Archive for Stories
By Carlos H. Conde
Asia Sentinel
Friday, 21 November 2008
Often described as the sick man of Asia, the Philippines appears to be walking an economic tightrope again. Its currency has fallen sharply against the US dollar from a high of P44:US$1 to P50:US$1, a fall of 13.6 percent since August. Three of the pillars of its economy – call centers, electronics exports and inward remittances — are all deeply exposed to the US economy, which is going into the tank.
Yet, for now at least, Simeon Mari Sillona, a human-resource officer at an outsourcing company based here, says he isn’t worried. In charge of recruiting the company’s call center agents, he says his company has not scaled down its hiring nor has it lost any clients.
“No one in my company has been laid off because of the financial crisis,” Sillona said. “So despite what we’ve been reading, things are actually looking up for us.”
His company, the Nasdaq-listed eTelecare Global Solutions, is one of the leading outsourcing companies in the Philippines, with top US clients such as AT&T, Sprint and Dell. Although the company posted a 67 percent decline in profits in the third quarter, it was mainly due to expenses for its expansion. The company, for instance, has put up eTelecare Nicaragua and is looking to expand to other Latin American countries.
If only the 900 employees of another Manila-based call-center company who were laid off this week after a major client in the US went bankrupt could share Sillona’s optimism. Although the company, Advanced Contact Solutions, employs more than 4,000 workers in the Philippines, the firing of the 900 caused concern in the local outsourcing industry, with many considering it a portent of worse things to come.
“This was due to declining business volumes from the ongoing US subprime financial crisis, as well as lingering customer concerns regarding a major US client which recently emerged from Chapter 11,” the company said in a disclosure on Thursday.
The impact of the crisis is not limited to outsourcing. The electronics sector, which accounts for nearly 60 percent of the country’s export revenues, declined by 2.7 percent in September compared to the same month last year, according to the National Statistics Office. Garments, the second biggest export revenue earner, also fell by 5.9 percent. The US has been the primary destination of the two export products.
Rosario Bella Guzman, executive director of the economic think tank Ibon Foundation, said in a recent paper that the Philippine economy will be affected by the global recession because “it is significantly linked to the US economy and other foreign economies” and that “it has basic weaknesses and vulnerabilities.”
“The Philippines has varying degrees of economic dependence on other countries—90 percent of its total foreign trade and investment is with these countries—so there will be a cascading effect through various countries,” she said.
As the crisis spreads across the globe, the primary worry now is its impact on the millions of overseas workers, whose remittances – more than US$14 billion in 2007 – are helping to keep the economy afloat. “In a global recession, immigrants are the first to go,” Emmanuel Leyco, an economist at the Asian Institute of Management, said last week.
However, Guzman hasn’t seen a drastic drop in the number of OFWs, as they are called here, saying that while they may be the first to get fired as the US economy worsens, “they will also be the first to be rehired in cheaper and lower quality jobs as the US economy continues to reel from the crisis.”
“What is likely, however,” she pointed out, “is that OFW remittances will slow down due to falling and negative incomes and social services and mounting debts in the host countries, particularly the United States.”
Apart from boosting consumer spending, which helps explain the popularity of huge shopping malls – some of the largest in the world — these remittances from an estimated 9 million Filipinos abroad, a tenth of the entire population, have likewise strengthened the banking system and the telecommunications industry, to name two industries. These remittances represent the second largest source of revenue for the country after manufactured exports.
They are also the primary engine of the real-estate growth here in the past several years, with property companies aiming their marketing strategies directly at them. Most of the buyers are OFWs in the US, Europe and the Middle East. Last week, Jaime Augusto Zobel De Ayala, chairman and CEO of Ayala Corp., which owns some of the largest shopping malls and property developments in the country, called these migrant workers the Philippines’ “new middle class.”
But many expect remittances to fall in the next months. The central bank projects that the inflow of OFW money for the remainder of the year would probably slow by 3 percent.
“Taking into account the possible slowdown of remittances, it might only grow about 15 percent which is still not bad given that 10 percent was the original projection to begin with,” said Nestor Espenilla, the deputy governor of the central bank, according to Reuters.
Others are not as optimistic. UBS said earlier this month that OFW remittances in 2009 could fall by as much as US$800 million, or nearly 6 percent of the $14 billion that flowed into the country last year.
As to the economy in general, the government has reduced its forecast for next year, from between 6.1 and 7.1 percent gross domestic product growth to 3.7- 4.7 percent. Earlier, the International Monetary Fund projected GDP growth next year at less than 3 percent.
The government also estimates that unemployment next year will likely increase to 9 percent, from 7.4 percent in January this year.
All of these contribute to a sense of gloom among many Filipinos, as reflected in recent surveys in which most consider themselves worse off than before. An October survey by Ibon Foundation, for instance, found that 75 percent of the 1,494 respondents “had difficulty buying enough food” during the preceding three months. The figure was no different from a similar survey in April.
In the October survey, 64.5 percent said they had difficulty paying for their children’s education, 68 percent said they didn’t have enough money for transportation, nearly 73 percent said they had trouble paying their bills, and nearly 69 percent said they had problems paying for their medical expenses.
In the same survey, 78.4 percent of the respondents rated themselves poor, up from 74 percent last year.
The government, meanwhile, says it is doing its best to mitigate the impact of the crisis. The department of labor has said it is putting together a contingency plan for the expected return of OFWs and those who lost their jobs domestically. Last month, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo announced that money has been set aside for this purpose.
“For returning expatriates should there be, we will have constant monitoring of job orders of foreign principals, we will have an expanded livelihood and business formation program with a P250-million livelihood fund,” Arroyo said in a speech in October. She also pushed through a measure that would give indefinite visas to foreign investors who can employ 10 workers or more.
While many analysts and economists are not as worried as the others about the state of the economy, with JP Morgan saying last week that the Philippines is in a position to weather the crisis, many Filipinos are not holding their breath. Some, like Eduardo Castillon, are, at the very least, cautiously optimistic.
Castillon, a 27-year-old engineering graduate, is considering applying for a job at a call-center company, the common fallback among many Filipino graduates who cannot immediately find a job after graduation.
“Does the news that the US economy is in trouble bother me? Of course it does,” he said in a phone interview.
Applying for a call-center job used to be easy, he said, pointing out the high turnover rate of call-center agents in the Philippines, as employees hop from one company to another looking for better salaries, benefits and working conditions. “I’m not so sure if that is something that we can continue to do.”
Posted on November 22, 2008, and filed under Asia Sentinel, Stories |
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: November 5, 2008
MANILA: Forty people, 11 of them children, died after a ferry capsized in the central Philippines, the Coast Guard said Wednesday, the latest in a long line of maritime tragedies.
The Philippine Coast Guard said the interisland ferry, the Don Dexter Cathlyn, overturned on Tuesday after being buffeted by strong winds and waves en route to Sorsogon Province south of Manila.
The Philippine Red Cross said more than 100 passengers had been rescued by Wednesday but that at least a dozen more were missing. The ship’s manifest listed only 119 passengers, although the coast guard said many passengers often do not register. Interisland ferries in the Philippines are often overloaded with passengers and cargo.
The Red Cross said two of the bodies have not been claimed by relatives. The survivors, most of whom suffered shock, sleeplessness and starvation, will undergo “stress debriefing,” the relief agency said.
A coast guard official, Captain Efren Evangelista, told The Associated Press that charges could be brought against the owners of the ship because it sailed without the required clearance and may have been overloaded.
“The coast guard should have inspected it and prevented it from leaving if it found violations,” Evangelista said. “In this case, the operator of the ship did not inform us it was leaving port.”
Such violations are common in this archipelago nation, where ferries are the primary mode of transportation between islands.
Several overloaded passenger ships have sunk here over the years, killing thousands of people, mainly because of lax safety regulations, said Harry Roque, a lawyer who represents several families of victims of some of these mishaps.
Richard Gordon, the chairman of the Red Cross, which often deals with these tragedies, said the maritime industry in the Philippines was so primitive that sea disasters were inevitable. “We have the best sailors in the world, but our ships are really old,” Gordon said in a recent interview. “We really have to modernize the industry.”
Roque said that corruption at the ports was a problem that allowed ships to sail without the necessary clearance. He also said shipping companies had successfully evaded sanctions, even closure by the government, because they often settle cases with victims for paltry sums.
Despite the series of sea tragedies in the past several decades, government safety regulation has not improved, Roque said.
Sulpicio Lines, the company that owns the Princess of the Stars ferry, which sank in June, killing most of its 800 passengers, remains in operation despite evidence that it had been negligent - it left port despite an oncoming typhoon - and despite a poor safety record, Roque said.
The company had insisted that bad weather caused the ship to sink in the central Philippines on June 23, at the height of a typhoon, even suing the government’s weather bureau for its alleged faulty weather forecast. Ships owned by Sulpicio Lines figured in several of the worst maritime disasters in the country.
Meanwhile, rescuers only managed last week to start retrieving bodies from inside the overturned Princess of the Stars, four months after it sank. Rescuers had to first take out the highly toxic pesticide endosulfan from inside the ship, which was the reason for the delay. Officials said the deadly cargo should not have been loaded on the passenger ship - yet another apparent sea safety violation.
Michelle Basco, a maritime lawyer whose family is also into the shipping business, said the government is hard put to strictly enforce maritime regulations because “shipping is very capital intensive and the government cannot really strictly implement standards because otherwise nobody will invest or operate these ferries.”
Posted on November 5, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories |
By Thomas Fuller
International Herald Tribune
Published: October 12, 2008
Carlos Conde contributed reporting from Manila, Janesara Fugal from Bangkok and Carmen Ng from Hong Kong.
BANGKOK: Is there more tainted food out there?
The far-flung recall of products contaminated with melamine - dozens of brands of infant formula in China, Cadbury chocolates in Australia, Lipton green tea in Taiwan and Nabisco Ritz cheese crackers in South Korea among them - has shaken the confidence of consumers and provided a window into what some describe as disturbing aspects of the increasingly globalized food manufacturing industry.
The melamine scandal has heightened fears that the food business is racing ahead of the ability of governments to detect health-threatening contamination, whether accidental or deliberate.
The physical toll of the milk scandal has been largely contained to China: the four children who died and almost all of the 54,000 who were sickened by the melamine were on the Chinese mainland.
But melamine has been found in products as far away as the Netherlands and the United States. And recalls far from China affected food made by Chinese companies and multinational brands.
Now shoppers are stopping in supermarket aisles to read labels more closely. They are shunning Chinese brands and choosing international name brands instead. But even then, they are wary.
“People used to have more confidence in international brands,” said Yang Fan, a specialist on the food industry at the Shanghai offices of Euromonitor, a market research company. “Now the multinationals have similar problems.”
Shan Cheung, a Hong Kong housewife, said she tossed out all her Lipton tea packages, Cadbury chocolates and cookies when she heard that some of those brands had found small amounts of melamine in their products. “Now I look very carefully if the food I am buying are made in China,” she said, and she avoids it.
Worrying for consumers both inside and outside China is the sense that processed foods may contain tainted ingredients no matter how trusted the brand. When contamination occurs, they cannot be sure of the provenance of the ingredients - and, ultimately, whether foods are safe.
Big food companies, like Nestle, Kraft and Danone, say that while they do not use Chinese milk in their products outside of China, they use other Chinese ingredients for goods sold around the world.
“It’s difficult sometimes to try to figure out how a certain product has been assembled and where a problem may have come from,” said Peter Hoejskov, a specialist in food quality and safety at the regional headquarters here of the Food and Agriculture Organization, a UN agency. “The globalization of food production is definitely an issue.”
Chinese companies are major suppliers of common ingredients and additives, like citric acid and many types of vitamins. The country is the world’s largest exporter of seafood, most of it from fish farms, and a major exporter of chicken, fruits and vegetables. In the medical field, China sells large quantities of penicillin and paracetamol, an aspirin alternative, overseas.
Chinese products have been failing food inspections for years. Hundreds of Chinese shipments have been stopped by inspectors in Europe, the United States and Asian countries in recent years because they contained banned chemicals or were unfit for consumption, government data show.
In the European Union alone, Chinese fish and shrimp were rejected because they contained fungicides, antibiotics or other banned drugs; dried fruit and vegetables were found to have more than the allowable level of the preservative sulfite; peanuts had excessive levels of fungus-related toxins; and packaged foods tested positive for heavy metals that leached from their packaging.
Although only the world’s eighth-largest exporter of food, China ranked in first place last year for the number of hazardous imports detected by regulators in the European Union. China had 352 notifications, its highest level ever, compared with 191 for the United States, which is the world’s largest agricultural exporter.
On Friday, the Chinese government announced measures intended to improve the quality and safety of dairy products as well as new regulations on the breeding of cows and the production and sale of dairy products. It also called for tougher penalties for who people who violate safety standards, according to Xinhua, the official state news agency.
China is not alone in struggling with tainted food. The European Union’s annual report on food safety found contamination in foods exported from well over 100 countries.
Hoejskov said the scale of production involved in the food industry had greatly increased the monetary incentive to cut corners and adulterate food.
“There is a lot of cheating,” he said. “Sometimes you discover it and sometimes you never discover it.”
One of the difficulties for regulators is knowing what to look for - and having the manpower to carry out the tests. In the case of the Chinese milk scandal, Fonterra, a New Zealand company that owns a large stake in one of the manufacturers that distributed tainted baby formula, says it never occurred to them to check for melamine.
“Melamine is not something you would be reasonably expected to find in milk,” a spokeswoman for the company said. “We have only recently become aware of one dairy company in the world who routinely tests for melamine.”
Melamine, a white powder used to make plastics, was added because it duped the instruments used to measure protein, creating the false impression that diluted or poor-quality milk was up to standard.
Governments often do not have adequate resources to carry out more than basic, random testing. The Food and Drug Administration in the United States only has the capacity to examine 1 percent of all shipments into the country, according to a report last year by the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan U.S. government agency.
The problem can be more severe in poorer countries.
Quirino Marquinez, the president of the Consumer Union of the Philippines, a private nonprofit group, said the country’s food inspection agency “only takes action if someone complains or if the media reports about food products that are defective or pose serious threat to public health.” The agency, he said, “needs to be more proactive.”
With China’s growing influence in Asia, governments in the region are also sometimes afraid to anger Beijing. Officials at the Thai food and drug administration said in interviews that they had discovered mushrooms imported from China with unacceptably high levels of mercury. But they declined to disclose the full list of Chinese products barred from the country.
“I hesitate to give you this information as I’m afraid that it will affect the relationship between Thailand and China,” said Jureeporn Boonyawongwiroj, the director of the Bureau of Food Quality and Safety. “When I was in China last time, they complained to me about this,” she said.
China’s melamine scandal has been particularly damaging to consumer confidence because it comes after Beijing said it had tightened regulations and heightened vigilance in the wake of problems with tainted dog food, also made in China, that sickened or killed thousands of dogs worldwide last year, and other tainted products.
In July 2007 the government carried out the execution of the head of the food and drug safety agency who was convicted of taking bribes in return for approving drugs. Regulators also closed 180 food manufacturers that it said had been using banned dyes, hydrochloric acid and formaldehyde in candies, seafood, pickles and cookies.
“This whole system is broken,” said Bing Zhang, a consultant based in Shanghai for AT Kearney and co-author of a report on food safety in China last year.
“The root cause is a combination of factors - the intense competition for profits and a general lack of tracing and monitoring,” he said.
Fruit, vegetables and most meat in China are not required to go through a cold distribution chain, said the Kearney study.
Almost 80 percent of retailers do not monitor temperature of products during shipping and two-thirds did not check temperature when they receiving goods, the study found.
In recent weeks, Cadbury withdrew candy bars from shelves in Hong Kong and Australia after it found trace amounts of melamine in them.
Unilever recalled Lipton Green Milk Tea from the Taiwan market because the product used Chinese-made milk. H.J. Heinz Co. recalled a batch of baby food in Hong Kong because it showed trace levels of melamine. In all of these cases, the levels of melamine were too low to make people sick. But the companies sought recalls to avoid further public relations damage.
The Chinese government now says recent testing of the Chinese milk supply shows no sign of melamine contamination.
There are some signs that the Chinese food industry is cleaning up its act. The European Commission said it had recorded a decline in quality problems with Chinese food imports in the second half of last year. It is also working with Chinese regulators to improve their monitoring techniques.
Yet the Food and Drug Administration in the United States has maintained an “import alert” on certain types of seafood - shrimp, catfish, basa, dace and eel - coming from China.
As of April 2007, China had the third-highest rate of import refusals in the United States, after Mexico and India.
Posted on October 15, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories |
By Keith Bradsher
The New York Times
Published: October 10, 2008
Choe Sang-Hun in Seoul, Carlos H. Conde in Manila, Thomas Fuller in Bangkok, Anand Giridharadas in Mumbai and Hilda Wang in Hong Kong also contributed reporting.
HONG KONG: Can a region like Asia - with more than $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, high savings rates, mostly well-capitalized banks and minimal exposure to American mortgage-backed securities - run into trouble during a global financial crisis?
The answer Friday was a resounding yes.
Stock markets plunged from Tokyo to Mumbai. Real estate prices are tumbling from Seoul to New Delhi. The economy in Singapore has tipped into recession, and there is growing evidence of a recession in Japan, where an unlisted insurer and a real estate investment trust filed for bankruptcy Friday.
From UBS to Morgan Stanley, investment banks have been warning in the past week of a global economic downturn. For Asia, that sounds uncomfortably like a forecast that economic slowdowns in the United States and Europe will cripple demand for Asia’s exports and pull the region down into recession as well.
What went wrong? As the biggest beneficiary of the rise in global trade, Asia depends heavily on exports to the West. Everything from corporate earnings to real estate prices depends on a steady inflow of dollars and euros.
Growth in exports has slowed to a crawl or started declining across most of the region when calculated in local currency terms and adjusted for inflation. And that is even before Western stores have had a chance to cut back their orders in response to the sort of steep declines in sales that American retailers announced on Wednesday.
India announced Friday that industrial production in August was 1.3 percent higher than a year earlier. That was a drastic deceleration from July, when the growth rate was 7.4 percent.
In Korea, exporters are suddenly struggling.
“The problem is the global recession - people don’t buy consumer electronics, this means less exports and fewer dollars for us,” said Choi Hae Pyong, an electronics parts manufacturer south of Seoul. “It’s like walking in a thick fog.”
As long as the region kept exporting and kept saving the proceeds, investors bid up real estate and share prices that now seem to have a long way to fall.
Matthew Au, a luxury real estate broker in Hong Kong, said that this past week had been even worse than the days after the Tiananmen Square killings on June 4, 1989, which briefly shattered business confidence here.
“I’ve been through June 4th, the 1997 financial crises and SARS, but this time around, the decline in housing prices has been the most abrupt,” he said. “Sellers of properties are now more willing to consider offers which come in 20 to 30 percent below their asking prices.”
As global financial markets increasingly look to each other for direction, lack of confidence in financial institutions and housing markets in the West has also proved contagious in Asia. The Asian news media, often focused on economics instead of potentially touchy political issues, have been full of reports in the past three weeks about failing banks and falling real estate prices, and that has fed through into local markets.
An outflow of Western investment has also played a role in Asia’s decline now, although foreign investment has become less important in much of the region as Asia has become a formidable saver in its own right.
In Malaysia, foreign investors held nearly a third of Malaysia’s national debt until they started selling this summer to raise money so as to cover losses in other markets.
In Korea, foreign investors sold $29 billion in the first nine months of this year. This was an important reason why the country’s foreign exchange reserves have slipped to a still formidable $239.7 billion last month from $264.2 billion in March.
Many in Asia now despair of help from the West, and are looking to Beijing.
“The United States is beyond saving - our only hope rests with China,” said Dick Chen, a middle-aged manager in a pin striped blue shirt and carrying an ultraslim modern mobile phone who watched the markets with dismay after lunch in a trading room of Tai Fook Securities in Hong Kong.
Can China save Asia? For the past six years, the Chinese economy has been like an enormously powerful hound that has charged ahead despite every obstacle. Worried that the economy may overheat and accelerate inflation, Beijing officials have run a budget surplus, repeatedly raised interest rates and even required banks to deposit a remarkable one-sixth of their entire assets as reserves at the central bank to slow lending.
Now Beijing is trying to loosen the leash it has had on the economy by cutting interest rates and taxes and lowering reserve requirements. But the government is finding the economy already looks a little out of breath as exports slow.
Economists see annual growth slowing from 12 percent a year ago to 8 or 9 percent this winter. That is still respectable by most countries’ standards, but a shock for many Chinese, particularly workers losing their jobs in factories producing mainly for export markets.
For Asia, this is the crisis that was never supposed to happen again.
The region was deeply scarred by the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and 1998.
Dozens of banks failed after lending too much with too little capital, while profligate governments found that they had borrowed too much overseas and could not repay their debts.
That led to a rapid contraction of credit that bankrupted many industrial companies and caused a steep decline in economic output and a surge in unemployment - the same fate that may now await the United States and Europe, many economists and investors fear.
Southeast Asian economies have never entirely recovered. After a drop of nearly 10 percent on Friday, the main index of the Thai stock market closed at 452, a quarter of its high in 1994.
Most of Asia emerged from that crisis with more cautious banks, stricter financial regulation, a tighter rein on government spending and a strong determination to accumulate. But while Asia broke its dependence on capital flows from the West, the dependence on exports remained.
Yet Asia’s frugality over the past decade has given the region a lot more room to maneuver than most Western countries.
South Korea and India are often cited by economists as the two most vulnerable economies in Asia.
South Korea is drawing attention because its trade deficit, by the broadest measure possible, was $4.7 billion in August, after mostly surpluses before that. Korean exports of manufactured goods have slumped even as the cost of its oil-dominated imports have surged - although falling oil prices now will help.
The South Korean won showed the steepest decline of any Asian currency against the dollar on Friday morning, falling more than 3 percent.
But the won soared on Friday afternoon, with a gain for the day of 6.3 percent. The reason? Widespread rumors that the government would start spending part of the country’s huge foreign exchange reserves to prop up the won.
The South Korean government only owes $334 million in foreign debt repayments by the end of next year, or 0.14 percent of foreign exchange reserves, according to a recent study of emerging market debt by ING. Big Korean exporters like Samsung, hobbled for lack of foreign currency reserves in 1997, have hoarded formidable reserves of dollars.
Corporate debt repayments are a little larger, and also harder to calculate. But since all of Asia only owes $31 billion in debt repayments through the end of last year, South Korea’s share is tiny relative to its foreign reserves.
India was one of the few countries in Asia to escape the financial crisis a decade ago, because it was just starting to embrace international markets then. It did not adopt the same tight bank regulatory standards and tough fiscal policies as the rest of Asia after that crisis.
That has prompted some economists, like Ajay Kapur at Mirae Asset and Takahira Ogawa at Standard and Poor’s, to express particular concern about India’s preparedness for the current crisis. While India has $295.3 billion in foreign exchange reserves, it is running a large government budget deficit and a large trade deficit while its banks have lent very aggressively to a real estate sector that is now tumbling quickly.
With an election expected early next year, Indian leaders have been much more upbeat about their country’s prospects than most Asian leaders.
Policy makers in India have also subscribed to the idea that their economy has “decoupled” from Western economies, an idea that most economists and policy makers in Asia rejected many months ago.
“India is not from any other planet,” said a posting on an Indian web site this week. “This common logic is ignored by our policy makers.”
Posted on October 15, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories, The New York Times |
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: August 31, 2008
MANILA: The authorities have taken into custody a man they contend is one of the founders of an Islamic extremist group who masterminded the bombing of a passenger ship here in 2004 that killed 116 people. It was the worst terrorist attack in Southeast Asia since the Bali bombings in 2002.
Ruben Omar Pestano Lavilla Jr., who the police assert helped form the Rajah Solaiman Movement, was deported Saturday from Bahrain, where he had been detained after his arrest in July.
Officials in the Philippines said Lavilla’s arrest was a major breakthrough in the U.S.-supported war on terrorism here.
Aside from the bombing of the ship Superferry 14 in February 2004, Lavilla is also under investigation for his role in a series of attacks in Makati City, the financial center of the Philippines, and two other cities in the south on Feb. 14, 2005.
Eight people were killed and more than 150 were wounded in those attacks.
The Rajah Solaiman Movement, which seeks a separate Islamic state for Filipino Muslims, is composed of Christians who have converted to Islam.
It is on the terrorist list of both the U.S. government and the United Nations.
In June, the U.S. Treasury Department sought to tighten the financial screws on the Rajah Solaiman Movement by designating the group and its members as “global terrorists.”
It said the movement had received financial support from people in Saudi Arabia and from at least one Filipino financier there who channeled funds through Muslim charities in the Philippines.
Filipino and Western anti-terrorism officials have linked the movement to the Abu Sayyaf group and Jemaah Islamiyah, the Southeast Asian terror network that Western and Asian intelligence agencies have tied to Al Qaeda.
Ricardo Blancaflor, spokesman for the Philippine Anti-Terrorism Council, announced Lavilla’s arrest and deportation and described the arrest as a “big boost” in Manilla’s fight against terrorism.
It was not clear how Lavilla managed to leave the country in the first place, though officials said there had obviously been “intelligence lapses” that might have allowed him to slip away.
The Treasury Department said Lavilla “is believed to have taken over as RSM’s political, religious and strategic leader” after the arrest in 2005 of the group’s leader, Ahmed Santos.
Officials also said Saturday that four members of the Philippine Marines had been killed and 10 had been wounded in an ambush, apparently by Abu Sayyaf militants in Sulu Province, in the southern Philippines.
In addition, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the main Islamic separatist group in the southern Philippines, said Sunday that it might abandon the peace process because of the government’s decision not to sign a peace agreement that had been initialed by both sides.
Mohagher Iqbal, the front’s chief negotiator, said in an interview with Reuters that his group would negotiate further only if the government signed the agreement, which would have given Muslims a sizable territory.
“We’re not only disappointed and frustrated over the government’s decision to turn its back on the ancestral domain deal, we’ve completely lost trust and confidence in them,” Iqbal said Sunday. “The fate of the peace negotiation rests solely in the hands of the government.”
Violence has resumed on the southern island of Mindanao because of the failure by both sides to sign the agreement.
More than 300,000 people have been forced from their homes, officials said, and more than 150 rebels, soldiers and civilians have been killed.
Posted on August 31, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories |
By Carlos H. Conde
Philippine Human Rights Reporting Project
Now that the plan to ram through the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD) has unraveled, the administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is trying to sweep it under the carpet.
The agreement has been in limbo ever since the Supreme Court issued a temporary restraining order at the request of Christian politicians against the scheduled signing in Malaysia that was planned on August 5. The agreement between the government of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) would have established an effective sub-state or homeland known as the Bangsamoro Juridical Entity.
While the Supreme Court is now conducting its review, Arroyo’s factotums are now saying that, no matter what the Supreme Court eventually decides, it no longer matters since the administration no longer wants the MOA.
Just like that.
The government then segues into a supposed whole new strategy: that the peace process in Mindanao is now going to be done with communities, not armed groups, and that these communities will be consulted and will participate in the crafting of any agreement with the MILF.
The entire thing is laughable — or perhaps, more accurately, maddening — since this is what the government should have done in the first place.
In the meantime, the damage has been done. Entire communities have been obliterated, both by rogue elements of the MILF and by the military, which launched offensive actions this week supposedly aimed at the rebels but actually displaced and maimed innocent civilians, both Moro and non-Moro.
No, this regime should not be allowed to get away with its blunders, miscalculations, if not even outright deception.
It must have known that the MOA would never pass muster. So can people be blamed if they now think that this is nothing but a ruse to initiate constitutional change in Congress with the aim of extending Arroyo’s term?
The Senate should pursue an investigation into the MOA and how it was crafted. It should not buy the government’s assertion that because it no longer wants the MOA in its present form, it’s a dead issue. The agreement and the circumstances that surround it simply beg to be investigated.
And the Supreme Court should issue its decision on the MOA whether this government wants it or not.
What of the MILF? To be fair, it has always been consistent that it will not negotiate within what it sees as the rigid confines of the Philippine Constitution –- and who can blame them? The peace agreement with the Moro National Liberation Front was consistent with the Constitution, and look what happened to it and the Moro areas? The MNLF declared war on this same government seven years ago after it accused Arroyo of reneging on the 1996 agreement.
While our 21-year-old Constitution, such as it is, should not be tweaked just to accommodate the MOA, it is a living document. If giving justice to the Bangsamoro necessitates changing the Constitution, then by all means we should change it. The only problem, of course, is that those who wish to change the charter have a vested interest in the act. Many believe that allowing the current administration to mess around with the Constitution is a bit like giving a burglar the keys to your house.
In any case, the MILF has certainly improved its ability to negotiate over the years and saw an opportunity to pursue an agreement that would see them move beyond the Constitution. They quickly grabbed it -– and again, who can blame them? There is a confluence of different interests at play here, and I suspect the MILF decided to play along because it had nothing to lose and everything to gain. Had the signing pushed through in Kuala Lumpur with all those dignitaries and representatives of foreign governments around to witness the event, can you imagine what that can do to improve the cachet of the MILF in the international community?
But given that Arroyo doesn’t have any remaining political capital to work with, the MILF should probably think about suspending negotiations with the government. As Zachary Abuza, an American expert on terrorism in Southeast Asia who has done extensive research on the MILF, told me: “President Arroyo is such a lame duck right now that she lacks the political capital to get any constitutional amendment passed in the final year plus of her term. So the MILF could be in limbo for another two to three years until a new president is settled in.”
So does this mean that the ceasefire and peace is now at an end and that all-out war is its logical consequence? Not necessarily. If the MILF really respects human rights and adheres to international humanitarian laws and the laws of conflict, Commander Bravo and the other MILF regional leaders accused of the recent atrocities committed against civilians should stand down.
The important thing to keep in mind is that, if the MILF plays its cards well and controls its troops -– it bears repeating that the MILF gains nothing from attacking civilians — the burden of stilling the guns and keeping the peace in Mindanao lies with Arroyo.
Thankfully, while a military campaign ostensibly to hunt down the “renegade” MILF commanders continues, the government is still showing signs that it is pursuing the peace process, that it is showing some restraint (if not calibration) in dealing with the MILF, and that it promised to launch nationwide consultations on the MOA.
The government simply cannot afford to abandon the peace process in Mindanao, according to Julkipli Wadi, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of the Philippines.
To be sure, there are elements in the military and government who will try to provoke the MILF into doing something silly. I wouldn’t be surprised if bombs suddenly go off in key cities, including Metro Manila, in the days ahead. I can almost see now terrorist suspects (from the Abu Sayyaf, Jemaah Islamiyah, wherever) being paraded before the television cameras and for the government to claim such people were part of an MILF plot to sow terror and to distract the military from its offensive and such.
We’ve seen it all before. Already National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales declared Sunday that those behind the Lanao del Norte atrocities have links to Jemaah Islamiyah.
The MILF, however, should not take the bait and allow the Arroyo administration in its dying days to hijack the Bangsamoro’s long-standing aspirations or to try and claim the moral high ground. Philippine Human Rights Reporting Project
Posted on August 27, 2008, and filed under Philippine Human Rights Reporting Project, Stories |
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Published: August 26, 2008
MANILA: Fighting in the southern Philippines between government troops and Islamic separatists is getting worse by the day, with the number of displaced people now reaching 300,000, officials and disaster volunteers said Tuesday.
Army officials estimated that 150 rebels from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the separatist group, were killed in the past five days and that government troops overran 15 rebel camps in one of the largest military offensives since peace negotiations began 11 years ago.
The military said the offensives, which have been taking place in several provinces in the southern region of Mindanao since last week, are specifically directed at three commands of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front that were responsible for attacks this month in which 33 people were killed.
Relief officials said most of the displaced were from Muslim areas.
Volunteer groups who are helping the refugees in Mindanao called on the government Tuesday to stop the offensives because of the worsening humanitarian crisis in many Muslim areas.
“We are calling for a cease-fire, for both sides to talk rather than shoot each other,” said Rexall Kaalim, an officer of Bantay Ceasefire, a volunteer group in Mindanao. He said that casualties were increasing and that refugees were dying or getting sick in evacuation centers.
Several reports since Monday indicated heavy fighting in at least two provinces, with airstrikes being carried out by the military regularly.
On its Web site, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front claimed it killed 13 soldiers since last week and also reported the downing of a helicopter gunship - assertions that the military had denied.
Gilbert Teodoro, the defense secretary, said Monday that the offensives would not stop until the three front commanders were captured. Arroyo advisers also said the peace negotiations would only resume if the commanders were turned over to the authorities. The front’s leadership said that would not happen.
The attacks followed the signing of a peace deal on Aug. 5, aborted since, that many Filipinos opposed. The fighting has left the peace process in tatters, although President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has been trying to resuscitate it.
“There is no all-out war,” Arroyo said in a speech Monday. “What we are doing, we are doing to have all-out peace in Mindanao.”
Her administration, however, is exerting pressure on the 11,000-strong front, which has been fighting for Muslim self-rule since the 1970s. On Monday, Norberto Gonzales, the national security adviser, said that the front commanders responsible for the rampage this month had ties with Jemaah Islamiyah, the Southeast Asian terror network.
Separately, a C-130 transport plane from the Philippine Air Force carrying two pilots and seven crew members went missing Tuesday morning after taking off in Davao City.
Officials said they had recovered body parts and debris, including combat boots, from the waters of the Davao Gulf. The authorities are still verifying reports by fishermen in the area that they saw an aircraft plunging into the sea after it was hit by lightning.
Posted on August 27, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories, The New York Times |
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Published: August 24, 2008
MANILA: Three weeks ago, the government of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was scheduled to sign a peace deal that, among other things, had promised to cede part of Mindanao, the main island in the south of the Philippines, to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the Islamic separatist group.
When the signing was aborted after local officials of Christian-dominated provinces complained to the Supreme Court, the rebels went on a two-day rampage in which 33 people were killed and dozens of houses burned. The events have left the peace process in tatters.
Since then, Arroyo has been faced with a dilemma: whether to salvage the peace process, or abandon it and deal with the rebels much more forcefully, as her predecessor, Joseph Estrada, had done. Either way, according to analysts and experts, there are big political risks.
Abhoud Syed Lingga, executive director of the Institute of Bangsamoro Studies, a nonprofit organization that conducts studies on issues involving Filipino Muslims, said the aborted signing had “triggered the actions of some of the front’s commanders.” What these actions suggest, Lingga explained, is that “if negotiations fail, violence will follow.”
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court began oral arguments last week on the complaint lodged by Manuel Pinol, the vice-governor of North Cotabato Province. The court is expected to make public its opinion - on whether the peace agreement was constitutional and legal - before the month ends.
Arroyo’s practical option is to proceed with the signing of the agreement - provided that the Supreme Court rules in her favor or that she manages to produce another, more acceptable draft - and pursue the peace process.
This, however, is politically tricky for her, analysts said. For the agreement to be signed, Arroyo will have to pacify a large segment of the population that is opposed to any deal that would give Muslims more territories than they already have. These opponents have made known their intention to use force - by organizing civilian militias against the front if necessary.
Moreover, Arroyo officials had said such a deal could only be implemented if the Congress amended the Constitution and shifted the system of government to federalism. Her opponents in both the Senate and the House of Representatives have vowed to block such an effort for two reasons: They do not want to divide the republic, and they do not want to give Arroyo the opportunity to extend her term, which her allies can theoretically do once the federalism proposal is under consideration in Congress.
Indeed, the suspicion that the peace deal is just a Trojan horse to extend her term, which ends in 2010, has been so overwhelming here that, according to analysts, whatever good the agreement has in store for Filipino Muslims has disappeared from the public discourse. In forging the agreement, the government did not consult the public, even refusing to release the draft to the public.
While the administration initially showed confusion in its response to the crisis, there have been indications in the past several days that it has opted to pursue the peace deal and to mollify those opposed to it.
For example, military officials, in a departure from their initial pronouncements of a widespread offensive against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, declared on Thursday that the offensives would be directed specifically at the two groups that carried out the attacks, not necessarily against the whole movement.
Arroyo’s advisers also initially said that the government was conducting a review of the agreement, possibly even a renegotiation.
But on Saturday, Arroyo’s press secretary, Jesus Dureza, declared that the government would no longer sign the agreement in its current form. Instead, it will launch “widespread consultations” on the agreement with communities and non-Muslim sectors in Mindanao - the very thing that opponents of the deal said the government should have done in the first place.
Adding pressure on the government to go back to the negotiating table is the interest shown by the international community in resolving the conflict, which has been going on for decades in the south. Malaysia, for example, has been mediating the peace negotiations in the past five years - the signing three weeks ago was to have taken place there - and its efforts have largely been credited for the progress in the talks.
Malaysian investments in Mindanao, including in Muslim areas, have been increasing the past several years.
Washington, on the other hand, is keen to end the conflict in the south as part of its war on terrorism. It has promised multimillion-dollar aid to Mindanao, particularly in Muslim areas, on the condition that a final peace agreement is signed. An undetermined number of American soldiers have been stationed in Mindanao since 2002, while U.S. corporations, like Exxon, are eyeing investments in Muslim provinces.
Clearly, said Julkipli Wadi, a professor at the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of the Philippines, “it is not in the interest of the government to abandon the peace process.”
Arroyo, he said, should now work to repair the damage she created by failing to involve others - like Congress, local governments, nongovernment groups, the various communities in Mindanao - in the peace process.
Not forging a peace settlement, warned Lingga of the Institute of Bangsamoro Studies, would be very costly. “As the conflict will be prolonged,” he said, “secession might become an option to some.”
On Saturday, the front’s chairman, Ebrahim Murad, said at his camp that “war is among the options.”
“If the Supreme Court rules against the agreement,” said Zachary Abuza, an American expert on Islamic extremism in Southeast Asia and a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, “brace yourself for a lot more fighting.”
Posted on August 24, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories |
A botched agreement, domestic politics and insurgent violence threaten to renew war in the southern Philippines
By Carlos H. Conde
Asia Sentinel
21 August 2008
By many accounts, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the separatist group in the southern Philippines, should have emerged the victor in what is now widely regarded as a fiasco involving a peace deal with the administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. But the ensuing violence of the last week in Mindanao may well have ended any chance for peace in the immediate future.
The peace agreement, called the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain, sought to give far more concessions to the MILF than previous administrations had offered to other Muslim groups. Among these were an expanded Muslim territory and the power and authority to exploit the rich natural resources in these areas as the autonomous Muslim rulers would see fit.
Perhaps more important for the MILF, the agreement was groundbreaking in that it did not mention the Philippine Constitution, the subtext being that the MILF or the would-be rulers of the proposed Bangsamoro Juridical Entity, the name of the expanded Muslim region, would operate outside its framework. This would be a sort of dream come true for the MILF, whose leaders, ever since the front’s inception in the late ’70s, had always maintained that any settlement should not be under the terms of the national Constitution.
Ironically, that proved to be the agreement’s undoing, along with the longstanding fear among many in Mindanao that the concessions could threaten Christian communities. Some Christian local officials sought the intercession of the Supreme Court, which issued a restraining order stopping the government and the MILF from signing the accord in Kuala Lumpur on Aug. 6.
What followed pretty much destroyed whatever goodwill the MILF gained in the negotiations and, as a result, now threatens to return Mindanao to a state of war. Two days after the signing was scuttled, hostilities erupted when MILF elements in North Cotabato province under the command of Umbra Kato refused to vacate villages they had earlier occupied, according to the military. The military responded with force, plunging the province and nearby areas into violence and displacing more than 160,000 people from their homes.
Less than a week after that, MILF elements, this time under the leadership of one Commander Bravo, went on a rampage in several towns and villages in the province of Lanao del Norte, shooting civilians, hacking people to death, taking hostages as human shields, and burning down houses. Images of mutilated and burned bodies, including that of a two-year-old girl named Love-Love, flooded the mainstream media, eliciting an outcry from many sectors, including those who had been supportive of the peace process.
The MILF insisted that the attacks were not approved by its central leadership and promised to investigate and punish those responsible. Al Haj Murad, the MILF’s chairman, told ABS-CBN television on Wednesday that the peace process remained a paramount consideration.
“We are trying our best to restrain our commanders in order to save the situation. This can be a beginning of the war if not properly handled,” Murad said. “There is still a chance in going back to peace as long as both parties ? for us and for the side of the government ? will implement utmost restraint in order to hold back the situation.”
But to many Filipinos, the damage created by this week’s atrocities is such that, in some parts of Mindanao, people are already reliving the horrors of the 1970s, the height of the government’s so-called “pacification campaign” against the Moro National Liberation Front, which dominated the Moro movement at that time but has since largely come to terms with the government under a previous autonomy agreement. The MILF broke away from the MNLF in 1981. On Wednesday, pictures emerged of a group of Christian militias, the Ilaga (literally, rats), arming themselves against the MILF. The name is itself frightening as the Ilaga were the often-vicious militias that faced Muslims in battle a generation ago.
Senator Rodolfo Biazon, who was a Marine Corps commander in Mindanao in the 1970s, said Thursday that civilians arming themselves present “a big problem in this country.” He recalled that during the insurgency drive in the 1970s, soldiers were taken from other areas to be deployed to Mindanao to pacify civilians who were killing each other. “We do not want a repeat of that,” he said, but “that could happen if the government fails to restore peace and order and protect civilians.”
In Manila, politicians denounced the MILF and called once again for an “all-out war” against the group, similar to the one launched by then-President Joseph Estrada in 2000. Estrada himself went on national television this week to accuse the Arroyo administration of treating the MILF with kid gloves.
Almost instantly, the other aspect of the peace deal that had riled many Filipinos prior to the attacks – the allegation that the agreement was a Trojan horse designed to keep Arroyo in power beyond 2010 – was nearly forgotten.
Before the attacks, Arroyo and her officials had insisted that the agreement could only be implemented if the Constitution was amended and the form of national government changed from the present centralized system into a federal one. Her critics and allies alike concede that during deliberations by the Philippine Congress on such amendments, no one could be prevented from introducing a proposal to shift to a parliamentary form of government in which Arroyo could be elected prime minister or to abolish the constitutional provision that bans a president from standing for re-election after a single six-year term. Arroyo’s term expires in 2010.
The paranoia that greeted the peace deal can be partly explained by the fact that Arroyo, apart from being the most unpopular president since the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, has been plagued with questions over her legitimacy in office since ascending to power after Estrada was overthrown by a military-backed uprising in 2001. Matters were made worse by charges that she stole the 2004 elections through massive cheating – an allegation that prompted three impeachment complaints against her.
Also, many Filipinos still view her as ambitious and power-hungry, someone who would not hesitate to lie about her political plans if it suited her. (Prior to the 2004 elections, she promised Filipinos that she would not run for president. After being named president, she was quoted by Time magazine as saying, “God put me here.”)
Her critics believe she wants to amend the Constitution to extend her term, a fear that has had the effect of poisoning even well-meaning campaigns to improve the charter hurriedly passed in 1987 after Marcos was overthrown. Indeed, at least two of the senators who had earlier backed a Senate resolution calling for a federal system withdrew their support, saying they did not want Arroyo to ride on that issue to prolong her stay.
After the attacks, all of these issues have been pushed to the periphery, allowing Arroyo to take the moral high ground and vow to crush the MILF factions that went on a rampage in Mindanao. Arroyo, said political analyst Ramon Casiple of the Institute for Political and Electoral Reforms, “still wants the memorandum of agreement but the pressure is on her to deal forcefully with MILF.”
“The MILF leadership, if they are serious about achieving peace in Mindanao, should discipline their ranks and not allow them to wreak havoc on the people of Mindanao,” said Aquilino Pimentel Jr., a senator from Mindanao who is the foremost proponent of federalism as a way to end the decades of conflict in the region.
The Lanao atrocities, said Casiple, “exposed the fact that the MILF does not really respect human rights, the niceties of democratic and legal processes, and that they do not yet have the requisites of a responsible political movement and a credible aspirant for state governance.”
For Bobby Tuazon, a political analyst at the Center for People Empowerment in Governance, a Manila think tank, the atrocities were a pity because the MILF “may have gained something out of this fiasco. It was able to press the government to recognize – at least in motherhood principles – the ancestral domain claim of the Bangsamoro people.” This, he said, “is a step forward in the MILF’s jihad toward self-determination.”
For the moment, many sectors, afraid that Mindanao will once again burn, are calling for restraint. “The primacy of the peace process is important,” said Julkipli Wadi, an Islamic scholar at the University of the Philippines. “The government cannot afford not to have peace talks in Mindanao.”
Posted on August 21, 2008, and filed under Asia Sentinel, Stories |
By Carlos H. Conde
The New York Times
International Herald Tribune
Published: August 18, 2008
MANILA: Islamic separatists attacked several towns and villages Monday in the troubled southern Philippine region of Mindanao, killing at least 28 people in a rampage that, officials said, included hacking several people with machetes and spraying bullets into buses.
The attacks came as tens of thousands of villagers in other areas of Mindanao were returning to their homes following the fighting last week between government troops and the Muslim rebels.
News reports from Mindanao said several of the victims had been hacked with machetes. The rebels, according to officials, also burned down houses. The police said that the fatalities were mostly civilians, mainly farmers, while an undetermined number were soldiers.
Officials said more than 200 rebels attacked at least four towns in two provinces in Mindanao.
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo called the attacks “sneaky and treacherous” and ordered the military and the police “to defend every inch of Philippine territory” against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the main Islamic separatist group operating in Mindanao.
“I will crush any attempt to disturb peace and development in Mindanao,” the president said in a radio address.
The civilians were killed when the rebels withdrew, said Brigadier General Hilario Atendido, a military commander in the area. “They used them as human shields,” Atendido said, speaking on the radio station DZBB. “The rebels killed them on their way out.”
According to news reports, the rebels also took several residents as hostages. A bus driver told a radio station in Mindanao that the rebels, shouting “Kill them all!” fired on his bus. The driver did not say how many of his passengers were wounded or killed.
Mohamad Khalid Dimaporo, the governor of Lanao del Sur Province, said that the rebels were moving toward Christian-dominated towns in the coastal areas and that the military was directing its forces to protect those places.
“The military is doubling its forces,” he told ABS-CBN television. “The highest priority now is to secure the coastal towns.”
Eid Kabalu, a spokesman for the rebel front, said it was still checking reports that the attackers were rebels. He urged the public “not to jump to conclusions” as the front investigated the attacks.
But in case the rebels were front members, Kabalu urged them to stop the violence and to pull out of the province. He said the Moro Islamic Liberation Front did not issue any directive to carry out the attacks.
The violence this week, which began on Sunday in Lanao del Sur, where four soldiers and four military-supported militia members were killed, is certain to complicate the peace negotiations between the government and the front.
Two weeks ago, both sides had reached an agreement that they thought could end the fighting. But it was scuttled because of protests over the concessions that were to be given to the Muslim rebels. Government negotiators then said they were willing to abandon the peace agreement because of the backlash it caused in the Philippines. Analysts had said the breakdown of the talks could lead to more violence.
The new attacks, said the army chief, General Alexander Yano, were a “clear manifestation of the insincerity to the peace process of a significant portion” of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. This, he added, “is a virtual declaration of war against the duly constituted authority.”
Posted on August 19, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories, The New York Times |
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: August 14, 2008
MANILA: For more than three decades, Filipino Muslims have been demanding greater autonomy in a country dominated by Christians. It is a dream that has fueled Islamic separatism in the Philippines, and embroiled Mindanao, the southern region where most Muslims live, in a cycle of violence and conflict.
Two weeks ago, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the main separatist group, and the administration of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo thought they had finally achieved a pact that would make that dream of autonomy come true and end the violence.
The agreement, which has been championed by Arroyo, would grant Filipino Muslims, in the words of one government negotiator, a Muslim “state within a state.”
The problem was that the document was not made public until two days before it was to be signed in Kuala Lumpur on Aug. 6. Once its contents were disclosed, a storm of protest brought the peace process to a halt and helped set off renewed violence in Mindanao.
Many critics felt the document gave too many concessions to the Muslims of Mindanao. Others from the region were angry that they had not been consulted.
The plan also became a lightning rod for critics of Arroyo, who see the deal as a Trojan horse designed to keep the president in power beyond her term.
Critics says the agreement violates the Constitution because it would divide the republic, in effect ceding a large chunk of Mindanao to Muslims. It seeks to give Muslims the final say in how their natural resources will be exploited, promises to expand an existing Muslim territory and, much like an independent state, would allow the Muslim government to enter into international agreements.
To make this plan work, however, the Constitution would have to be amended to transform the Philippines into a federal republic, officials said. In a speech Monday, Arroyo confirmed that her administration would now work for this shift. “I advocate federalism as a way to gain lasting peace in Mindanao,” she said.
Her press secretary, Jesus Dureza, said the administration supported a resolution in the Senate that could pave the way for this shift to federalism. Under the proposal, the Philippines would be divided into 11 federal states, each empowered to chart its development. At present, provinces and regions have to defer to the central government in Manila on major decisions, particularly those involving natural resources.
“This concentration of such enormous powers in Manila has created only one center of finance and development in the country, resulting in a highly centralized system of government,” the resolution said. Dureza said Tuesday that it was now “all systems go” for federalism - the only way, he said, that the agreement with the Muslims could be implemented.
Fearful that the agreement would make the Islamic front more powerful than it already is, several officials from the provinces that were to be included in the expanded territory denounced the pact, particularly a clause that says an existing region being run by Muslims would be expanded. One of the officials appealed to the Supreme Court, which stopped the scheduled signing of the agreement.
The aborted signing was a major embarrassment for Manila. Dignitaries, including the U.S. ambassador to the Philippines, Kristie Kenney, had gone to Kuala Lumpur to witness the ceremony. It also caught the Moro Islamic Liberation Front by surprise.
In response, Moro Islamic Liberation Front rebels occupied several villages in one province, even burning down Catholic chapels, by some accounts, and refused to leave when government troops arrived.
The confrontation triggered a conflict last week that killed several rebels and displaced more than 160,000 residents.
Anger over the deal came from a wide spectrum of Filipinos. Some critics complained that it was negotiated without transparency or without input from other players in the region.
Father Eliseo Mercado Jr., a Catholic priest who has mediated in the negotiations in the past, wrote in a column on the GmaNews.tv Web site last week that “the paramount flaw” in the agreement “is the absence or utter lack of consultation of stakeholders, including Christian leaders, indigenous peoples in Mindanao, and peace advocates themselves.” This flaw, he added, “contravenes the very essence of any peace process which is participative of the stakeholders.”
Adding fuel to the fire are accusations leveled by opponents of Arroyo that the president is planning to use the agreement with the Muslims to sneak a proposal to extend her rule into the deliberations on amending the Constitution.
The president is co-opting the peace process with the Muslims for her political ends, said Ramon Casiple, the executive director of the Institute for Political and Electoral Reform, based in Manila.
Renato Reyes, secretary general of Bayan, a leftist group that has led numerous anti-Arroyo protests in the past, adds that “there is nothing in the track record of this government that says it can be trusted with amending the Constitution.”
When asked Wednesday whether there was anything that could stop Arroyo’s allies from proposing a term extension for the president during the deliberations, Representative Victor Ortega, chairman of the House committee on constitutional amendments, replied: “Nothing. It can be proposed in the committee, in the plenary.” Under the present Constitution, a president is only allowed one term, and Arroyo is due to step down in 2010.
Arroyo’s advisers deny she is seeking to extend her presidency.
“We must disassociate the principle of federalism from any rumors of term extension for the president,” Anthony Golez, an Arroyo spokesman, said Wednesday.
While many are opposed to the agreement, others believe it is a step in the right direction.
Mercado, the Catholic priest, said the deal represents a “paradigm shift” in dealing with Muslim autonomy. For example, he said, the agreement could pave the way for “shared sovereignty” between Manila and the new Muslim territory.
He said it was unfortunate that the government’s failure to keep the public informed about the agreement, coupled with Arroyo’s unpopularity, now threatened to scuttle the agreement altogether.
Analysts say Filipino Muslims’ wish for a separate state may have been set back. While the Supreme Court could still allow the signing of the agreement later this month, it might be politically costly for Arroyo, they say.
Posted on August 14, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories |
By Carlos H. Conde
Interntional Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Published: August 11, 2008
MANILA: The number of Filipinos displaced from their homes since fighting began late last week between government forces and Islamic separatists in the southern Philippines reached 130,000 on Monday, officials said. The military and the police sent more troops to fight the rebels.
Social welfare officials warned of a potential humanitarian disaster as the fighting between troops and elements of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which had been confined to two provinces, threatened to spill over to other areas. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front is a separatist group that has been fighting for an Islamic state in the southern region of Mindanao for several decades.
Local media reported that thousands of residents, the majority of them Muslims, had been fleeing their homes since Friday, many in carts pulled by water buffaloes.
Thousands of refugees had been housed in more than 40 refugee centers, officials said, but most of them had chosen to leave their communities and seek shelter with relatives in other provinces.
As of Monday, officials said two soldiers and at least 15 rebels had been killed in the fighting, which erupted on Thursday after separatist forces refused to vacate nine villages in North Cotabato Province.
Two days earlier, the Philippine Supreme Court ruled in favor of a petition that prevented the government and the rebel group from signing an agreement that both sides had thought could help end the decades-old separatist war.
The petition was filed by officials of North Cotabato, who feared that the agreement would allow the rebel group to encroach into Christian territories, a charge that the group and the government denied.
The court is set to make a final decision later this month on whether to allow the agreement to be signed.
Eid Kabalu, a spokesman for the rebels, blamed government-backed civilian militias for the conflict. He said the front had wanted to “reposition its forces” but was attacked by militias opposed to the peace agreement.
The administration of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has been severely criticized for the way it handled the negotiations that led to the peace agreement. Many officials, including allies of the president as well as Filipino Muslims, have complained that they were not consulted and that details of the agreement were deliberately withheld from the public.
“The renewed fighting in North Cotabato goes to show that when the government bungles the peace negotiation, it is the citizens who suffer,” Risa Hontiveros, a congresswoman, said Monday. “The peace process is turning into a humanitarian mess.”
The renewed fighting coincided with elections on Monday in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, which comprises seven predominantly Muslim provinces. Past elections have been violent but officials said the latest voting was largely peaceful, although there were reports of sporadic violence, including the bombing of electric towers in one province.
People escaping the violence fled along a major national highway that had been ordered closed to traffic on Sunday after separatists had commandeered a passenger bus.
“We are tired, but we have to move on,” Farida Dimalangan, a 47-year-old refugee, told MindaNews, a news agency in Mindanao.
Hundreds of refugees sought shelter in sheds and warehouses along the highway.
Posted on August 12, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories, The New York Times |
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: August 10, 2008
MANILA: Two Filipino journalists were shot and killed in a span of four days last week, their murders once again highlighting the “culture of impunity” that prevails in the Philippines, media groups said Sunday.
Dennis Cuesta, who was shot last Monday in General Santos, a city in the southern Philippines, died in the hospital on Saturday after lapsing into a coma, colleagues and the police said.
On Thursday, Martin Roxas, another journalist, had just concluded his radio show in the central Philippine province of Panay when two men shot him in the back. He died an hour later in the hospital.
Cuesta and Roxas had been working as news anchors and commentators for their respective stations, both owned by Radio Mindanao Network, the country’s largest radio network.
While the two murders were believed to be unrelated, both journalists were known for their scathing commentary on the air, often tackling corruption allegations against politicians and airing complaints from residents in their communities, colleagues said.
Their deaths brought to five the number of Filipino journalists killed so far this year. According to the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, 5 were killed last year and 13 in 2006.
The killings of Filipino journalists have received considerable international attention and even prompted an investigation by the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists and other international press freedom groups, the Philippines was next only to Iraq as the most dangerous country in the world for journalists. Unlike in Iraq, however, almost all media killings in the Philippines were premeditated.
Although the killings seem to have declined in the last two years, journalists insist that the Philippine authorities had done little toward arresting or successfully prosecuting the perpetrators.
The killings of Cuesta and Roxas and the way they were carried out - in public and in broad daylight - “merely show that the culture of impunity the government has helped nurture by its inaction, apathy and even its outright attempts to stifle press freedom, continues to thrive,” the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines said in a statement Sunday.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, based in New York, said “two attacks against outspoken radio commentators in the space of a week is of grave concern to us and our colleagues in the Philippines.” Journalists in the Philippines, said Elisabeth Witchel, the coordinator of the committee’s impunity campaign, “are frequently killed and assaulted with impunity, all for doing their jobs.”
Witchel said the murders this year were “an alarming sign that violence against Philippine journalists may be on the rise.”
The police have arrested several suspects in three other cases this year but released some of them for lack of evidence. The force has also set up a special unit to investigate the murders of journalists, but an overwhelming majority of the 60 killings since 2001 remain unsolved.
Posted on August 10, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories |
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: June 26, 2008
MANILA: The death toll from Typhoon Fengshen, the storm that battered the Philippines last week, could go as high as 1,300 if the missing passengers and crew of a capsized ferry are included, officials said Thursday.
Rescue divers continued to search the overturned ferry Thursday but failed to retrieve any new survivors, raising the possibility that as many as 809 of the 865 passengers and crew had perished in the disaster.
Since the ship capsized Saturday near Sibuyan Island, only 56 survivors have been found. The Philippine Coast Guard said 124 bodies had either washed ashore on nearby islands or had been found floating in the sea.
Adding to the uncertainty of the situation was the way in which some of the recovered bodies were being handled. On some of the islands where bodies had washed up, television footage showed corpses being dumped from a truck into mass graves. Many of the bodies had not been examined by forensic experts for possible identification.
Officials on Thursday raised the overall death toll from the storm to 498, excluding those still missing.
Divers have had difficulty pulling corpses from inside the ship because of narrow passageways that are blocked by debris. Retrieval efforts, officials said, could last a month.
As hopes dimmed of finding more survivors, friends and relatives were becoming more desperate. At the offices of Sulpicio Lines, the company that owns the ferry, relatives have been pressing officials for answers.
During a Catholic Mass held on a tugboat near the wreckage of the ferry, emotions ran high, with relatives weeping and throwing flowers into the sea. Mark Anthony Barrozo, whose pregnant girlfriend was among those believed dead, exclaimed “forgive me” and then broke down, according to Reuters.
The National Disaster Coordinating Council said the typhoon affected more than 2.4 million Filipinos in 42 of the country’s 81 provinces. It estimated damage to property at more than 5.5 billion pesos, or about $125 million.
The coast guard’s Board of Marine Inquiry has initiated an investigation into the ferry disaster.
At a hearing Wednesday, lawyers for Sulpicio Lines stopped short of blaming the coast guard for the tragedy. Coast guard officials, on the other hand, insisted it had been the company’s fault.
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said Wednesday that Sulpicio Lines should be held accountable for the tragedy. The hearings are scheduled to resume Friday.
Posted on June 27, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories, The New York Times |
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: June 24, 2008
MANILA: What Rodel Laborte could not forget was the screaming of his fellow passengers. As the strong waves and wind tossed around the 24,000-ton ferry - “like a paper boat,” he said - pandemonium broke out. The shrieks got so loud, he said, he could not determine if the captain gave an order to abandon the ship.
“My heart was racing fast,” Laborte said. “All I could think about was whether there were enough lifeboats for all of us.”
When the ship tilted heavily to the left, Laborte decided to jump, along with several others, into the churning water, where they clung to a lifeboat. It took only minutes for much of the ferry to disappear, he said.
Laborte, 60, was one of the 62 survivors of the Princess of the Stars, which was struck by Typhoon Fengshen on Saturday, possibly killing most of the more than 800 passengers and crew on board. He and 27 others huddled in the lifeboat, which ended up Monday on the shore of Quezon Province, miles from the island of Sibuyan, near where the ferry capsized.
The ferry disaster could turn out to be one of the worst in the Philippines in the past two decades. On Tuesday, rescue teams from the Philippine Coast Guard managed to penetrate the overturned ship and found many decomposing corpses floating inside.
Coast guard divers managed to retrieve only one body from inside while another body was seen floating outside the ship, according to a Philippines Navy spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Edgard Arevalo.
Arevalo said it was too dark inside the ship to determine the number of victims.
“Most of the bodies were floating inside. They were trapped when the seven-story ship suddenly tilted and capsized,” he told DZBB radio.
Apart from sinking the ferry, the storm also submerged whole towns and communities, knocked down power lines and caused landslides. The Red Cross said that 177 people died elsewhere in the country, including 106 in Iloilo Province. Another 438, not including those from the ferry, were still missing.
The government was working intensively to mount recovery operations, which have been hampered by the rough seas and the sheer amount of damage the typhoon wrought in the central and northern Philippines.
According to the National Disaster Coordinating Council, 38 of the country’s 82 provinces were affected by the typhoon, which packed winds of up to 200 kilometers an hour, or 125 miles an hour.
“We learned from the news that a storm was coming, but we were confident when we left Manila that everything was O.K. because the weather at the time seemed perfect,” Laborte said in an interview Tuesday at the Red Cross offices in Manila, where he and 24 other survivors were brought early Tuesday for more medical attention and debriefing.
The ferry left Manila on Friday evening, bound for Cebu City, in the central Philippines, and by noon Saturday had run straight into the path of Fengshen, which had changed its path, according to the weather bureau.
Aside from the Princess of the Stars, more than a dozen other vessels, mostly fishing boats, capsized as the typhoon made landfall Saturday morning.
Bodies have been washing ashore in several different islands near Sibuyan and the authorities could not yet determine whether these bodies came from the ferry or from the other vessels.
“It’s a daunting operation,” Senator Richard Gordon, who is also the chairman of the Philippine National Red Cross, said in an interview Tuesday. Hundreds of Red Cross volunteers across the country have been assisting in the rescue and recovery operations, complimenting the government’s effort.
Coast guard officials said they were not losing hope of finding survivors inside, especially because part of the ship was protruding from the water.
“Our mission is to search all the cabins, but it is dark inside,” one of the coast guard divers, Inocencio Rosario, told ABS-CBN television.
Rosario said he doubted any survivors were left inside the ship, but he added, “Miracles can happen.”
Posted on June 25, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories |
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
MANILA: Hopes faded Monday that more survivors would be found in what could be one of the worst Philippine sea disasters as rescuers failed to find signs of life inside a capsized ferry that had held more than 800 passengers and crew members when Typhoon Fengshen struck Saturday.
Rescue officials said only 38 people had been rescued, including 28 passengers and crew members who came ashore Monday after drifting at sea since Saturday. A total of 13 bodies believed to be from the ferry Princess of the Stars have been recovered, including 9 that washed ashore Monday.
The known dead from the ferry brought the death toll from the typhoon to at least 176, the Philippine National Red Cross said. Fengshen, packing winds of up to 195 kilometers per hour, or 120 miles per hour, struck the central and northern Philippines on Saturday, knocking down power lines, causing landslides, flooding rivers, and inundating entire communities.
Divers who beat against the hull of ferry Monday in search of survivors heard nothing that indicated life.
‘‘We just approached the hull of the ship, we got near and then banged, knocked in order for us to give a sign if ever there are still people inside,’’ Lieutenant Colonel Edgard Arevalo of the coast guard said Monday. ‘‘Unfortunately there was no response.’’
The Philippine government has approached other countries, particularly the United States, for help in the recovery operations. A U.S. Navy ship from Okinawa, Japan, was expected to arrive early Tuesday near Sibuyan Island south of Manila, where the ferry sank, said Jesus Dureza, press secretary of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
Officials said helicopters on the U.S. ship could help survey the general area for survivors.
Eleandro Madrona, a congressman of Romblon Province, where the ferry sank, flew over the area Monday afternoon, but reported seeing only a tugboat near the ship’s wreckage.
‘‘I was thinking, where could these 700 people be?’’ Madrona said, according to The Associated Press.
Elsewhere, officials tried to assess the losses from the typhoon.
Iloilo, a central Philippine province, was the worst hit, with fatalities approaching 100 as of Monday, officials said. It was too early to determine damage to agriculture and infrastructure, but officials said it could run up to millions of dollars.
Another concern was the welfare of the nearly 70,000 people throughout the country who were displaced by the typhoon and are now living in evacuation centers. On Sunday, Arroyo ordered all government agencies to help in the relief operations, while private companies have begun campaigns to collect donations of food, clothing and bottled water.
The president also ordered tighter maritime regulations. ‘‘Pending a review of Philippine Coast Guard protocols, no vessel sails if it would pass a possible typhoon path,’’ Arroyo, who is on a visit in the United States, said in a video conference with her advisers on Monday.
The government has suspended the operation of all vessels of Sulpicio Lines, which owns the 24-ton ferry, which was certified to carry 1,992 people.
Distraught relatives of the ferry passengers have trooped to the Manila office of Sulpicio Lines since Sunday, many of them blaming the company for the disaster. An advocacy group for crime victims, Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption, announced Monday that it was filing a class action suit against the company.
Officials of Sulpicio Lines, however, said that they had tried to set in motion a rescue operation as soon as they learned that the ship had encountered problems. But ‘‘severe weather condition delayed the rescue efforts both from the sea and on air,’’ Carlos Go, the Sulpicio chief executive, said in a statement Monday.
‘‘Our company also assures the families of all unfortunate passengers who perished in this incident that they will be properly compensated,‘‘ Go said.
Coast guard officials told reporters Monday that they had cleared the ferry to leave Manila for Cebu, a city in the central Philippines, on Friday night because the initial forecast for Fengshen showed that the storm would only hit the eastern part of the country, away from the ferry’s route.
But according to the government weather bureau, the typhoon changed direction Saturday, moving toward the center of the country, running right into the ferry’s path.
Coast guard officials said they had advised the ferry to seek shelter, but that the boat’s engine had failed after the ship was battered by strong winds and waves, thus leaving it even more vulnerable to the intensifying storm.
In a television interview, Senator Richard Gordon, who is also the chairman of the Philippine National Red Cross, quoted a survivor as he described what happened next. According to the survivor, ‘‘It was high noon but it was so dark, and there was too much rain and the waves were just too much for the ship,’’ Gordon quoted the survivor as having said.
Sulpicio Lines is one of the largest Philippine shipping companies, with 22 ships, both freight and passenger, plying the waters of the Philippine archipelago.
Its ships and ferries have figured in many of the worst maritime disasters in the Philippines. In December 1987, an overloaded Doña Paz collided with an oil tanker off Mindoro Island, killing 4,386 people.
A year later, in October 1988, another Sulpicio Lines ship, Doña Marilyn, sank near Leyte Province, killing 300 passengers and crew. In 1998, 200 died when the Princess of the Orient, also a Sulpicio liner, capsized near Manila during a storm.
Posted on June 23, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories, The New York Times |
By Carlos Conde
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Published: June 23, 2008
MANILA: The death toll from the powerful typhoon that killed more than 100 people in the Philippines last weekend could rise sharply after a ferry carrying more than 700 passengers and crew members capsized in the central part of the island chain , officials said.
The Red Cross reported that at least 137 people had been killed in the hurricane, not including those confirmed dead after the ferry sinking. Glenn Rabonza, executive director of the National Disaster Coordinating Council, said casualty figures were difficult to confirm because of extremely bad weather that was hampering search and recovery operations.
On Sunday, the coast guard said it had reached the spot near the island of Sibuyan where the passenger ferry, the Princess of the Stars, had capsized a day earlier.
Officials said they found no survivors apart from four passengers rescued earlier in the day.
Officials said the bodies of four passengers had also been recovered earlier in the day.
Nanette Tansingco, mayor of San Fernando, Sibuyan’s largest town, told DZMM radio on Sunday that witnesses had described “the boat upside down with a big hole in the hull.”
She said island villagers had reported seeing slippers and other belongings washing ashore, and other witnesses offered similar accounts.
One of the survivors, Jesus Gica, told a radio station that he saw passengers losing consciousness and children unable to wear their life vests. “Many of us jumped from the ship,” he said. “The waves were big.”
He also said elderly people, unable to escape, had been trapped underneath the sunken ferry.
Dozens of relatives of the passengers went to the ferry company’s office in Manila, demanding to know what happened to their loved ones.
“I’m very worried,” Felino Farionin told The Associated Press. “I need to know what happened to my family.” He said his wife, son and in-laws were on the ferry.
According to the government, the ferry was carrying 702 passengers, 45 of them children and infants, and 121 crew members.
The typhoon, Fengshen, made landfall on Saturday and battered several provinces. Its wind and rain knocked down power lines in the capital and elsewhere, caused landslides and capsized small boats.
Fengshen, its winds at more than 90 miles per hour, caused more destruction in the northern Philippines but was headed out of the country on Sunday afternoon, weather officials said.
The bad weather hampered efforts to locate the Princess of the Stars and its passengers, coast guard officials said.
“They haven’t seen anyone,” Lieutenant Senior Grade Arman Balilo, a spokesman for the coast guard, told The Associated Press. “They’re scouring the area. They’re studying the direction of the waves to determine where survivors may have drifted.”
Officials were checking reports that some people reached a nearby island and that a raft was spotted off another, said a coast guard spokesman, Commander Antonio Cuasito, The Associated Press reported. “We can only pray that there are many survivors so we can reduce the number of casualties,” he said.
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who is in the United States for a state visit, scolded coast guard officials during a teleconference on Sunday for allowing the ferry to sail despite warnings about the typhoon. She ordered government agencies to coordinate rescue and relief efforts.
The coast guard said the Princess of the Stars was allowed to leave Manila on Friday evening for Cebu, a city in the central Philippines, because the storm had not yet made landfall.
Coast guard officials said the ferry should have been big enough to sail and that a warning issued earlier on Saturday barred only small boats from traveling.
In Iloilo Province, in the central Philippines, the governor, Neil Tupaz, reported that 59 people had died and that more than two dozen others were missing. “Iloilo is like an ocean,” Tupaz said in a radio interview.
Officials said tens of thousands of displaced residents were moved to evacuation centers. Flights were canceled and Monday classes suspended.
Each year, about 20 typhoons slam into the Philippines, an archipelago bordering the Pacitic in the path of the storm systems.
Posted on June 23, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories, The New York Times |
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Published: June 18, 2008
MANILA: Abu Sayyaf militants have released members of a news team they abducted in the southern Philippines last week, among them one of the country’s best-known television journalists, officials said Wednesday.
The police said no ransom had been paid for the release Tuesday night of Ces Drilon, her cameraman and a guide. Drilon’s driver was released on June 12 after local officials paid the kidnappers 2 million pesos, or about $45,000, which officials refused to call a ransom.
Drilon and her crew were abducted June 8 on their way to interview members of Abu Sayyaf. In a news briefing Wednesday, Drilon said that someone had betrayed her group.
“There was betrayal involved, which was why we were kidnapped,” she said without elaborating.
ABS-CBN, the country’s largest network, where Drilon works as a senior reporter, had repeatedly said that it would not pay a ransom. The militants had demanded a payment of 15 million pesos by noon Tuesday.
Officials said the kidnappers had relented only when told that the network was adamant about its no-ransom policy and that, in lieu of a ransom, the kidnappers could get “a livelihood package.”
They did not explain what this might entail, but officials had said that the lagging economy in the Muslim areas of the south was a factor in the rise in kidnappings there. Alvarez Ishaji, the mayor of Indanan, said after the release that the package might involve promoting jobs in the region.
Avelino Razon Jr., the chief of the Philippine National Police, said Wednesday that the release mainly had been the result of negotiations between the kidnappers and officials of Sulu, an island province in the troubled south where Abu Sayyaf is active.
The police also credited a senator, Loren Legarda, a former colleague of Drilon’s at ABS-CBN, for the successful negotiations.
“We were treated well, in a perverse kind of way,” said Drilon, whose face bore marks of mosquito bites after spending nine days in the jungles of Jolo. But she said the kidnappers, at one point, had threatened to cut off her driver’s head.
Abu Sayyaf, a group mainly known for its banditry in the south, has been blamed for several of the more serious terrorist attacks in the Philippines in recent years. They have kidnapped, and sometimes decapitated, their victims, including several foreigners.
Posted on June 19, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories, The New York Times |
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Published: June 10, 2008
MANILA: A television news team from the Philippines’s largest network was believed to have been abducted by members of the militant group Abu Sayyaf, officials said Tuesday.
Ces Drilon, a senior reporter for ABS-CBN and one of the country’s best-known journalists, was with a cameraman and driver when they were intercepted Sunday by armed men in Sulu, a province in the south where the Abu Sayyaf and Islamic extremists are known to operate, the police said.
With the crew was Octavio Dinampo, a professor at Mindanao State University who, according to the police, accompanied the news team on their way to meet with members of Abu Sayyaf.
Abu Sayyaf, whose stated goal is a separate Islamic state, is notorious for its kidnap-for-ransom activities and has victimized Filipinos and foreigners. The group has been blamed for several major terrorist attacks across the Philippines in recent years and is the target of a sustained military campaign supported by the United States.
Although U.S. and Philippine officials say that the campaign has considerably weakened the group over the past five years, analysts say Abu Sayyaf remains a high security threat.
Chief Superintendent Joel Goltiao, chief of police in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, to which Sulu belongs, said Tuesday that the police had sent “feelers” to the Abu Sayyaf in the hope of a negotiation “but the abductors have not yet said anything,” he said, according to The Associated Press.
Goltiao told reporters Tuesday that the crew was abducted on the island of Jolo by a group led by Albader Parad, a known Abu Sayyaf leader.
“This can give a bad signal because Ms. Drilon is a very popular figure in the country,” said Lorelie Fajardo, a spokesperson for President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. She said the president had already ordered the police to do its best to locate the four abductees.
ABS-CBN, in a short statement made Tuesday, confirmed that its crew has been missing but stopped short of calling it a kidnapping. “All efforts are under way to find them and bring them home,” the network said.
The incident once again highlighted the security problems that Filipino journalists face. According to local and international media groups, the Philippines is among the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists.
“It is great cause for concern that this volatile southern region of the Philippines remains insecure for the press