The way of terrorists

The way of terrorists


Posted 11:15pm (Mla time) Feb 15, 2005
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the February 16, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer



BY MAKING common cause with a faction of the Moro National Liberation Front loyal to Nur Misuari, the Abu Sayyaf apparently sought to gain recognition and support, if not respectability, as a revolutionary group among Muslim Filipinos. Since last week, the bandit group, which achieved international notoriety by boldly raiding plush resorts and kidnapping foreign tourists and Filipinos and beheading some of the hostages, has been fighting alongside a so-called MNLF breakaway group against government troops. The group said it was fighting to obtain justice for the killing of a couple and their 14-year-old boy.

As the fighting escalated and civilians were forced to flee their homes, several local leaders called on the government to declare a ceasefire and start negotiating with the group. Such a call would have been unthinkable just a few weeks back. Until the Abu Sayyaf joined forces with the MNLF faction, there was nothing in its past that would allow it to claim any revolutionary credentials, except its own rhetoric. With its long record of kidnappings, beheadings, torture and bombings, the group was considered widely as nothing more than a greedy and bloodthirsty bunch of criminals. After 9/11, the governments of both the Philippines and the United States classified it as a terrorist organization, and few people disagreed.

The fighting in Sulu put the Abu Sayyaf in a new light. By painting it as a fight for justice, it seemed to be well on the way to winning the sympathy and respect of moderate Muslim leaders in the south, who urged the government to stop its attacks on the combined Abu Sayyaf-MNLF forces.

The series of bombings last Monday, however, has blown to pieces any political gains the Abu Sayyaf may have achieved from its alliance with a faction of the MNLF. The blasts that left 11 people dead in General Santos City, Davao and Makati killed its chances of being acknowledged even by Muslims as a group that speaks for them and works for their well-being.

But the Abu Sayyaf leadership is either unaware of this or it has learned to love the sound of bombs and the sight of blood too much to care. Minutes after the last explosion rocked Makati, its spokesman Abu Solayman gloated in a statement he read over a radio station that the bombings were their "Valentine gift to Gloria," in reference to President Macapagal-Arroyo. "We will find more ways to inflict damage," he warned the Filipino people. "Grieve and mourn your dead. We will make no distinction between civilians [and soldiers]."

That is the way of terrorists, of course, and the Abu Sayyaf has time and again practiced what it preached, grabbing women and schoolchildren, torturing and killing preachers and foreign tourists, bombing ports and passenger boats. Even that reference to gifting the President with dead bodies was a mere rehash of what it said after beheading the American hostage, Guillermo Sobero, four years ago.

Obviously the Abu Sayyaf has never changed its ideology of violence and terror. What is rather surprising is that some other groups would think otherwise. Now that it has again shown its true colors, the Abu Sayyaf has alienated the people of Mindanao who have grown weary of the war as well as the Muslims who have come to resent the use of their religion as an excuse for bringing death and injury to so many innocent people.