Very few outsiders ever venture into the Liguasan marshes, the remote inland sea which stretches across hundreds of square miles of the southern Philippine island of Mindanao. These marshes, for the most part approachable only by jungle tracks and navigable by shallow-bottomed boats, form the perfect hiding place for criminal gangs which make a good living by kidnapping businessmen from nearby towns and cities.
The Liguasan marshes also provide a base for the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), an insurgency which claims to speak for the native Bangsamoro people who were living in the Philippines long before the Spanish invasion in the 16th century. Despite repeated assaults, which have intensified in recent years, the Bangsamoro have never been conquered. These Islamic rebels assert that they are affiliated to the rest of the Philippines neither by history, race, language, geography nor religion. Their implacable demand is for autonomy over what they call their ancestral domain.
Last summer the Bangsamoro almost achieved their ambition. President Arroyo, 700 miles to the north in Manila, was within hours of signing an agreement that would have granted self-government. At the last minute it was blocked in the constitutional court after a challenge from a group of well-connected Christian settlers, many of who had travelled south to acquire Bangsamoro land after the second world war.
Fighting broke out at once. MILF commanders swept through Christian areas, wreaking widespread destruction. Government forces responded in kind. In some districts the army recruited allies by arming militias as a bulwark against the Muslim raiders. According to human rights groups, 600,000 people have been displaced over the past 12 months. But nobody really knows. The world has turned a blind eye to the southern Philippines, mainly out of indifference and in part because reporting was too dangerous.
Then, at the end of July, the government and rebel forces agreed a ceasefire. The resulting lull in the fighting gave director/cameraman George Waldrum and I the chance to penetrate the war zone. Travelling through the marshes and deep into the jungle, we found evidence of barbarity perpetrated by all sides. But we sensed something ominous.
The conflict in the southern Philippines is starting to mutate. For the last half century there have been many killings and much intercommunal violence. But essentially this has been a conflict about local issues: land, neighbourhood vendettas and clan disputes, all shaped by the ancient claim of the Bangsamoro people to self-determination.
Now the war is turning into a 21st-century war of religion. As it does so, the techniques of this long-standing insurgency have also become disturbingly contemporary. For decades the MILF, whose 12,000 fighting soldiers have been based in camps in the jungle or on islands in the Liguasan marshes, has been content to fight a conventional low-intensity civil war.
There is now reason to speculate that, driven by a new fanaticism, a cell structure is emerging in the urban areas. This year there has been an epidemic of roadside bombs, some aimed at conventional military targets, others intended to massacre civilians. Philippine army officers told us that the ‘special operations group’ of the MILF was receiving training and cooperation from Jemaah Islamiya, the al-Qa’eda-linked terror group blamed for the murder of 202 people in the Indonesian island of Bali seven years ago. If this connection is true, then the struggle in the southern Philippines may indeed be about to enter a new and terrifying stage.
We started our investigation, however, in the rural districts, where the bulk of the violence had reportedly taken place. Driving south from the regional capital of Cotabato City, we came across scenes of devastation, with burnt or destroyed houses by the side of the road. Philippine soldiers manning one of the frequent checkpoints had provocatively turned one ruined mosque into their barracks, with washing lines strung up outside.
We turned off the road and, leaving our car, plunged into the jungle towards the village of Nunungan, accompanied by villagers who were taking advantage of the truce to return home for the first time since their houses were destroyed in May. They told us how the army had launched a three-day-long attack, using howitzer and mortar fire to force them to flee. Then the troops systematically destroyed every single house in the centre of what had obviously been a prosperous village. One woman, Ida, had run the local pharmacy store, sleeping upstairs with her parents. Now only the foundation stones remained, though the ground was still scattered with phials of medicine. Our guides told us we could not stay long because of the kidnap gangs.
The villagers — all of them Muslim — said they had been attacked because MILF troops often passed through. Now they live in a makeshift encampment by the main road, some miles away. Many villages, we were told, had suffered a similar fate.
By contrast the Christian areas we visited were still inhabited. Loreto Cabaya, mayor of Aleosan north, which lies on the far side of the marshes from Nunungan, proudly took us round his defences. There were trenches, barricades and bunkers. His pièce de résistance was a M30-calibre second world war machine-gun, which he said had been given him by the army. It was aimed at some Muslim houses about 15 yards away. He told us that MILF had launched attacks ‘on many occasions’ from this direction over the previous 12 months, and succeeded in burning down 200 Christian homes.
Well dressed, and with near-perfect English, Cabaya told us that ‘we are always under siege. The conflict here is about the land — it’s just like Israel and Palestine.’ He had 500 militia men under his command, mainly local farmers. They received some arms from the government, but he told us they got most of their training from watching Hollywood movies. Some of the most murderous-looking soldiers wore Christian amulets — radiant depictions of the Virgin Mary, the Last Supper or favourite saints — which they believed to protect them from bullets. One seasoned fighter, Juanin, told us that in the 1970s he had served under a notable warlord, Commander Toothpick, whose atrocities have been widely documented. Juanin recalled cutting off the ears of dead Muslims, frying them and eating them, washed down with beer. He told us that he made no distinction between ordinary Muslims and Muslim combatants. Recently, so he said, seven of his relations had been killed in a sectarian attack, so he felt that when he killed Muslims he was simply doing the right thing.
Wherever we travelled through the war zone we met victims of this brutal, arbitrary conflict housed in temporary encampments by the main roads. They told us they had been driven from their homes by the Philippine army. In one pathetic shack in Datu Odin we found a 46-year-old farmer, Kaytm, with his 38-year-old wife Tambayn. They told us how, one lunchtime, their village had come under air attack.
Kaytm’s brother, his wife and their five children fled by boat but were killed. Kaytm and his family crept through the jungle and eventually escaped. From time to time they have tried to return to their village, but it is too dangerous and in any case their homes and livestock have been destroyed. Kaytm told us that the conflict in Mindanao is a religious war. ‘The Christians want to exterminate us, or convert us,’ he said. ‘But that cannot happen. I was born a Muslim and I will die a Muslim.’
The evacuation camps are by no means safe. There have been many reports of abductions by Philippine army troops. At Datu Odin we met Sarah (she asked us to change her name) who told us that her husband had been seiz ed by soldiers on the way back from collecting food rations. Witnesses told her that he was hit with rifle butts, slashed with blades, handcuffed, and shoved into a military vehicle. Some five days later his dead body was discovered on a river bank. She showed us the shirt, filled with slits caused by knives, that he was wearing when he died.
These atrocities are committed by all sides. In one Christian village a woman named Carmela took us to the house she and her husband had built and where they had raised five children. One morning, while she was preparing breakfast, Carmela heard gunfire. Going to the door, she saw her husband rushing towards her pursued by armed men. They gathered up their children and ran.
They escaped, though their home was destroyed. Her father, who was planting maize in a nearby field, was killed. Her mother tried to run away, but was shot in the back. The raiders abducted her brother — his dead body was discovered later. Tears streaming down her face, Carmela told us that her family had no enemies, were involved in no land disputes, and that the only explanation she could think of for the massacre was that they were Christian.
Wherever we went, we heard testimony of this kind. One beautiful young Muslim woman, Itam, described how her husband had been lynched when he went to sell fish in a Christian village. ‘I know it isn’t the right thing to say,’ she told us, ‘but when my sons grow up I want them to carry out a retaliation attack on the vigilantes who killed my husband.’
Peace is still possible. The Arroyo government wants it, so do its American sponsors. But powerful vested interests — above all the Christian farmers and landowners who stand to lose everything if an agreement is signed — are opposed.
But consider this: MILF’s commanders have been intermittently at war for 40 years. They are growing old and they want peace. Their demands are moderate. They do not want independence, just jurisdiction over what everyone agrees is ancestral Bangsamoro land. If a deal were struck today they would, just about, have the authority to enforce peace.
But their power is waning. A new generation is emerging. Younger, hungrier men, schooled in the vilest techniques of international terror, are already at work. Rival organisations, evil and ruthless, are competing for popular support. The MILF leadership too, is starting to split between moderate and die-hard factions. By the time we left fighting was breaking out once more between rogue MILF commanders and army-backed militias.
One bomb was placed outside the cathedral in Cotabato City, primed to go off as worshippers were leaving the service, designed to create a fresh wave of sectarian hatred. Six people were killed, 49 injured. When we talked to the survivors nobody was sure who did it — MILF’s so-called special operations group or sinister local interests determined to end all hope of peace. There is a terrible danger that the Liguasan marshes, so long a relatively tranquil backwater in George W. Bush’s misbegotten war on terror, may soon gain international notoriety.