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-
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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
San Juan /Abu Sayyarf
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
San Juan /Abu Sayyarf
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
San Juan /Abu Sayyarf
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
San Juan /Abu Sayyarf
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
San Juan /Abu Sayyarf
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
San Juan /Abu Sayyarf
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
San Juan /Abu Sayyarf
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
San Juan /Abu Sayyarf
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
San Juan /Abu Sayyarf
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
San Juan /Abu Sayyarf
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
San Juan /Abu Sayyarf
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
San Juan /Abu Sayyarf
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
San Juan /Abu Sayyarf
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
San Juan /Abu Sayyarf
(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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