YESTERDAY MORNING on the island of Jolo in the southern Philippines, 200 Muslim separatists laid siege to an army outpost. The attackers, however, were not part of Abu Sayyaf, the terrorist group currently holding two Americans hostage. They were supporters of the much larger Moro National Liberation Front (the MNLF; Filipino Muslims are called Moros). By day’s end, the government reported that the raid on Camp Asturias was neutralized, and that 52 of the attackers had been killed. But the true crisis has only just begun. For the past month, the Philippine military has been bragging about its successes against Abu Sayyaf, whittling its membership from 2,000 to roughly 450. But with yesterday’s assault, which breached a 1996 peace accord, the government faces perhaps several thousand Muslim insurgents. Nur Misuari, outgoing governor of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, founder of the MNLF, has refused to be outgoing: He considers the upcoming election in his region a violation of the peace accord and told his followers the accord was dead. It is not certain at the moment exactly how involved Misuari was in the latest attack. One thing many officials believe: The raid was timed to embarrass Philippine president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who meets with President Bush in Washington today. When asked if the attack would cut short her trip, Arroyo was undeterred. She told her defense secretary to strike back at “whatever group is launching the attacks.” But would she actually be willing to go to war against the Moro National Liberation Front and all of its members? If the military cannot even defeat Abu Sayyaf–Arroyo described them as “a money-crazed gang of criminals”–how much worse would a conflict be against more than a thousand well-armed Muslim rebels? The result of Arroyo’s meeting with Bush will probably be increased aid, debt relief, and special training of the Philippine army by American military advisers–but no actual U.S. combat troops. Arroyo has, in fact, been downplaying the terrorist threat emanating from the Philippines, even telling CNN that the al Qaeda network is no longer active in her country. Her national security adviser, Roilo Golez, told the New York Times, “We have no evidence that Abu Sayyaf has gotten financing from bin Laden recently. Otherwise, they would not have to resort to kidnapping.” Ask Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the al Qaeda connection and you get an entirely different answer. At a press briefing yesterday, he told a reporter, “There is no question but that there has been a good deal of interaction between the terrorists in the Philippines and the al Qaeda and people in Iraq and people in other terrorist-sponsoring states over the years.” A senior official in the Bush administration seconded that, telling me that “just in the last few years, more than 5,000 Muslims from the Middle East came to Cebu in the central Philippines–and that’s not even where the Moros are concentrated. It’s becoming the place where they can just lie low for a while.” Admittedly, the Arroyo administration has lately been getting tough on terrorism. Last July, seven Saudis were turned back at the international airport in Manila because they couldn’t say why they wanted to visit the country. And of course there was the plot to assassinate the pope, foiled in 1995 when bomb-making material exploded in a Manila apartment. One of the residents, Abdul Hakim Murad, confessed to the plot (after a “torturous” interrogation by Manila police), while his roommate, Ramzi Yousef, wanted for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was later arrested in Pakistan. But things have been anything but quiet since then. In the last two years, 13 Western tourists have been kidnapped, including three Americans. Two of those Americans are still being held–the other was beheaded. Whether or not al Qaeda is still funding the Abu Sayyaf, its outpost of terror has been successfully established. And if the MNLF has struck an alliance with Abu Sayyaf, which the military firmly believes, then the government may be facing an influx of several thousand more Muslim insurgents. The war on terrorism in the Philippines may get a lot worse before it gets better. President Arroyo would be wise to ask Bush for more than just the training of her troops. Victorino Matus is assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
