Jihad Threat Looms If Negotiations Fail; Mindanao Rebels Are Losing Patience

By Carlos H. Conde

This article first appeared in the October 13, 2004, issue of the International Herald Tribune

DARANAPAN, the Philippines: Like thousands of young Muslim guerrillas in the southern Philippines, 19-year-old Manex Ulam believes that his jihad, his participation in a decades-old struggle to carve out an Islamic niche for Filipino Muslims on an island dominated by Christians, is just.

“My parents taught us that unless we are free as a people, we shouldn’t do anything else during our lifetime but to be in this jihad,” Ulam said. About half a dozen of his comrades in the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, brandishing Armalite rifles and grenade launchers but some wearing only flip-flop slippers, nodded in agreement. Ulam said he joined the MILF, as the front is known here, when he was only 10 years old.

The future of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and Mindanao, the region in the southern Philippines that has been the hotbed of Islamic separatism, is in the hands of young Muslims like Ulam. They want to see the peace process between the front and Manila succeed, but no one but the government should be blamed if it fails, Ulam said.

He is understandably wary: After years of negotiations, the government and the front are still trying to figure out a suitable solution to the conflict in Mindanao. In the meantime, a new generation of Islamic guerrillas like Ulam is getting impatient and, according to analysts and the front’s chairman, Al Haj Murad Ebrahim, could get more radical.

Murad, 54, fears that terrorist groups such as Jemaah Islamiyah, the Southeast Asian network of extremists with links to Al Qaeda, could exploit a failure by both sides to reach a settlement.

“It is in the best interest of the Philippine government and the United States to find a solution to the Mindanao problem,” Murad said during an interview in this camp about 880 kilometers, or 545 miles, south of Manila.

He said the United States was afraid that if a peace agreement was not reached, terrorism could worsen in Mindanao.

In an earlier interview with Reuters, Murad said: “There is now a process of changing from our generation to the younger generation. Most of them were exposed to the war, the violence of the war.

“We are afraid the younger generation would be more radical.”

According to Philippine authorities, Jemaah Islamiyah penetrated the Moro Islamic Liberation Front beginning in the late 1990s, using its contacts with some of the front’s members whom the Jemaah Islamiyah operatives had met in Islamic schools in Pakistan.

These operatives conducted training inside the front’s camps, officials said.

One of them later conspired with a front member to launch a series of bombings in Manila in December 2000 that killed more than a dozen people, Filipino officials said.

The International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based research organization that has studied the front, warned in July this year that the radicalization of front guerrillas through Jemaah Islamiyah was putting Mindanao at even greater risk.

“The most significant threat of all for the Philippines and the wider region is the possibility of international terrorism and domestic insurgency becoming ever more closely interwoven and mutually reinforcing,” it said in a report.

This, it added, “lends new urgency to the quest for peace” in Mindanao.

“Genuine and fully implemented autonomy for Philippine Muslims is a sine qua non in winning the long-term war on terror in Mindanao,” it said.