Philippines overruns base of Abu Sayyaf militants

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: August 19, 2007

MANILA: The Philippine military said Sunday that it had overrun an elaborate base of operations constructed by Abu Sayyaf insurgents on the southern island of Basilan.

Lieutenant Colonel Ariel Caculitan, a marine spokesman, told Reuters that the base was seized after a protracted firefight Saturday morning that left 15 troops and at least 20 militants dead. The facility was laced with underground bunkers, tunnels and well-developed trenches, Caculitan said.

The military operation on Basilan was prompted by an encounter there July 10, when insurgents killed 14 members of the Philippine Marines who marched into a village known to be an Abu Sayyaf stronghold. Ten marines were later found beheaded.

In the past month, the government has increased the number of troops on Basilan and the adjacent island province of Sulu to more than 12,000, the biggest such deployment since 2001.

“The firefight is ongoing,” Lieutenant Colonel Bartolome Bacarro said in a news briefing Saturday. “Our troops are now concentrating in the area. We will press on with the fight.”

In 2002, the United States sent hundreds of troops to Basilan to help Philippine troops destroy Abu Sayyaf, a terrorist group with alleged links to Jemaah Islamiyah, the Southeast Asian terrorist network responsible for several attacks in the region since 2001, including the 2002 nightclub bombings in Bali.

Since then, both Washington and Manila have routinely claimed success on Basilan, saying that top Abu Sayyaf leaders had been killed and the group’s military infrastructure largely neutralized on the island. They also claimed to have reduced the risk of a resurgence through a campaign to win over the local population with nonmilitary development assistance.

In Basilan, U.S. and Filipino forces worked together “to eradicate Abu Sayyaf group havens on the island through a combination of civil-military operations and improved counterterrorism coordination,” Henry Crumpton, Washington’s counterterrorism chief, said during a news conference in Manila in October 2005. “This model offers a highly successful example of what we can do together.”

According to the Philippine military, the number of Abu Sayyaf fighters on Basilan has steadily dwindled to about 200 last year from a high of more than 1,000 in 2000. Both governments credited the nonmilitary assistance program provided by Washington, which built bridges, schools and clinics throughout the island, with winning the hearts and minds of Basilan people.

The recent resurgence of Abu Sayyaf activity there, however, has raised questions about the reality of these gains. Some analysts specializing in the region said the Basilan campaign had been prematurely curtailed in 2003 when the bulk of military resources were shifted to Sulu, where Abu Sayyaf militants are also active.

Zachary Abuza, a specialist in Southeast Asian terrorism at Simmons College in Massachusetts who is writing a book on Islamic separatism in the Philippines, said the Sulu campaign had much more support from Washington, which maintains an undetermined number of troops on the island.

“I think the U.S. and armed forces of the Philippines have thrown everything they have into Jolo,” he said in an interview, referring to the main island in Sulu Province. “They are thin elsewhere.”

When in January the Philippines announced that it was pulling troops from other provinces and sending them to Basilan, Abuza said, “that was a clear indication that things were not going as well there as everyone was saying.”

“I don’t think that what the armed forces of the Philippines and the U.S. did in Basilan was a failure,” Abuza said, but they departed hastily.

Earlier this month, the Philippine military suffered its highest casualties in recent years during separate battles on Jolo Island with fighters suspected of belonging to Abu Sayyaf. Twenty-seven soldiers were killed in those clashes.

Western officials, speaking before the fighting Saturday, warned against gauging success in the Basilan theater by the beheading incident alone.

“The government’s system in Basilan is now functioning,” said a senior Western military official, who asked not to be identified because he is not authorized to provide public assessments of the U.S. military effort.

A Western aid official, who also asked not be named, said of Basilan: “Most people there think that they’re much better off today. Their lives are improving. They have health care.”

But the continued presence of Abu Sayyaf on Basilan could prove embarrassing both for Manila and Washington, according to Abhoud Syed Lingga, executive director of the Institute of Bangsamoro Studies, which researches issues concerning Filipino Muslims.

“Exactly what benchmark did the government use in determining success in its operations against the Abu Sayyaf in Basilan?” Lingga asked in an e-mail exchange. “If the measure is the Abu Sayyaf’s absence, they can come back after the military operations were over.”

Basilan’s congressman and former governor, Wahab Akbar, said this month that 80 percent of Muslims in Basilan supported Abu Sayyaf, although Lingga said a more accurate way to put it might be that “80 percent tolerate the presence of the Abu Sayyaf” on an island that had always been racked by lawlessness and saddled by poverty.

English getting lost in translation in Philippines

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: August 13, 2007

MANILA: “We grow our hogs in our own farms so you’re sure to get meat that is grown.”

“The city’s voice is soft like solitudes.”

“He found his friend clowning himself around.”

“He seemed to be waiting for someone, not a blood relation, much less a bad blood.”

Such phrases, lifted from government-approved textbooks used in Filipino public schools, are reinforcing fears that crucial language skills are degenerating in a country that has long prided itself on having some of the world’s best English speakers. At a time when English is widely considered an advantage in global competitiveness for any country, many fear this former U.S. colony is slipping.

English is an official language here, along with the native Tagalog. Yet the U.S. State Department, in its “2007 Investment Climate Statement,” released this month, concluded: “English-language proficiency, while still better than in other Southeast Asian nations, is declining in the Philippines.”

For years now, Antonio Calipjo Go, an academic and a supervisor of the Marian School of Quezon City, a private school here, has waged a campaign against bad textbook English.

“I pity our children who are being fed these errors,” Go said in an interview. “This is one of the reasons why the level of education in our country is worsening.”

Go says he has notified the Philippine Department of Education of dozens of English-language errors in all seven approved social studies textbooks. In January, he testified at a Senate hearing on the subject. And he has written to the World Bank, which has granted an 800 million peso, or $17.5 million, loan to the Philippines government for textbooks.

But when the new school year opened in June, the books were unchanged.

So Go took out advertisements in newspapers detailing the errors. In July, he paid for a full page in the country’s largest-circulation newspaper, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, enumerating errors in two textbooks.

He titled the ad “Learnings for make benefit glorious nation of Philippines,” after the movie “Borat,” whose title character has a less-than-perfect grasp of English.

“I do not wish to pick a fight with anybody,” Go declared in his ad. “I only know that if I kept this to myself, the errors that have been in these books all these years will continue to harm the hearts and minds of more generations of Filipino schoolchildren. The errors must be corrected. Now.”

Go estimates that more than 75 percent of all elementary textbooks in public schools contain errors.

“And I am being kind with that estimate,” he said. Aside from the linguistic errors, he finds other aspects problematic, pointing out a textbook that extols the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Go has been sued for libel by two textbook authors and a publisher, though the lawsuit of the publisher, Phoenix Publishing, has been dismissed. He is undeterred. “I refuse to accept that we cannot do something to solve problems like this,” he said in the interview. “I cannot accept that.”

Go is far from the only person worried about textbook errors and the deterioration of English skills in the Philippines.

Business chambers, foreign and domestic, have voiced concern that the decreasing quality of English could hurt the country’s competitiveness. Three years ago, the European Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines launched a campaign called “English is cool!” to address this deterioration.

Last year, the Joint Foreign Chambers of Commerce of the Philippines, in a workshop on how to increase foreign investment in the country, identified “improved English proficiency” as a key area that needed improvement.

The U.S. State Department, in its recent report, said the “the comparative advantages the Philippines once enjoyed vis-à-vis its neighbors in attracting foreign investment need to be restored in order to attract more investment and support higher growth.”

One reason English proficiency, or its lack, has received so much attention here is because of the call-center boom and the fact that Filipino workers with a good command of the language stand a better chance of being recruited for jobs abroad.

For years, foreign governments, particularly the United States, and donor agencies like the World Bank have been providing assistance to the Philippine educational system, and some of the programs have involved the production of textbooks. This month, Australia announced that it was giving a $10 million loan to Manila to improve basic education.

Educators do not deny a problem with the quality of English in textbooks and instruction, but point out that there are other, perhaps more pressing, problems in the schools.

Among these are poor skills in science and math; the lack of teachers, many of whom are being recruited abroad for higher pay; a lack of equipment; and overcrowded classrooms, with some holding nearly 100 students.

Some critics say that the Education Department itself is part of the problem. The Senate hearings in January focused not only on the poor quality of textbooks, but on allegations that the process of bidding for textbook contracts is flawed, with a small cartel of publishers controlling 75 percent of the contracts.

Last month, in response to Go’s ads, Education Secretary Jesli Lapus issued a statement saying that the department had implemented stringent measures to improve the quality of textbooks.

He said he had banned those who evaluated the error-filled textbooks from future book projects. An oversight committee has also been created to address issues concerning these textbooks.

On Monday, Franklin Sunga, an under secretary of education, predicted that the situation would improve. “There will be a new batch of English textbooks soon and we hope that these errors will not be repeated.”

He said the department was improving its evaluation of these books, contracting the services, for instance, of academics and evaluators from the country’s top universities and colleges.

Philippine military rushes troops to battle Islamic militants in the south

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: August 12, 2007

MANILA: The Philippine government has relocated its military headquarters and stepped up its offensive against Islamic extremists in the south, sending hundreds of additional troops to the province of Sulu, where fighting in recent days left at least 25 Philippine soldiers dead.

A similar number of militants from the Al Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf and the Moro National Liberation Front were killed in two fierce gunbattles after an ambush on a military convoy on Jolo Island, in the same province, on Thursday.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo on Saturday ordered the relocation of the Philippine Army headquarters to Zamboanga, a city in Mindanao near Sulu. The defense secretary and several senior generals have been dispatched there to coordinate what is being described as a massive military operation against the Islamist insurgency.

Two battalions will be pulled out from the central and northern Philippines, where they have been fighting communist guerrillas, and deployed to Sulu, said Lieutenant Colonel Ernesto Torres, an army spokesman.

“The military offensive against the Abu Sayyaf must continue, not as an act of vengeance but as a strategy to win the peace,” Arroyo said. “We cannot allow terrorists to hold the south hostage to their agenda of mayhem and bloodsport.”

She said the transfer of the army headquarters would be a temporary measure until the situation “normalizes.”

Fierce fighting in Sulu, a mainly Muslim province 950 kilometers, or about 600 miles, south of Manila, broke out last week as the government intensified operations against Abu Sayyaf 10 Filipino marines were beheaded on nearby Basilan Island in July.

On Thursday, at least 25 army soldiers were killed in two separate firefights on Sulu, the biggest death toll for the military in a single day in recent years, according to General Hermogenes Esperon, the armed forces chief of staff. He said at least 32 members of Abu Sayyaf were killed in Thursday’s encounter and in the days afterward.

Among the militants killed, officials said, was the son of a senior Abu Sayyaf leader who had provided sanctuary to Indonesian operatives of the regional militant group Jemaah Islamiyah, which is linked to the 2002 Bali bombings.

Officials said nearly 50,000 residents fled their homes for fear of being caught in the crossfire. Nongovernmental groups have warned of a potential humanitarian disaster on the island if the fighting, which has so far been contained to three townships, spills into other areas.

The first batch of reinforcements arrived in Sulu on Saturday, with more troops scheduled to arrive over the next few days.

“We are continuing with our operations to be able to cordon off and finally destroy the Abu Sayyaf,” Torres said.

A peace agreement signed in 1996 by the government and the Moro National Liberation Front, the largest Islamic secessionist group in the country, has failed to stop the fighting. A splinter group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, is engaged in peace negotiations with the government, but the talks have yielded little progress.

Complicating the situation is the presence of the Abu Sayyaf, a militant group composed mainly of Islamic extremists who are notorious for kidnapping and beheading their victims. Officials said “rogue elements” from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Moro National Liberation Front are working with the Abu Sayyaf, a charge that the groups have denied.

The U.S. military also maintains a presence in Sulu. The Philippine military said that with help from the United States it has reduced the strength of Abu Sayyaf to between 300 and 400 militants from more than 1,000 in 2000.

Company accused of abducting Filipinos to build U.S. Embassy in Iraq

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: August 3, 2007

MANILA: The Filipinos thought they were flying to Dubai. One of them told a fellow passenger how excited he was about his new job as a telephone repairman at a hotel in the emirate.

It was only after liftoff from Kuwait, when the captain made an announcement, that they learned their destination was, in fact, Baghdad.

“All you-know-what broke loose on that airplane. People started shouting,” said Rory Mayberry, an American passenger on the flight who had been hired to work in the Iraqi capital.

The Filipinos settled down only after a security guard from the company that had hired them waved a submachine gun, according to Mayberry. “They realized they had no other choice but to go to Baghdad,” he said.

Mayberry recounted this incident, which he said took place in March 2006, during a congressional hearing in Washington on July 26 that looked into allegations of “waste, fraud and abuse” in the construction of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Held by the House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the hearing yielded startling testimony about victimization of workers from the Philippines and other poor countries.

The allegations riled Philippine officials, particularly because Manila bans the deployment of workers to Iraq. The government is trying to find out what happened to the workers reportedly trafficked to Baghdad, who have not been accounted for.

Though it is not unusual for Filipinos working abroad to be abused, the charge that 51 laborers had been brought to work at an American facility against their will touched a nerve. The Philippines has more than eight million citizens working abroad, or 10 percent of the population, and the remittances they send home - $12 billion last year - are keeping the economy afloat.

“It is distressing to hear that our fellow Filipinos are being deceived into working in Iraq by unscrupulous contracting firms,” Senator Mar Roxas of the Philippines said. “Unless we have officially accepted that the days of slavery are back, the government must act.”

Roxas called on the foreign affairs and labor departments of the Philippines to investigate.

“This particular issue is so serious because the very lives of our migrant workers - not just their comfort or their living conditions - but their very lives are at the core of what this issue is about,” said Claro Cristobal, a spokesman for the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs.

Mayberry told the committee he was hired by First Kuwaiti, a firm based in Kuwait that was the project’s primary contractor, as an emergency medical technician. He said he stayed at the Baghdad site for five days, went back to the United States afterward and reported the alleged abuses to the U.S. authorities.

“I believe these men were kidnapped,” Mayberry said, according to a transcript of the congressional hearing. He said First Kuwaiti had asked him to escort the Filipino workers to the Kuwait airport and make sure they boarded the plane to Baghdad.

Mayberry said he later found out that the workers “were being smuggled into the Green Zone” in Baghdad. “They had no IDs, no passports, nothing.”

Mayberry’s account was corroborated by John Owens, a foreman at the site, where quarters for embassy security personnel were being built. “I believe I witnessed it,” Owens said, referring to human trafficking.

“When flying from Kuwait to Baghdad, I saw a bunch of workers with tickets to Dubai,” Owens said. “Mine was the only one that said Baghdad. When I asked the First Kuwaiti manager, he said, ‘Shhh, don’t say anything. If Kuwaiti customs knows they’re going to Iraq, they won’t let them on the plane.’ ”

Owens said the conditions at the site “were deplorable, beyond what even a working man should tolerate.” Foreign workers, he said, were packed tight into trailers, equipment was insufficient and basic needs went unmet. “If a construction worker needed a new pair of shoes, he was told, ‘No, do with what you have’ by First Kuwaiti managers,” Owens said.

He said many of the workers were verbally and physically abused and intimidated.

Mayberry said safety was a major problem at the site. “There were a lot of injuries out there because of the conditions these people were forced to work in. It was absurd,” he said.

According to the Philippine labor secretary, Arturo Brion, First Kuwaiti denied the forced labor allegations to Filipino officials. The House panel’s chairman, Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, said during the hearing that the committee had tried but failed to get First Kuwaiti to answer questions.

Attempts to contact First Kuwaiti were unsuccessful Friday. But Wednesday, Adel Jabbour, the company’s human resource manager, told ABS-CBN, a Manila television network, that no Filipino in its employ had been forced to work, and that the workers on Mayberry’s flight - only 11 of whom, he said, were Filipinos - had known they were going to Baghdad.

Matthew Lussenhop, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Manila, told The Philippine Daily Inquirer that the State Department had found “no evidence” of forced labor at the Baghdad site. He said two U.S. inspectors general had “looked at the embassy compound in Baghdad, interviewed the workers and found no evidence of trafficking.”

The Philippines does not have an embassy or a diplomatic contingent in Iraq. Officials say Manila has been relying on Washington to help find the 51 workers.

According to the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, First Kuwaiti has been on its watch list for three years for “gross violations of laws, rules, and regulations on overseas employment,” and was barred from recruiting Filipinos.

Ramon Magsaysay Award recipients announced

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: August 2, 2007

MANILA: Seven people from China, India, South Korea, Nepal and the Philippines will receive this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Award, organizers have announced.

The awardees include an environmentalist, an AIDS activist, a blind lawyer - all from China - as well as a journalist who writes about India’s rural poor, a South Korean pastor, a Nepalese educator and a former senator from the Philippines.

The award, to be given out in Manila on Aug. 31, is named for Ramon Magsaysay, the late Philippine president. Some 256 Asians have received it in various categories since it was established in 1957. Each awardee will receive a certificate, a medallion and an undisclosed cash prize.

“Working in different countries on diverse issues of poverty, prejudice, politics and the planet’s future, these seven individuals nevertheless share an uncommon faith in the tremendous potential of people and social institutions,” said Carmencita T. Abella, president of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, in a statement on Wednesday announcing the list of honorees.

The Philippines’s Jovito Salonga, a former senator, will receive the prize for government service. A staunch opponent of the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, Salonga defended victims of the regime and led efforts to recover its stolen wealth.

The Reverend Kim Sun Tae, from South Korea, will be honored for public service. Orphaned by the Korean War and blinded when he was young, Kim struggled to become a Christian pastor and helped found the Siloam Eye Hospital in Seoul that provides eye services to poor Koreans. More than 20,000 people have received free eye surgery.

Mahabir Pun, awardee for community leadership, used wireless technology for the benefit of poor villages in Nepal. After 20 years in the United States, Pun returned to Nepal to help establish schools and, later, with donations of computers and wireless-communications gadgets from all over the world, helped hook these schools and villages to the Internet.

Tang Xiyang is recognized with the prize for peace and international understanding. He was known for his “Green Camps,” which have helped publicize the degradation of China’s environment. The camps, in which environmentalists and students are dispatched to areas in China where the environment is at risk, have helped influence government policy, according to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation.

Palagummi Sainath, a journalist from India, will receive the prize for journalism, literature and creative communication arts. The foundation said Sainath had written passionately about India’s poor and the injustices they suffer. Today, “his journalism workshops occur directly in the villages, where he teaches young protégés to identify and write good stories and to be agents of change,” the foundation said.

The awardees for emergent leadership are China’s Chen Guangcheng and Chung To. Chen, who is blind, led the filing of a class-action lawsuit in 2004 against officials in rural Shandong Province for, among other complaints, coercing women into having late-term abortions or sterilization. Chen publicized his case, eliciting a backlash from officials that later put him in jail, where he is serving a four-year sentence for “inciting a mob” of supporters.

Chung was recognized for his work on behalf of people with HIV. Chung, who was born in Hong Kong but grew up in the United States, created the Chi Heng Foundation in 1998 to assist gay men in Hong Kong to protect themselves from the virus. He later extended his work to the Chinese mainland, where his AIDS Orphans Project pays for the education of children whose parents have died or are dying of AIDS.