40 die as Philippine ferry capsizes

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.”

The melamine stain: One sign of a worldwide problem

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.

Asia, too, feels the pain

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.”

Islamist militant held in the Philippines

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.

Fighting worsens in Philippines, displacing 300,000 on Mindanao

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.

Peace process fraught with peril for Arroyo

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.”

Islamic separatists kill 28 in Philippines rampage

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.”

Suspicions of Arroyo helped sink Muslim peace deal

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.

130,000 Filipinos displaced as fighting escalates

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.

Murders of 2 Filipino journalists alarm media groups

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.

1,300 feared dead in wake of typhoon in the Philippines

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.

Grim scene greets rescue divers in Philippines

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.”

Hopes fading for Philippine ferry survivors

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.

Hundreds feared dead in Philippines storm

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.

Militants free Philippine TV reporter and 2 others

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.

Television news crew believed kidnapped in Philippines

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, and we call on local authorities to work diligently to secure their safe and swift release,” said Bob Dietz of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is based in New York.

This would not be the first time that journalists pursuing a story on Abu Sayyaf had been kidnapped by their subjects. In 2000, Abu Sayyaf seized a group of 16 local and foreign journalists who were covering the kidnapping of 21 people from a Malaysian resort.

Philippines cracks down on illegal kidney trade

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Published: April 29, 2008

MANILA: The Philippines is banning kidney transplants for foreigners as part of a government crackdown on a growing, illicit trade in human organs bought from the poor, officials said Tuesday.

The ban is expected to take effect in May. Foreigners who violate it, as well as middlemen in the transaction, can be jailed for up to 20 years and fined as much as two million pesos, or more than $47,000, Health Secretary Francisco Duque said at a news conference Tuesday.

Foreigners who are related to Filipino citizens by blood are exempted from the ban, Duque said.

Although the sale of human organs has always been illegal in the Philippines, kidney transplants have become a lucrative underground business, with hospitals classifying the kidneys as donations to evade the law, according to Amihan Abueva, the regional director in Manila of Asia Acts Against Child Trafficking, a nongovernment group that lobbied for the ban.

According to Duque, kidney transplants to foreigners increased more than 60 percent between 2002 and 2006.

Abueva attributed that increase to hospitals exceeding the government-mandated cap on kidney transplants for foreigners. Under Health Department regulations, only 10 percent of a hospital’s kidney transplants may be performed for foreigners.

“These transplants are done openly in the best hospitals,” Abueva said.

A typical kidney transplant costs about $95,000, she said.

Organ transplants, including those for kidneys, are among the services hospitals offer under the government’s Philippine Medical Tourism Program, aimed at foreigners. Some of these hospitals, such as the National Kidney Institute, are government-owned.

As a result of the thriving trade in kidneys, many poor Filipinos have been willing to sell their kidneys for $2,000 to $10,000, a huge amount of money for an impoverished family.

According to Abueva’s group, kidney brokers scout for possible “donors” in the poorest slums in Manila and in the provinces. These brokers often are paid from $1,000 to $1,500 per transplant.

The Philippine media have produced numerous reports about donors dying because of complications.

There have also been reports of the brokers housing the donors for months in apartments in Manila and nearby areas until they can find foreign buyers, who are mostly from Europe, the Middle East and richer Asian countries like Japan and South Korea.

On April 21, the police raided such a house in a province just north of Manila and arrested three members of a gang that was selling kidneys to foreigners, the police said. They found nine donors in the house.

“I can barely provide for my wife and children,” one of them told the Philippine Daily Inquirer. “I just wanted to earn some money and give it to them.” He said he was promised 120,000 pesos, or about $2,800, for his kidney.

The World Health Organization has identified China, Pakistan, Egypt, Colombia and the Philippines as the world’s leaders in the illegal sale of kidneys.

Officials have said that because some of these countries have tightened regulations on transplants, more foreigners seeking kidneys would come to the Philippines, unless preventive action was taken.

Duque, the health secretary, said the ban was meant to protect poor Filipinos. “The poor always end up as the ones being abused,” he said. “The sale of one’s body parts is condemnable and ethically improper. We have to stop it.”

High food prices leads to ‘rice passes’ for poorest Filipinos

The government reacts as the price of rice in the Philippines has nearly doubled since the beginning of the year.

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: April 27, 2008

MANILA: Poor Filipinos who are reeling from high food prices unseen since the 1970s will get some relief this week, when the Philippine government starts to distribute “rice passes” to the most impoverished families across the country, officials said Sunday.

The government has also set in motion an unprecedented relief program that would entail the distribution of cash subsidies amounting to about 1,400 pesos, or $33, a month to the poorest Filipino families.

These measures are just two of several implemented by the government as it tries to mitigate the effects of the global food crunch that has hit poor countries like the Philippines the hardest.

The cash subsidies, which will be distributed by the government-owned Land Bank of the Philippines through ATM cards, “should provide immediate emergency assistance to the extremely poor,” Esperanza Cabral, the social-welfare secretary, said Sunday.

The program will cost the government an estimated five billion pesos a year and should benefit about 300,000 families in the 20 poorest provinces. Each family will receive 500 pesos a month and an additional 300 pesos monthly support for each child, with a maximum of three children. A typical Filipino household has more than three children.

Cabral said the cash-subsidy program was already under way in five provinces outside of the capital and two cities in the greater Manila area.

Earlier this month, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said her government would make sure to “put food on the tables of our people.” The food crisis, she said, was “putting a strain on all hardworking Filipinos.”

“We need to prevent this strain on individuals and economies from becoming a crisis by taking decisive action,” she added.

On Tuesday, the Social Welfare Department will begin distributing “Family Access Cards” that will entitle families with a monthly income of less than 5,000 pesos to buy government-subsidized rice. The rice passes, Cabral said, would ensure that the poorest Filipinos be prioritized in the rationing of rice.

The National Food Authority, the government rice-trading agency, said last week that the rice passes would help the authorities monitor distribution. Last week, the agency reported incidents of unscrupulous traders buying government-subsidized rice and then selling it at higher prices. The cards, officials said, would have bar codes and would set off alarms if fraud was detected, including any attempts to buy more than the maximum amount allowed.

The rice cards will only be distributed when the National Food Authority withdraws its subsidized rice from public markets, a move opposed by many, although the government maintains selling directly to consumers is one way to keep the price low. A kilogram of the government-subsidized rice costs 18.25 pesos, or roughly half the price of rice being sold in grocery stores.

Since the beginning of the year, the price of rice in the Philippines has nearly doubled.

The Philippines is now the world’s largest rice importer by metric tons, according to March 2008 figures released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Asian food crisis has political and civil implications

By Thomas Fuller
Published: April 18, 2008
International Herald Tribune

Carlos Conde contributed reporting from Manila, Janesara Fugal from Bangkok and Peter Gelling from Jakarta.

BANGKOK: Asia’s food crisis is spreading beyond the specter of empty stomachs.

Politicians are facing the wrath of angry voters, government budgets are being stretched to pay for increased food subsidies and the potential for civil unrest looms, especially if the cost of essential items like cooking oil and rice continues to climb.

In Malaysia, where the governing coalition was nearly ousted in March elections, voters overwhelmingly cited the surging price of fuel and food as “the most important problem in the country” in a postelection survey carried out by the Merdeka Center, an independent polling agency.

If Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi steps down, which many members of his party are pressuring him to do amid postelection turmoil, he will be the region’s first high-profile political casualty of fuel and food price inflation.

In Indonesia, the government recently revised its 2008 budget, increasing the amount it will spend on food subsidies by 2.7 trillion rupiah, or about $290 million. Total government spending on fuel, electricity and food subsidies this year will total $20 billion.

“The biggest concern is food riots,” said H.S. Dillon, a former adviser to the Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture. “I don’t see an immediate danger right now, but it has happened in the past and can happen again,” Dillon said. A rise in soybean prices in January led to months of small but widespread protests across Indonesia.

The price of rice, which on world markets surged 165 percent over the past year, is being closely watched as a barometer of potential unrest.

“Rice is a political commodity,” said Kwanchai Gomez, the executive director of the Thai Rice Foundation, a research center. “It’s not only an economic one.”

In the Philippines, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is scrambling to ensure that there is enough subsidized rice available for the poor.

“The immediate concern is regime survival,” wrote Amando Doronila, one of the country’s most respected political commentators, in Tuesday’s edition of The Philippine Daily Inquirer.

The rise in prices affects consumers differently across Asia. For the wealthiest in Singapore, Hong Kong or Kuala Lumpur, food inflation can engender a political backlash, but it is not a life-or-death problem. But for the poorest across Asia, rising prices mean the prospect of increasing rates of malnutrition.

“Food price increases are especially regressive,” said Paul Risley, the spokesman in Asia for the World Food Program, the UN agency that feeds the world’s destitute.

Singaporeans on average spend only 8 percent of their income on food, compared with 15 percent in Malaysia, 26 percent in Indonesia and Thailand, 28 percent in China, 33 percent in India and around 40 percent in Pakistan and Vietnam, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Those likely to be hurt the most by the sharp increase in food prices are the urban poor, the residents of Asia’s sprawling megacities, Risley said. People in rural areas may have less cash, but they can resort to hunting and gathering.

Slum dwellers in the Philippines, the world’s largest rice importer, are among the worst off in the region. Even before the spike in food prices this year, poverty and food insecurity were on the rise. According to a government report released in March, the number of people who do not have enough income to meet basic food needs in the Philippines rose to 12.2 million in 2006 from 10.8 million three years earlier, an increase of about 13 percent.

In recent weeks the government has mobilized police officers and soldiers to supply the poorest Filipinos with subsidized rice. The rice, much of which was imported from Vietnam, sells for 18.25 pesos a kilogram, or 20 cents a pound, half the price of the cheapest commercially sold rice in the Philippines.

Waiting in line outside a warehouse last weekend to buy government-supplied rice was Julieta Casanova, 60, who lives with her two children and eight grandchildren in Tandang Sora, a slum outside of Manila.

“We can’t survive without rice,” Casanova said. The government rations the rice to five kilograms per person, which Casanova said would last two days.

Arroyo, the Philippines’ president, and many other leaders across the region have blamed hoarding by traders and millers for the price increases. Thai Grade B rice, a widely traded variety, reached $854 per ton last week from $322 a year ago, a rise that appears speculative as much as driven by market fundamentals.

Bad weather and increased consumption have caused rice supplies to shrink, experts say, but the world is not in immediate danger of running out. Indonesia is in the midst of a record harvest this year and after years of importing rice will have a surplus of 1.2 million tons, according to Bayu Krisnamurti, deputy for agriculture for the Coordinating Ministry of Economic Affairs. The Food and Agriculture Organization, a United Nations agency, predicts that an overall good harvest this year will increase rice production by 12 million tons, or about 1.8 percent globally.

Yet this news has been overshadowed in a generalized atmosphere of soaring prices for gasoline and economic uncertainty stemming from the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis. In Hong Kong and other Asian cities, some shoppers have panicked, emptying shelves of rice as news of rice prices became a front-page story.

Even in Thailand, which produces 10 million more tons of rice than it consumes and is the world’s largest rice exporter, supermarkets have placed signs limiting the amount of rice that shoppers are allowed to purchase.

During a recent afternoon in the aisles of Tesco Lotus, a supermarket and department store in Bangkok, three worried customers surveyed large bags of rice and complained about the price increase. Jaruwan Krairit, 60, said the type of rice she usually buys had gone up 60 percent. Srisuttha Worawan, 57, said she had been to all the major supermarkets in Bangkok and “no one has the cheap rice,” she said, only the fragrant, more expensive varieties.

Yet these particular customers were not worried about going hungry: All three were looking for cheap rice for their dogs.

“I’ll have to give them dry dog food for now,” said Phanit Chatthanasenee, 60, who has 10 canines. “But my dogs don’t like that.”

In Thailand, as in many other up-and-coming Asian countries, food may cost more, but it remains abundant.

9 sentenced in Philippine coup attempt

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Published: April 8, 2008

MANILA: A Philippine court on Tuesday sentenced nine military officers to prison terms of up to 40 years for participating in a 2003 coup attempt against President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

The officers were among 31 accused of raiding and occupying a hotel in Manila’s business district on July 27, 2003, protesting corruption in the military and demanding reforms.

The daylong mutiny ended with the officers surrendering to the authorities.

Judge Oscar Pimentel, who presided over the five-year trial, sentenced two officers - Captain Gerardo Gambala and Captain Milo Maestrecampo of the army’s Scout Rangers - to 40 years and the other seven to sentences ranging from 6 to 12 years.

Prosecutors said the sentences were harsher than they had expected.

“The decision caught us by surprise,” said Richard Fadullon, one of the prosecutors, adding that they had requested a maximum 20-year sentence for the leaders.

The military chief of staff, General Hermogenes Esperon, said: “Our judicial system is taking its due course. I appreciate them for having pleaded guilty.”

The fact that the accused changed their pleas last week to guilty raised speculation that the officers had reached a deal with the prosecution.

Prosecutors and defense lawyers denied a plea bargain had been arranged. However, Trixie Angeles, a lawyer representing several of the accused, said the officers could now expect a presidential pardon because they changed their plea.

“It would be normal for us to expect pardon,” Angeles told reporters Tuesday.

She said Esperon was “instrumental” in the officers’ decision to plead guilty.

Last December, 53 soldiers who were jailed for the same coup attempt were released after pleading guilty.

Several of the accused in the 2003 mutiny, including Gambala and Maestrecampo, had publicly apologized to Arroyo.

Prosecutors had argued that the mutiny was part of a larger plot to oust Arroyo and install a civilian-military junta.

Since she took power in a 2001 uprising against President Joseph Estrada, Arroyo has faced numerous allegations of corruption.

A navy lieutenant, Antonio Trillanes, who led the 2003 mutiny, alleged that corruption was so rampant in the armed forces that soldiers were dying because of inadequate supplies and facilities, a charge the military denied.

He also accused the military and the Arroyo administration of having had a hand in bombings in the southern Philippines that killed many civilians, a charge that the government also dismissed.

Trillanes and another mutiny leader, Captain Nicanor Faeldon of the Marines, are facing a criminal trial on the same charges and a separate court-martial.

Last November, Faeldon, Trillanes and other military personnel walked out of court and briefly occupied another Manila hotel, calling for Arroyo’s resignation.

Faeldon remains at large after having escaped from a police dragnet during that incident.

Trillanes ran for a Senate seat and won, even though he remains in detention awaiting a verdict.