Sayyaf faction,”

GMANews.TV). The US is offering half-a-million dollars for the

arrest of this ideologically inspired agent. The Basilan-based

group has supposedly given sanctuary to Dulmatin, a key suspect

in the Bali carnage, hence the interest of the US State

Department (which explains why he has been reported killed

several times). Aside from Mundus and Dulmatin, another Bali

bomber Umar Patek has been tagged by the US-funded Philippine

Institute for Peace, Violence and Terrorism Research as operating

in Tawi-Tawi province (ABS-CBNNews.com 2010).

Since Abdurajak Janjalani’s death, the group has lost

interest in Islamic goals and degenerated into banditry and “high

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impact terrorist activities.” But Mundus is trying to revive its

Islamic evangelism and unite the factions spread out in Basilan,

Sulu and Zamboanga, influencing even Puruji Indama, the guerilla

blamed for the brutal beheading of 10 marines in a 2007 encounter

in Basilan. A clear tendency of the media propaganda machine has

emerged to infuse ideological and political substance to the ASG

which, since at least 1998, has simply become a criminal outfit

for easy containment by the local police, not by the heavily

armed US Special Forces with technologically sophisticated spy

equipment and drones. The journalists Marites Vitug and Glenda

Gloria named Gen. Guillermo Ruiz, former Marine commander and

police officials Leandro Mendoza and Rodolfo Mendoza as

coddlers/patrons of the ASG (Bengwayan 2002).

Anatomy of a Faction

Clearly, without the presence of this group with its

flagrant, highly visible kidnappings and bombings, the rationale

for US military intervention would lose credibility. It is not

secret that the AFP, so much dependent on US Pentagon logistics

and equipment, would not really be able to challenge the NPA, its

perennial military target, as long as the political, economic and

social conditions warrant its existence. US geopolitical strategy

for maintaining hegemony in Asia and around the world requires

its presence in the Philippines, hence the need for ASG’s

terrorist identity and anti-people behavior.

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We can learn more about US ideological rationale from a

U.S.Institute of Peace academic expert Zachary Abuza’s recent

summing-up in response to the April 13 raid on Isabela City, the

capital of the island province of Basilan. Abuza rehearses the

founder’s past as an Afghan mujahidin and the founding of the

group in 1991 “with al-Qa’ida seed money” (Abuza 2010, 11).

Muhammad Jamal Khalifa, an Osama bin Laden connection, and Ramzi

Yousef, famous for plotting the bombing of multiple commercial

airliners, are mentioned to reinforce its international terrorist

standing. ASG orientation changed from being sectarian (1991-

1996) to being purely monetary (2000-2001), with over 140

hostages (16 of whom were killed) ranging from Western tourists,

school children, priests and ordinary people.

Clearly the ASG will never disappear, if not in reality at

least in the media. In 2003-2004, with leaders Abu Sabaya and

Ghalib Andang killed (followed by Abu Solaiman in January 2007),

ASG is tied with the Indonesian terrorist JI as well as with

Malaysian terrorists. It is at this point that the ASG becomes

more frequently associated with the MILF which employs the ASG

for bombing campaigns and also for infiltrating the Sulu

archipelago, mostly controlled by the Tausug-dominaed MNLF.

Despite the loss of its leaders (the latest being Albader Parad),

the ASG keeps coming back like a hydra-headed monster, almost

chameolonic too in adapting to changing environments. Its public

face will metamorphose or metastize relative to the two main

groups, the MNLF and MILF.

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The latest attempt to spread the ASG contagion to other

parties in the region may be gleaned from Abuza’s claim that the

ASG has recruited new combatants from the MNLF under Habier Malik

in March 2007. But the bombings and kidnappings did not subside

in 2008-2009, with two US soldiers killed in the 2009 Jolo

bombing. Philippine generals and Marine commanders all concur

that the ASG has been decapitated and falling apart, even while

attacks are continuing. A new line is being established: the

Pakistani connection. One Abdulabasit Usman was killed by a U.S.

drone attack in Waziristan, the Afghan-Pakistan border. This

Usman is suspected to be a member of the MILP, the JI, ASG, and

also “an independent gun for hire.” Abuza nonetheless states as

a fact that “What is clear is that he worked at times as a bomber

and trainer for both the ASG and MILF.” Thus linkages are at

first hypothesized, posited, and then simply asserted as a

factoid for the record.

The death of Dulmatin occasions the suspicion that al-Qai’da

in Malaysia and Aceh are using the ASG and the MILF as channels

connecting Arab militants and South Asian (Pakistan and

Afghanistan) fighters with southeast Asian organizations. In any

case, the ASG and MILF are now interwoven with Al-Qai’da

operations in the Indonesian-Malaysian region. The MILF has been

accused of harboring Rajah Solaiman (recently labeled “terrorist”

by the US State Department), Pentagon Gang and JI terrorist

agents. Jihadist violence and criminal kidnapping-for-ransom

characterize ASG with close working relations with the MILF and

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disaffected elements of the MNLF. Abuza concludes that despite

its successes, the “Philippine military does not appear to have

the capacity nor the will to finish the job militarily, and the

government’s refusal to develop a holistic peace process in the

southern Philippines….will continue to support the ASG’s ranks”

(2010, 13). The unstated implication is that US military

intervention to advance its own strategic geopolitical-cum-

economic interest, cannot be given up lest the whole battlefront

is lost to anti-systemic Islamic-led extremism. Meanwhile,

Ibrahim Murad of the IMLF warned last August that US troops’

sojourn in Mindanao “only complicates the situation. They are

just simply justifying their presence for terrorist elements”

(News Essentials 2010).

Provisional Inventory

What is the situation now after 13 years of GRP-MILF peace

talks? Let me provide a drastic schematic framework within which

to view the current impasse affecting at least 6-9 million

Muslims (10% of the total population) in over 700 villages,

mainly within the Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).

The 2008 agreement between the GRP and MILF was scrapped in

2008 as “unconstitutional.” The MNLF is deeply factionalized,

with Misuari still in jail. From its official emergence in Nov.

14, 1972, immediately after Marcos’ declaration of martial law,

to Dec. 1976, with the signing of the Tripoli Agreement, and its

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final actualization in the 1996 peace agreement between Fidel

Ramos and Nur Misuari, the MNLF (with 30,000 fighters in 1973-75)

seems to have wasted its decades of lessons and experience.

Misuari’s arrest after the failed Jolo and Zamboanga rebellion in

Nov. 2001 may lead to the gradual exodus of his followers into

the camps of the MILF, the ASG, or even government fronts.

Meanwhile, splitting from the MNLF in 1977, the MILF pursued the

armed struggle under Hashim Salamat as “jihad fi sabilillah (struggle

in the way of Allah)—a sectarian, fundamentalist trend which runs

immanent in the peace negotiations with the Arroyo regime

(Klitzsch 2009). The peace agreement signed on May 7, 2002, with

Arroyo culminated in the Memorandum of Agreement on “Ancestral

Domain” (MOA-AD) and the issue of the Bangsamoro Juridical Entity

(JEC), which was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in

2008. Now, the March peace talks in Kuala Lumpur witnessed a

controversy over the use of the Philippine Constitution and the

Republic’s jurisprudence as the existing legal framework

(requiring amendment) for a revised peace agreement (Balana 2010;

Rosauro 2010). The resort to the internationalist idiom of “self-

determination” (with its Wilsonian, not Leninist precedents) does

not guarantee actual political/military control over territory

and natural resources if it conflicts with the overarching

sovereignty of the neocolonial State. Misuari’s experience in

administering the ARMN fully bears this out (Dela Cruz 2006).

Given the severely uneven development of the region, diverse

class and sectoral interests are involved. The Lumads or

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indigenous ethnic communities have recently mobilized. The

hostility of the Christian landlords, business, comprador, and

foreign corporate fronts in Mindanao rests on varied grounds,

some diehard and some amenable to compromise. The present regime

speaks of course for the US/Washington Consensus, for global

capital and transnational corporate interests and their local

allies, so that unless the MILF addresses this structural and

institutional constraints, the iniquitous status quo will not be

altered in any substantial or meaningful way so as to improve the

material lives of the Moro masses, not to speak of the Lumads and

other indigenous communities.

Meanwhile, notwithstanding the mobilization of 10,000 armed

combatants and several thousand partisans, MILF ascendancy

remains contested, hence their wobbly diplomatic stance. Overall,

the primary cause for persisting armed confrontations is the

absence of any hegemonic (intellectual and moral leadership, in

Gramsci’s sense) power in Mindanao as a whole, though the MNLF

once enjoyed such in the Tausug homeland of Sulu. The MILF has

suffered from a marked opportunism, as evidenced in Salamat’s

January 2003 letter to George Bush “seeking his good offices,”

and the MILF’s assent to allowing the US Institute of Peace

(USIP) to intervene. In fact, by June 2003, the US State

Department laid down its policies for the GRP-MILF peace

negotiations. USIP Philippine Facilitation Project Executive

Director Eugene Martin’s explanation for US involvement deserves

to be quoted here:

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The continued conflict was seen as a source of not only

domestic instability but a potential threat regionally and

even globally. As such, it became part of the war on

terror, although the MILF is not considered a terrorist

organization. Increased military assistance to the AFP and

joint exercises, like Balikatan, were focused on helping the

AFP be more professional and effective against designated

terrorist groups such as the NDF and the Abu Sayyaf Group

(quoted in Santos 2005, 100).

Martin acknowledges that the conflict cannot be solved “by purely

military means,” so he cites the underlying causes—poverty, lack

of development and education, and displacement of Muslims from

ancestral lands—as the reason why the US is involved. This of

course does not overshadow the main concern, “the war on terror.”

Unlike other commentators, Martin does not neglect naming the NDF

together with the ASG as “terrorist organizations.”

In terms of profit-centered Realpolitik, US interest in the

Moro insurgents is designed to coopt this force as much as

possible and manipulate it for geopolitical ends. This does not

preclude its purpose of serving as a pretext or cover for

preparing the ground in suppressing the NDF/NPA as well as the

possibly more dangerous Indonesian and Malaysian affiliates of

al-Qaida/Osama bin Laden. Aside from USIP ideological and

political input, the US has made overtures to the MILF leadership

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on the possibility of using MILF “ancestral domain” for military

bases, to which the MILF leadership replied that “everything is

negotiable.” Astrid Tuminez (2008), a USIP operative, confirms

the US focus on Mindanao as a new “Mecca of terrorism,” a half-

concealed rationale which thus legitimizes the thorough

involvement of the US government in the current peace talks as

well as the regular “Balikatan” war exercises and civic-action

activities of the US military contingent in the Philippines.

Never Again “Benevolent Assimilation”

US dominance, both political, military and ideological,

cannot be discounted. Even those who purport to be neutral or

well-intentioned observers succumb to the fallacy of believing

the US a neutral or benevolent mediator in the conflict. In his

book, Dynamics and Directions of the Grp-MILF Peace Negotiations (2005) that

Soliman Santos Jr., for example, naively claims “that US clout

can play a positive role as guarantor of a just and lasting peace

agreement” even as he admits that for the US the global war on

terrorism is its chief concern.

Terrorism, die-hard separatism, is not necessarily the polar

opposite of compromise and bargaining with the Arroyo regime for

temporary concessions. Like the MNLF, the MILG knows that it

cannot win solely by military means. With the realization that

conventional warfare is not feasible to advance a separatist

project of full independence, esp. with the loss of fixed camps

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(first, the Abubakar camp and then the Buliok Complex) and

millions of their followers displaced and reduced to refugees,

the MILF has shifted to a pragmatic, if somewhat opportunist,

mode of diplomacy. While the aim of Islamization seems to

persist as a cultural identity brand, despite the passing of

Hashim Salamat and his adherence to the Egyptian Muslim

Brotherhood’s doctrine of jihadism {Klitzsch has ably documented

this genealogy of Salamat’s thinking), I think the present MILF

leadership has realized that they cannot deliver immediate

benefits to its ranks and the popular base unless some gains in

the diplomatic/legal front are achieved. While Islamism (jihadist

or merely didactic) appeases those militants vulnerable to the

ASG appeal, the need to produce material rewards is urgent lest

the mass base turn to the MNLF or, even worse, the traditional

Moro oligarchy. The tactical changes may be discerned in the

2004 statement by the MILFG Peace Panel Advisor that the MILF

“strives for a ‘political solution’—‘neither full independence

nor autonomy, ‘but ‘somewhere in between’ “ (quoted in Klitzsch

2009, 166). Murad Ebrahim was also quoted in saying that the

territory they will administer as BJE will be “governed with

Islamic precepts” (Robles 2010). Of course, these may just be

propaganda ploys or publicity subterfuge.

Varying commentaries on the conflict register as symptoms of

disparate theoretical frameworks and axiomatic paradigms. The

common error of mainstream academic scholarship, as well as media

punditry, in this matter—i.e. the failure to locate the Moro

21


struggle within the US global strategy to maintain its imperial

hegemony—stems, of course, from either deliberate advocacy for

neoliberal free-market worldview, or from misguided naivete. The

shift of the intellectual paradigm from leftist or progressive

historicist views to narrow empiricist and even eclectic

postmodernist stances may be perceived in a recent volume edited

by Patricio N. Abinales and Nathan Gilbert Quimpo. With the

single exception of Herbert Docena’s effort to document active

U.S. military collaboration in the war against the Moro

insurgents, the contributors range from the narrow “all politics

is local” stance of Abinales to Quimpo’s endorsement of the view

that the situation in the southern Philippines is a product of

internal causes, with the US as peripheral or not centrally

involved. Quimpo chimes in with Establishment voices that welcome

US intervention. Quimpo harps on the bossist, “patrimonial and

ethnocratic” Philippine state, as though it had no historical

genealogy or political provenance in US colonial and neocolonial

control of the country. He even laments that the US has not

addressed the corruption endemic to a patrimonial state. Quimpo

believes that the USIP is “an independent federal institution”

(2008, 189), while the cynical Abinales celebrates “the fading

away of the US in the postauthoritarian scene” pervaded by

globalization anomie (2008, 199).

In general, the prospect seems bleak to Quimpo and his

associates. In his detailed description of the ASG included in

the volume, the military-affiliated academic Rommel Banlaoi

22


dismisses the solid, irrefutable findings of the 2002

International Peace Mission published in their report, “Basilan:

The Next Afghanistan?” that the ASG is basically the product of

local political and social conditions, in a U.S.neocolony. This

judgment has been meticulously supported by a rich trove of

stories, interviews, and textured accounts of the ASG’s symbiotic

ties with the military, local politicians, and government

bureaucracy in many books published since the ASG appeared, among

them Marites Danguilan Vitug and Glenda Gloria’s Under the Crescent

Moon: Rebellion in Mindanao (2000).

While recognizing that the ASG and other groups are

struggling to solve structural inequity and injustice, as well as

cultural discrimination and the loss of sovereignty, Banloai’s

recommendation is to improve governance into one “more

transparent, accountable, responsive and participatory.” (2008,

145). Meanwhile, Kit Collier rejects the primordialist analysis

for a more instrumental, postmodernist approach, which uses an

ethnographic phenomenological method similar to the

anthropologist Frake’s picture of a contested, ambiguous,

invented identity of the ASG combatant (see Frake 1998; and my

critique in San Juan 2007). All deflect attention away from the

larger global context of US re-tooling of imperial hegemony in

the wake of the end of the Cold War and, in particular, the post-

9/11 “global war on terrorism” launched by George W. Bush and

carried on by Barack Obama.

23


Toward Historical Dialectics

A more serious endeavor to grapple with the vast historical

and political landscape into which the Moro struggle is

inscribed, is the volume The Moro Reader (2008) published by

CENPEG. The volume correctly defines the subordinate role of the

Philippine nation-state to the US and its neoliberal program of

globalization. What is missing is further elaboration of the

concept of “ancestral domain” and the abstract “right of self-

determination” within a rigorous historical-materialist analytic.

I venture a preliminary clearing of the stage for such an inquiry

with a few general propositions/theses.

Only a general review of what is needed can be made

here.While I myself (San Juan 2007) have previously endorsed the

fundamental imperative of solidarity with the Moro aspiration for

independence and separation from the neocolonial domination of

the oligarchic landlord-comprador ruling bloc, I would like to

reformulate my views in light of the more pronounced MILF

ideological doctrine of Islamic evangelical confrontation with

the West (deriving either from Egyptian or Saudi Arabian

traditions). A theoretical reframing is in order.

Progressive activists need to take into account the primacy

given by the MILF and the ASG to Islamization and the project of

an Islamic state patterned after Saudi Arabia, Libya, Egypt and

other Arab countries. Unlike the MNLF program, the MILH (to my

knowledge) has not come up with a thorough analysis of

24


Manila/Christian colonialism, nor its dependence on the imperial

US patron, despite its denunciation of settler greed, injustice,

ethnic discrimination, etc. To my knowledge (I stand corrected),

the MILF has no anti-systemic (anti-capitalist) policy or

operational ideal functioning at present. The marginalization of

the secularly-oriented MNLF and the outright rejection of Marxist

and other socialist-oriented revolutionary ideas aiming for a

class-less society is symptomatic of a retrograde impulse

influencing the actual tactics and strategy for autonomy. Some

have noted the separatist motivation of the Bangsamoro nation to

encourage the development of an autocratic, tributary and highly

hierarchical sociopolitical formation. “Self-determination”

cannot be an absolute principle but must always be historicized

and dialectically apprehended within the manifold determinations

of social historical development of specific formations within a

global context. Can we envisage a popular, democratic civil

society/public sphere flourishing within the Bangsamoro Juridical

Entity?

Of course, the everyday practice of Moro militants yields a

rich complex of data for formulating hypothesis and theoretical

propositions that may engender a socialist-democratic ethos.

Since culture is a creative process, such is theoretically

possible. But empirical data cannot substitute for a valid

theoretical framework. I agree with Kenneth Bauzon (2008) that

the current conjuncture has to be read within the framework of a

resurgent neoliberal restructuring of global capitalism. This is

25


occurring within the US hegemonic “crusade” against Islamic

fundamentalism, or violent extremism, itself framed by the

neoconservative Huntingtonian paradigm of the “clash of

civilizations.” This culturalist interpretation obviates any

structural or systemic critique. This is why the understanding

and theorization of terrorism as a political phenomenon is also

superficial, misleading, and tendentious. It acquires a life of

its own divorced from the analysis of dynamic political forces

(for example, the antagonism between capital and labor) and their

specific agendas and long-range platforms.

Terrorism becomes a political and moral issue when the

political group using it adopts a subjectivist mode of imposing

its will on the masses. When Marx objected to the Jacobin use of

the guillotine as a tactic to impose bourgeois interests on

everyone, instead of developing it within the given conditions,

he was objecting to this means of enforcing the interests of a

particular group/class on the whole society. In opposing the

conspiratorial terrorism of utopian socialists and anarchists,

Marx argued his dialectical stand that “socialist revolution must

develop from within the given social relations and must be

directed to the establishment of universal interests’”(Hansen

1977, 102-103)—the revolutionary process, in short, is not

superadded but inheres within the existing nexus of

sociopolitical relations. Critical analysis of the interaction

between the collective actors and their changing sociopolitical

environment is needed, together with constant appraisals of the

26


direction of the changes of both subject and object of the field

of conflict, to ascertain what can be changed and what cannot—the

possibilities and limits of radical historical transformation in

the multi-layered Philippine setting.

In this context, the MILF goal of claiming the sovereign

power of a Bangsamoro Juridical Entity to rule over “ancestral

domain” has been promoted through both conventional war and

terrorist tactics (as evidenced by links with Jemaah Islamiya,

ASG, and others). Forced to renounce publicly their connections

with such groups, Salamat and the MILF leadership has to resort

to the OIC and the US to enhance its status as a legitimate

political party. Nonetheless, their supreme goal is no longer

secession or a separate independent state, but political power

over a definite territory and its inhabitants via combination of

force and diplomacy. Essentially, it is an attempt to

universalize the Will of a political party—the agent of

historical change--that claims to represent the whole Moro

peoples (across ethnic and class divisions). Now the reality is

that any revolutionary party with a democratic-popular

orientation has to take into account the social-economic reality

and the political alignment of forces both within the

Philippines, the southeast Asian region, and within the

capitalist world-order (global war on terror by the US-led bloc,

including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, etc. against Iraq,

Aghanistan, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and other nation-states).

27


Ultimately, the Moro rebellion has to confront the power of

global capital (at present led by the US power bloc) as the enemy

of genuine Moro sovereignty, freedom and progress in a planetary

habitat of peoples with diverse cultures, religions, histories,

and aspirations.

Self-Determination as Means or End-In-Itself?

The ultimate goal of self-determination cannot be attained

simply by fiat, of course, but by a revolutionary program of

rejecting colonial occupation and imperialist domination. The

MILF rejects the Manila/Christian state and its military forces

and affirms its subjective identity (as the MNLF did in opposing

Marcos and its US patron). However, the MILF does not mediate its

self-proclaimed Islamic identity by the otherness (the concrete

social context of a secular world of commodity-relations) in

which it finds itself. Hence, it imposes on its mass base a view

absorbed from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Islamic centers while

paying lip-service to the history of the anti-colonial struggles

of Moros as a whole. It is thus caught in a unity of

contradictions. “Ancestral domain” tends to be fetishized in its

purely Islamic heritage. An abstract self-affirmation of Islamic

identity (to distinguish it from Christian/Western others)

remains subjectivist/voluntarist as well as

philosophical/idealist, susceptible to terrorist realization. Its

obverse is the positivist or pragmatic dependence on the OIC, the

28


US, and other sponsors that it calculates will advance its self-

identified agenda, given the current volatile contingencies.

From a dialectical stance, the only way to resolve the

contradiction between the subjectivist/voluntarist Islamic self-

identification of the MILF and its objectivist/pragmatist resort

to US/OIC determinants, is to analyse the nature of the unity of

these abstract opposites. In other words, the way to resolve the

contradictions is by way of discovering the universal

logic/principle underlying the project of revolutionary action,

assuming that the MILF is engaged in a revolutionary project of

emancipation of the Moro people’s potential for expressing its

full humanity with others in the world. The past and the present

will have to coalesce to shape the historical agent of change

whose interests are not particular but universal, the interest of

all members of the given society. The search for the

revolutionary class or agent which, from the beginning, is the

necessary condition of the present—that agent which will bring

the future to the present because of its past—is not a

theoretical problem but a practical one: “It is a problem of the

unity of theory and practice, the co-determining conditions of

which are in the present because of the past. Consequently,

whereas the subjectivist [terrorist] desires the restoration of

the past by means of externalizing a particular subjectivity, the

revolutionary needs revolution to realize what is already given

in the present through the past” (Hansen 1977, 108). Hence the

revolutionary agent does not force onto people a particular view

29


because his view is already present (though occluded or

suppressed) in the existing reality.

In Quest of Critical Universality

From a radical-democratic standpoint, the crucial question

then is: what is in the existing reality that needs to be

released or brought to self-realization? What is that emerging

universal within the historical present? To answer this, one

needs to critique the total situation to move beyond the abstract

subjectivist/voluntarist position and the positivist/determinist

one. One needs to achieve a concrete dialectical comprehension

of the whole global capitalist totality. To grasp the concrete

universal immanent in the historical conjuncture, one needs to

generalize the unique condition of the Moro peoples so as to get

beyond the particularity that imperialism/capitalism has imposed

on it. Capitalism is precisely what enables particularism in

social relations and conflicts arising from this, so that the

elimination of distinctions cannot be carried out by presupposing

differences (cultural or religious values, for example) without

unity.

One manifestation of such a unity is perhaps what Muslim

historian-philosopher Cesar Majul had in mind when, at the end of

his scholarly history of the Moro sultanates and the Moro Wars,

he proposed that the Muslim struggle should “be considered part

of the heritage of the Filipino people in the history of their

30


struggle for freedom…part of the struggle of the entire nation”

(1999, 410). If the surveys are to be believed, more Filipinos

now than before (63% in 2005, compared to 43% in 2002) are

sympathetic to the Moro struggle for their right to govern

themselves (Robles 2010).

We are not proposing pluralism or status quo

multiculturalism, a bazaar of affective flux and performative

gestures, either corporate liberalism or individualist

libertarianism, both apparent opposites concretizing the ideology

of bourgeois society based on the division of labor and its

attendant disparities in the distribution of power and resources.

What we are proposing is to free ourselves from this enslaving

ideology that teaches the idea that authentic self-expression

(or, by extension, national self-determination) depends on an

abstract property which guarantees authenticity, freedom,

fulfillment. In short, we are searching for the politicized,

active mass base of the Moro revolution that will universalize

its goals by a thorough critique of global capitalism (led by the

US imperial power) and, in the process, forge organic solidarity

with the entire Filipino people struggling for democratic

socialism. Such a critical universality will resolve the

contradictions between subjectivism and objectivism I have

outlined earlier.

As of now, such a critical universality is absent. One sign

is the lack of a critique of the Moro dynasties and clans and the

property relations characterizing the everyday experience of the

31


Moro peasants, women, workers, youth (Wadi 2008), or of the

prison conditions afflicting Moros in Camp Bagong Diwa (Vargas

2005), not to speak of taking cognizance of analogous Lumad

demands for self-determination over ancestral domains (for Lumad

aspirations, see Rodil 1993). A way of revising the deployment of

the principle of self-determination is proposed by Talal Asad by

distinguishing between the concept of Arab nationalism and a

classical Islamism that contains an element of “critical

universality” by an implicit critique of the secular bourgeois

nation-state. It is necessary to define the narrow bourgeois

nation-state parameters into which the Bangsamoro nation is being

confined. Asad observes:

The fact that the expression umma ‘arabiyya is

used today to denote the “Arab nation” represents a

major conceptual transformation by which umma is cut

off from the theological predicates that gave it its

universalizing power and is made to stand for an

imagined community that is equivalent to a total

political society, limited and sovereign like other

limited and sovereign nations in a secular (social)

world. The ummatu-l-muslimin (the Islamic umma) is

ideologically not “a society” onto which state,

economy, and religion can be mapped. It is neither

limited nor sovereign, for unlike Arab nationalism’s

notion of al-umma-al-arabiyya, it can and should

embrace all of humanity….The main point I underline

32


here is that Islamism’s preoccupation with state power

is the result not of its commitment to nationalist

ideas but of the modern nation-state’s enforced claim

to constitute social identities and arenas (2003, 197-

98, 200).

One inspiring sign of “critical universality” may be found

in the MNLF’s participation in the 1981 Permanent People’s

Tribunal and its solidarity with the NDF and other forces in

opposing US imperialism. At present, it is difficult to say

whether the MILF recognizes the need to achieve a “critical

universality” (Lowy 1998, 78) in its program, policies, and

diplomatic positions. In my view, subject to the pressures and

exigencies of every phase in its negotiations with the GRP and

relations with the OIC and the US, the alternating options of

subjectivist/voluntarist and objectivist/pragmatist handling of

the struggle distinguish the MILF record so far. With

unpredictable dynamic changes in the Islamic world vis-à-vis the

US, the internal antagonisms in the OIC and its relations with

other blocs (Europe, Russia, China), and the advance of the

national-democratic forces in the Philippines, it is not

impossible that the succeeding generation of leaders and rank-

and-file militants will respond to the need for articulating that

critical universality without which the revolutionary project of

collective emancipation will remain doomed to repeat the horrors

of the past and miseries of the present.

33


The Prospectt Before Us

The Moro people’s struggle in the Philippines for national

self-determination has placed under critical interrogation the

hallowed theories of cultural pluralism, liberal tolerance, and

muticulturalism that continue to legitimize the domination of

diverse ethnic groups under elite control in contemporary

Filipino society. Bourgeois political norms and laws have led

since colonial times to the severe dispossession, exclusion, and

utter impoverishment of the Moro people as a distinct historical

community united under Islamic faith and an uninterrupted history

of preserving its relative autonomy through various modes

(collective, familial, personal) of anticolonial resistance.

Since the Spanish (1621-1898) and American colonial period (1899-

1946) up to the present Arroyo government’s neocolonial polity

subservient to U.S. hegemony, the Moro people have suffered

national, class, and religious oppression. The Moro insurgents

are labeled “terrorists” and stigmatized daily by the media,

schools, Christian churches, and international business. They

tend to be lumped with the Abu Sayyaf bandits, wholly a product

of gangsterism involving the military, police, local officials,

and the central government bureaucracy. It is the obligation of

Filipino Marxists and progressive organizations around the world

to recognize the Moro people’s right to self-determination and

offer solidarity. In my book US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines

34


(2007), I have tried to express this solidarity by a preliminary

critique of neoliberal ideology, including sectarian ultra-

leftism, that apologizes for, and foments overtly and covertly,

the genocidal wars currently raging in the Moro homelands of

southern Philippines. This paper is an attempt to explore the

theoretical and practical limits of “self-determination” as a

political strategy when, in this specific conjuncture, U.S.

imperial manipulations are defining this Wilsonian principle for

its own hegemonic interests. I propose that a historical-

materialist socialist perspective (following Lenin’s use of the

principle of the right of nations to self-determination), with

modifications as suggested by Talal Asad, be pursued and

developed in the light of the singular historical circumstances

of the BangsaMoro struggle against local compradors, landlords,

and bureaucrat-capitalists allied with the U.S. imperial hegemon

and its transnational criminal accomplices. At the least, we need

to pursue the ideals of justice and principled solidarity with

all oppressed peoples who have long been victimized by global

capitalism and the neoliberal market in the name of the global

North’s deadly ideas of freedom, democracy, and cosmopolitan

progress.

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ABU SAYYAF & BANGSAMORO STRUGGLE: A Background to the Mamasapano Encounter

Documents