There is nothing grand about Manila's Lumba Ranao Grand Mosque. A two-storey grey-brick building with a gold-painted dome, star and crescent moon, the mosque sits in the middle of a grassy field on reclaimed land by Manila Bay. Around it, some 300 Muslims live in shacks made from rice sacks, pieces of discarded wood and sheets of plastic. There is no water, no electricity and the toilet is a polluted creek nearby.
These are just some of the thousands of Muslims displaced by 40 years of unrest in the southern Philippines. Last year, 1,500 families lived here, but most of them fled when local government demolition crews attacked the settlement, destroying homes, burning a foot bridge and ripping down the outer walls of the mosque. "We told them that if they entered the mosque we would declare jihad. We'd had enough and were prepared to die if necessary," said Abdelmanan Tanandato, 46, the president of the mosque.
"Many of the residents now live in pushcarts on the streets, selling cigarettes and candy just to get enough money to eat. They are afraid to come back to the mosque," he said. For Mr Tanandato, there is nowhere else to go, and the prospect of returning to his home in Lanao del Norte, in the Muslim region of Mindanao, appears to have been extinguished since rebels from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) began attacking Christian towns and villages earlier this month.
Since the violence first erupted two weeks ago, more than 160,000 people have been made homeless. More than 30 civilians, including children, have been killed, homes have been burnt, pharmacies looted and banks robbed. Earlier this week, Abdurahman Macapaar, the MILF rebel leader, better known as Commander Bravo, declared "all out war" against the Manila government. Speaking on local radio, he said: "We are prepared to kill and be killed. What the Muslims want is Islamic justice in Mindanao."
In reply, government troops claimed on Thursday to have overrun Camp Bilal, a MILF stronghold near two remote villages on Mindanao, forcing Bravo to retreat. The camp had been used as a base to launch raids over the past month. The intense fighting comes after real hopes that a peace settlement might soon be reached. After a decade of stop-start negotiations, the government and the MILF, the country's largest Islamic rebel group, agreed last month on the boundaries of a proposed Muslim homeland, a dream that has been at the heart of the Muslim debate for decades.
Although Muslims account for only six per cent of the 90 million mainly Roman Catholic population, Mindanao was once predominately Muslim, long before the Spanish arrived in 1564 and colonised the islands. Most Muslims believe the agreement would have brought peace to Mindanao and ended four decades of violence, which has left more than 120,000 people dead. But for Christians and many of the country's politicians, it was seen as a recipe for disaster, with people in mainly Christian towns taking to the streets and venting their anger at what they saw as a betrayal by the government.
Rene Azurin, a columnist for the BusinessWorld newspaper, went as far as saying that the deal was like "the Americans giving the descendants of Geronimo and his Apaches exclusive ownership of Arizona and New Mexico. The deal is nothing less than a surrender." On Aug 4, a day before the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD) was due to be signed in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, a number of petitions were filed in the Supreme Court of the Philippines calling for a temporary restraining order against any further move on the document. The court issued the order, throwing a cloud over the future of the agreement and an even darker shadow over Mindanao.
Pacific Strategies and Assessments, a political and risk consultancy, said in a report this week that it doubted whether the MOA would bring any closure to the struggle in Mindanao. "With the recent outpouring of vehement opposition against the MOA, forcing its implementation could potentially worsen animosity between Christians and Muslims in Mindanao," it said. "The MOA's implementation would require a change to the Philippine Constitution - a complicated initiative requiring widespread support and significant political posturing. In true Philippine fashion, however, consideration of the MOA and subsequent technicalities surrounding a potential charter change will dominate headlines and political debates for weeks and months."
During arguments last week on the legality of the agreement, Justice Adolf Azcuna said the MOA-AD, "on its face, is patently illegal under our present laws". Bravo and Ameril Umbra Kato, MILF commanders who have been ordered by the group's leadership to stand down, believe it was the government's intention that the agreement would fail. In its 333-year occupation of the Philippine Islands, Spain failed to bring the Muslims of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago into the fold, choosing instead to leave them alone.
All that changed in 1898, when Spain was defeated in the American-Spanish war. The US took over the Philippines and launched a campaign to tame the Muslims that, in many ways, helped to sow the seeds for today's problems. Millions of Christians from Luzon were encouraged, first by the American colonisers and then by successive Philippine governments, to move to the fertile lands of Mindanao to farm, further marginalising the local Muslim population.
In less than 70 years, the Muslims of Mindanao became a political, demographic and landowning minority on land they had dominated for centuries. The movement for a homeland started peacefully in 1968 with the establishment of the Muslim Independence Movement, but erupted into full-scale war after the massacre of Muslim soldiers who were being trained secretly near Manila by Ferdinand Marcos, the late dictator, to take Sabah back for the Philippines from Malaysia.
Manila still has a claim on Sabah in the international courts. The massacre gave birth to the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), led by Nur Misuari. At the time many saw the war in the south as Marcos's Vietnam. A peace deal in 1976 fell through, and it was not until 1996 that an agreement was finally reached and a pact signed. Part of the agreement called for the establishment of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), comprising the Muslim provinces of Basilan, Sulu, Tawi-Tawi, Lanao del Sur and Maguindanao.
At the time, it was heralded as a breakthrough and gave the MNLF leaders a chance to show that they could govern themselves, but the ARMM has been a miserable failure and is one of the poorest provinces in the Philippines. Misuari failed to deliver the new dawn for which Muslims were hoping. After years of corruption and poor management, he was thrown out by the Manila government and, after a failed rebellion, is still awaiting trial.
Today, the MNLF is split into factions and has become marginalised as a political force. Misuari even failed to be elected governor in a Muslim stronghold during last year's midterm elections. The MILF, advocating a more Islamic identity-based approach to the Muslim struggle, formally split from the MNLF in the early 1980s. Led by the Islamic scholar Salamat Hashim, the MILF refused to sign the 1996 peace agreement. Its leaders instead began their own talks with the government in 1997, but these were suspended after the disgraced former president Joseph Estrada launched an "all-out war" against the MILF in 2000.
Peace talks restarted under President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in 2001, with the Malaysian government mediating and the US playing an active role behind the scenes. In 2003, the MILF signed a ceasefire and Malaysia sent monitors into Muslim Mindanao to keep the warring sides apart. Except for the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and a few Muslim nations, the international community largely ignored the Mindanao conflict, even during the mid-1990s, when evidence started to emerge that al Qa'eda was establishing a base in the Philippines.
Al Qa'eda-linked activities in the Philippines have included plots to assassinate Pope John Paul II during his January 1995 visit to Manila and a conspiracy to blow up a dozen airliners flying from Asia to the US. Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law lived in Mindanao and funded al Qa'eda-related networks there, but it was not until after the September 11 attacks on the US in 2001 that Washington began to grow concerned that Mindanao could become a training ground and sanctuary for international terrorists and expanded its military assistance to the Philippine government.
US special forces are on permanent rotations in the southern Philippines, training local troops in anti-terrorist operations and hunting down members of the Indonesian Jemaah Islamiyah and the local Abu Sayyaf Group. For a few years, the Philippines became a major focus of the global war on terror but, while much was made of the possible links to international terror, many analysts believe the threat is no longer there.
Nevertheless, America has remained keenly engaged in the region. During the peace talks with the MILF, the US had four former ambassadors to the Philippines - Richard Murphy, Stephen Bosworth, Frank Wisner and Richard Solomon - acting as senior advisers. The precise nature of US involvement has been shrouded in mystery and has led to a number of conspiracy theories. The political commentator Antonio Abaya believes America has two interests in Mindanao: stopping the spread of Islamic terrorism and frustrating China's growing dominance in the region.
The agreement, which offered so much hope, is now in tatters. The government is desperately trying to keep the peace process on track, as is the MILF leadership, but the organisation's leaders are finding it difficult to convince the rank and file that the pact can be saved. As far as Mr Tanandato is concerned, "the only way peace will ever come to Mindanao is when the rightful inhabitants are given their land back ... it's as simple as that."
Sitting on a plastic chair on a dirt floor, he drags hard on his menthol cigarette and says: "Just look around you: why should we have to live like this? "The people here are all from Lanao del Norte and they have relatives caught up in the current fighting. Even in Manila you cannot escape the pain," he says. The young Muslims sitting near him nod in agreement. Outside, children laugh and play, oblivious to the uncertain nature of their future.
estephenson@thenational.ae
