Looking for Trouble

Philippines faces more than just natural calamities

The Philippines is frequently in the news these days, primarily because of two recent typhoons – Ketsana and Parma – which killed more than 850 people and displaced hundreds of thousands.

Today reports say Typhoon Lupit is expected to make landfall around the far northern tip of the main island of Luzon by Thursday and it may be even stronger than the earlier storms.

Natural calamities always seem to get a lot of coverage. Those created by people often don’t.

The Philippines has been dealing with two armed conflicts that have been a major drain on its economic and political life, not to mention the deaths and destruction these conflicts have brought to the people.

The first is a rebellion throughout the islands led by the New People’s Army, the military wing of the Philippines’ Communist Party. The NPA, formed in 1969, has undergone a lot of changes, politically and materially since then – reportedly shrinking from a maximum of 25,000 guerrillas to about 4,000 now – but it continues to fight for what it calls a more democratic form of government. The Philippine government has been intermittently (and sometimes half-heartedly) attempting to negotiate a peace treaty with the NPA for years.

The second conflict is with Muslim guerrillas, primarily in the southern islands of the Philippines. Muslims have been struggling for their independence for several centuries, dating back to the first colonization of the islands by Spain, which called them “Moros” after the Moors of Northern Africa. The name stuck.

The United States battled Filipino rebels, including Moros, during our colonization of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War of 1898. We didn’t give up control until July 4, 1946. And then it was in name only. The U.S. continues to play a major role there politically, militarily and economically.

Today, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front is continuing the struggle, although a small region in the south has attained autonomy – the provinces of Maguindanao, Lanao del Sur, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi. For the moment a truce between the guerrillas and government troops is holding, but only a few months ago the two sides clashed in battles that killed hundreds.

Recently the MILF asked the United States for help in ending the conflict. Ghazali Jaafar, MILF vice-chairman for political affairs, said in a statement they are asking the U.S. government to help resolve the root cause of the Moro conflict, which, he claimed, began after the U.S. government – during the colonial years – failed to recognize the Moro people’s aspirations for self-rule.

I met Ghazali Jaafar in the jungles of Mindanao in 1979, describing him as an “affable and eloquent politician” for a story I wrote on the Moros and the NPA for Mother Jones. It never occurred to me that he would still be at it 30 years later or that both conflicts would still be unresolved.

Maybe the Philippines would be a great place for President Obama to start living up to his Nobel Peace Prize.