Around the port of Zamboanga, what was originally the Spanish citadel has now become the main town of Western Mindanao, a large island of the Philippines situated in the Sulu Sea and inhabited by 75 million people. In the early hours of 17 May huddles of fishermen were discussing the night’s meagre catch, apparently oblivious to a column of passengers arriving under military escort from an old ferryboat. The arrivals were 85 Moro expatriates [1] - Muslim Filipino nationals - who had been deported from Sabah, the Malaysian region in the north of the island of Borneo. One of them was a 27-year-old by the name of Yussuf, his eyes dark with lack of sleep. He explained that he and his companions had been caught up in a police raid, and had been expelled by the Malaysian police. By mid-May almost 2,000 Moros had already been deported by the Kuala Lumpur authorities. This was a reprisal for the episodes of hostage-taking which, for three months, have been causing turmoil in the Sulu archipelago, the southernmost part of the Philippines.

Here at the border between Malaysia (a majority Muslim confederation) and the Philippines (the biggest Catholic country in Asia) [2], there are several separatist groups identifying with Islam. Thirty per cent of the inhabitants of the Southern Philippines are Muslim (as against the 70% who are Christian). But in the Sulu archipelago (the islands of Basilan, Jolo and Tawi-Tawi) the situation is reversed, with 97% of the population professing Islam.

It was here, in March and April, that a small extremist group known as Abu Sayyaf took two groups of people hostage : about 30 Filipino schoolchildren and teachers, and 21 Asian and European tourists. The organisation - whose name means “father of the sword” - was founded by Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani. He had studied Islamic law in Saudi Arabia, had fought as a guerrilla in Afghanistan and was killed by police in the Philippines in 1998). The group was set up in the early 1990s, and is said to have links with the Taliban in Afghanistan. In an interview given at their base among the coconut palms on the island of Jolo, armed Abu Sayyaf rebels explained that their aim was to create a federal Islamic state along the lines of the sultanate that had existed prior to colonisation by Spain.

As has been happening in the Indonesian province of Aceh, the Sulu archipelago - historically a shuttlecock between Malaysia and the Philippines, depending on the fluctuating fortunes of their respective British, Spanish and American colonisers [3] - is seeking an identity for itself. The kidnappers demanded money, and made it clear that they would use the cash to finance a long-term programme of armed struggle. The ransom money would first be used to pay the increasing number of guerrilla fighters who are joining the rebellion. Within a few days of the start of the crisis, a thousand peasants and fishermen had already answered their appeal. The money could also help the Abu Sayyaf group to procure weapons and vehicles, and finance the setting-up of a powerful radio transmitter.

This double kidnapping has been accompanied by recent bomb attacks in Mindanao and the capital, Manila. But it is only the most spectacular episode in a general resurgence of earlier movements - mostly Islamist, but some communist and some simply separatist - which have threatened the territorial unity of the Filipino, Malay and Indonesian archipelagos ever since they won independence.

In northern Sumatra, the Islamist Free Aceh Movement hopes to take its followers to independence down a similar path to that trodden by East Timor. In the Indonesian part of Papuasia (former Irian Jaya), there have been increasingly violent clashes, both with the army and within communities, since 1998. In each case the guerrillas and their supporters say that they are trying to preserve their cultural and religious identities in the face of the “internal colonisation” imposed by the central governments and the majority ethnic groupings.

In the Philippines, the gap between religious communities has been widening relentlessly, within a national space that has become increasingly fragmented. The centre ground is occupied by the former colonial subjects of the Spanish crown, the Christians who played a major part in the building of the Filipino state. And at the margins are the irreducible “tribes” (of Mindanao, Palawan and Sulu) who never accepted colonisation by Spain. The establishment of a Filipino state with an identity built on the values of the majority Christian community, has relegated the other communities to an economic and political periphery.

Islamic militants in today’s Philippines claim to be under threat from the increasingly powerful demographic presence of Catholics in a region where jobs are scarce and effectively reserved for Christians. Of the country’s 20 poorest provinces, 14 are located on the island of Mindanao and in the Sulu archipelago, where the annual per capita GNP is one sixth of the national average, which itself stands at not much more than $1,000. The region has the lowest life expectancy in the entire Philippines archipelago (57), and the highest rate of illiteracy (25%).

The hostage crisis, plus the general rise in tensions in the area in recent months, are also the result of an escalating conflict of interests between local Muslim clans. Abu Sayyaf is in competition with an earlier and more powerful organisation, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), which was set up in 1969, has a membership of 15,000 and enjoys permanent observer status at the Organisation of the Islamic Conference.

The kidnapping of the Western hostages on a Malaysian island and their subsequent transfer to Filipino territory was carried out by Abu Sayyaf a few days after peace negotiations broke down between its rival and the central authorities. At the end of April the MNLF had launched a broad-based military offensive against government armed forces. Comments by the kidnappers revealed that they have collaborators among old members of the Front now living in Sabah, which has been part of Malaysia since 1963 and is itself now the subject of growing separatist demands. According to reliable sources, the Sabah Moros had planned the operation as early as February, as a way of “responding to the bad treatment and over-exploitation to which our people have been subjected in the building sites and factories of Malaysia” [4].

Under the regime of Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos (1965-86), the conflict between the country’s cultural communities was exacerbated by massive interventions by the national army and the private Christian militias [5]. The MNLF was born at the start of this period. What began as a movement turned into a full-scale uprising in 1972 with the establishment of martial law, which ended up with 200,000 Moros being forced to flee to the neighbouring Malaysian state of Sabah. It was only with the signing of the Tripoli Agreement in 1976 that the violence abated slightly, but the presence of Christians in Western Mindanao meant that the central government ruled out any notion of autonomy for the provinces concerned.

Huge frustration

The Moros had to wait 20 years until (with the treaty of September 1996) President Fidel Ramos finally committed the government to creating an autonomous Muslim region in Mindanao. However, since 1996 nothing has been done to develop the economy of Mindanao and the Sulu islands. Initially the former fighters of the MNLF had believed the government’s promises, but later, with unemployment affecting upwards of half the economically active population, frustration set in.

As a businessman in Zamboanga explained (on condition of anonymity), “So then the Moros took up arms again and joined with the separatists of the Islamic Liberation Front and the radicals of the Abu Sayyaf group.” At the end of May, on the island of Jolo, Global, one of five members of the mysterious central committee of Al Arakatul Islamiir (Islamic Movement, the new name adopted by the Abu Sayyaf group) told us that the kidnapping was “one way of achieving our revolution”. In the course of a long soliloquy delivered by the light of an oil lamp, the gap-toothed revolutionary used his local dialect to outline the group’s political project : “To create a federal Islamic state taking in Jolo, Tawi-Tawi, Basilan, Mindanao and Palawan [i.e. about 40% of the present territory of the Philippines], a country in which we will be able to live in accord with our own aspirations, instead of under a government that refuses us the right to be different.”

Up until now Manila has categorically rejected these demands, since they threaten to dismantle the country’s national unity. However, the separatists are fully aware of how East Timor succeeded in detaching itself from Indonesia last year. Global insists that the discussions with the Filipino government will have to take place in the presence of the United Nations and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference “and no longer just with local politicians, in whom we have absolutely no confidence”. As a former criminology student from the University of Zamboanga, he points out that the kind of Islamic state that he wants to see did actually exist in former times : “A long time before the arrival of a certain Portuguese explorer by name of Magellan, sent by Madrid... He was fought by Lapu-Lapu, one of the heroes in our pantheon, who fought to preserve the independence of our soil against the invaders coming from the West...”

The Jolo sultanate was never wholly subdued by the Spaniards, who settled in Manila in 1521. The Moro resistance had a new lease of life at the start of the 20^th century against the colonial presence of the Americans. It campaigned particularly against the takeover of agricultural land which, as everywhere in Southeast Asia, was used by the central government as a means of territorial integration and assimilation of their minority populations. Since that time, the majority Muslim provinces on the west side of Mindanao have been the target for various waves of immigration by Christians, who dispossessed the Moros of their land, and marginalised them culturally, demographically and in terms of exploitation of natural resources.

The little hamlet of Taglibi, Abu Sayyaf’s main stronghold, has huts made of leaves and bamboo perched on wooden piles. It sums up the poverty in which the Muslim populations of the southern Philippines exist today. Taglibi sits next to blue seas and a long white beach, but it is no paradise for the people who live there. It has no running water, no electricity. The roads are liable to salinisation, and there is no tarmac on what they call the island’s “highway” - a dusty track that runs round the coast. As Ijirani, a fisherman, explains : “Here, the main work’s picking coconuts, fishing, and growing manioc, which we make cassava pancakes from”. Rice (imported from Vietnam via Sabah) is only eaten on big occasions. Life is made even worse by the fact that one third of the product of the harvesting and coconut gathering must be handed over to Panglima Ayudenee [6], patriarch of one of the six main families in Jolo who took advantage of the land reforms which the American colonial government began introducing in 1910 to take over most of the land on the island.

In the old days, under Moro customary law, the land belonged to those who farmed it [7]. The inhabitants of Taglibi explain that not even the sea is beyond the greed of the rich and powerful. Ijirani, who says he has a hard time feeding his seven children because of the extent of industrial fishing in the neighbouring concessions, explains : “By the time the trawlers have finished, all that’s left in the sea is seaweed. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t believe the Abu Sayyaf mujahedin when they promise us an end to oppression”.

Solomon Kane and Laurent Passicousset