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“How many guys did you lose at Bali? Almost ninety? I don’t know why you Aussies aren’t jumping up and down about Mindanao,” the officer says, referring to the large southern Filipino island where the bombers trained, and where I would soon be heading.

Another dinner companion, Bob, whom I’m told is “the most crucial guy you’ll meet on all this” (but who declines to reveal either his
lists a hostess to help demonstrate the flow of a battle.

“We came up this canyon and met the bad guys around here…” says Jim, hoisting the bar-girl’s breasts this way and that as the battle develops. Meanwhile Bob leans in, trying to talk to me amidst the crush of female attention.

“You know, 9/11 was planned in this city,” he says, referring to the Manila days of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, al Qa’ida’s former operations leader who oversaw September 11, and his nephew, Ramzi Yousef, who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. This Western-educated pair of engineers (Muhammad studied in the US and Yousef in the UK) lived in Manila in the early 1990s, where they brainstormed a variety of terrorist strikes against US targets involving jetliners – abandoned or foiled prototypes of the sort of devastation that Sheikh Muhammad would eventually achieve.

The plans ranged from the 9/11-like ramming of hijacked explosive-laden planes into the Pentagon and nearby CIA headquarters to the Bojinka plot - where 11 American passenger jets would simultaneously explode en route to the US from airports in the Asia Pacific region. The plan also included a wave of church and business bombings and assassinations. When visiting Manila, Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II were to be killed, as was the then-president of the Philippines, Fidel Ramos.

Yousef had considerable expertise with explosives. He warmed up for the mass murder by stashing a small nitro-glycerine device on a Philippines Airline flight from Manila to Tokyo in December 1994. Yousef deplaned before the last leg of the flight, during which his bomb blew a hole in the fuselage, killing one, wounding eleven, and forcing an emergency landing.

However, al Qa’ida’s 11-plane plot came unstuck a month later when bomb-making chemicals caught fire in Yousef’s Manila apartment and the police attending found explosives and a computer with encrypted files that eventually yielded detailed plans for the Bojinka attacks. He was later caught in Pakistan and extradited to the US, where he is serving a 240-year sentence in a federal prison in Colorado. Unfortunately, Sheikh Muhammad stayed in circulation until 2002, when he was apprehended in Pakistan, languishing ever since somewhere in US custody.

The Abu Sayyaf has long campaigned for Yousef’s release, threatening carnage if his incarceration continues and using hostages as bargaining chips. The US declines to negotiate.

Al Qa’ida’s claws are hooked deep into this country whose southern lands are closer to Darwin than Darwin is to Sydney. In the year Australia celebrated its bicentennial, 1988, Osama bin Laden co-founded al Qa’ida al-Sulbah (“the solid base”), and his brother-in-law, Muhammad Jamal Khalifa, moved to Manila. There he set up a number of trading companies and non-government organisations while taking control of several Muslim charities, including the Philippine branch of the International Islamic Relief Organisation.

Khalifa ensured that charity money flowed to militant groups as Filipino jihadists came home from the conflict in Afghanistan. Those who served abroad had transformed from parochial rebels into international jihadists, and with a little help from their friends, they transformed the Philippines from a country in which local wars were fought for local reasons into a new Afghanistan. Mindanao, home to the bulk of the Philippines’ five million Muslims, became a citadel of terrorism.

Khalifa financed the Islamist ambitions of Abdurajak Janjalani, an Afghan veteran from the island of Balisan off Mindanao’s southwestern tip. Janjalani started the Abu Sayyaf Group (the name means “bearer of the sword”), and courtesy of al Qa’ida’s largesse, Janjalani sent batches of fighters through religious indoctrination and military training at terrorist academies in regions of Mindanao held by the Philippine’s largest Muslim rebel group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Army. The Abu Sayyaf then grew into the most hated pack of extremists in the Philippines, storming schools and hospitals, raping and murdering nurses, pulling fingernails from priests, beheading and enslaving Christians, bombing churches and ferries, and seizing tourists from resorts as far away as Malaysia. Battered by al Qa’ida-aided terrorist groups including the Abu Sayyaf, JI, and the MILF, the Philippines has for about fifteen years endured the kind of Islamic terrorism that has traumatised much of the West only since 2001.

In the later half of the 1990s, the MILF welcomed Jemaah Islamiyah to Mindanao. Members of the two groups had bonded during the Afghan war, often living and training together. As the International Crisis Group (ICG) reports in Jemaah Islamiyah in South East Asia: Damaged but Still Dangerous, Filipinos, Indonesians and other South East Asian jihadists stayed mainly in the camps of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, an Afghan commander whose puritanical brand of Islam earned him the friendship of Osama bin Laden and considerable financial backing from Saudi Arabia. And as the ICG reports, many who later became notorious terrorists (including JI’s Bali-bombing strategist, Hambali, and Janjalani of the Abu Sayyaf), trained at a camp led by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf.

Janjalani named the Abu Sayyaf in his honour.

I’m sitting in the lounge room of MILF spokesman Eid Kabulu in his central Mindanao home when he tells me that he is one of “many hundred” Muslim guerrilla from Mindanao who travelled to Pakistan and Afghanistan for the fight against the “Russian menace”. The war was a time of solidarity between Islam and the West, he says. “Recall even that bin Laden was there and they were fighting side by side with the Americans and there was no quarrel at that time, but later on they quarrel.”

Kabalu says that many of the MILF’s Afghan sponsors, including Sayyaf, enjoyed power after the war as victorious mujahidin leaders, but “later on they were overthrown by the Taliban.” So the Filipinos came home to Mindanao, and brought JI with them.

The Philippines is a terrorist playhouse – a rugged wonderland of guns and machismo from its labyrinthine capital, Manila (population 10 million), to the feudal countryside where government control grows weak and much of the Muslim community ignores the rule of law, instead following a vendetta system known as “rido”. Rido necessitates blood money, payback killings, the targeting of relatives, and even attacks on the families of police should they try to intervene.

About 90 percent of the country’s 83 million-strong population are Catholic, and in fact Islam accounts for less than 5% of the population, but Mindanao is home to enough radicalized Muslims to have been home to a three decades-old insurgency going that has cost an estimated 120,000 lives. The MILF can field about 12,000 well-armed, well-trained guerrillas at the drop of a hat, and has tens of thousands more in reserve. Today an uneasy peace exists between the MILF, which denies links to JI and other terrorist groups, and the Filipino government: Under an agreement signed almost three years ago, the MILF is required to block the entry of wanted men into their communities, and to work with the authorities to pursue and apprehend fugitives inside its regions. The military and police, meanwhile, are required to submit to the insurgents their order of battle and the names of the hunted. But this is all just theory: almost three years later, the government has yet to even nominate its delegates to a Joint Action Group that will oversee the enforcement of law as called for by the ceasefire.

More to the point, the idea that the MILF and JI aren’t thick as thieves, and that any information given by the Filipino government would not immediately be passed on to terrorists is laughable, as shown during a 2000 government offensive when the army overran a joint JI-MILF training centre called Camp Hudaibiyah. What they found was a veritable graduate school for jihadists.

Courses ran for as long as three years, but shorter programs were available, including an 18-month special: “It consisted of three semesters, each six months, with two-week breaks at the end of the first and second semesters … practical explosives training covered familiarisation, identification, and handling of TNT, C-4, black powder, ammonium nitrate and RDX, detonating cord and detonators, and improvised explosive devices (IEDs)”, according to the ICG report. The JI students were also embedded with the MILF in areas of greatest tension with government forces, so that they might benefit from “jihad exposure”, the report says. A witness at the trial of JI’s
accused spiritual head, Abu Bakar Bashiyar, told an Indonesian court in December that he stood beside Bashir at Camp Hudaibiyah’s 2000 graduation ceremony of JI terrorists. In Collier’s report for the ICG, Southern Philippines Backgrounder: Terrorism and the Peace Process, he writes that “the men who trained or became instructors in Camp Hudaibiyah include many of the JI members most closely associated with the Bali bombings and other atrocities in Indonesia and the Philippines.”

Nevertheless, despite this glaring Exhibit A – Camp Hudaibiyah – and plenty of other evidence from arrests and corroborated admissions that the two groups have worked together on bomb attacks in the Philippines and Indonesia, and that joint training continues in remote camps, the government maintains that the MILF is not a terrorist organisation in order to maintain the fiction of a ceasefire. When guerrillas are caught or implicated in bombings, the government settles for the useful fiction that the
guilty parties are from the MILF’s “lost commands”, thereby excusing the organisation of responsibility and allowing the peace
process to trundle along. The government has even persuaded Washington to leave the MILF off its list of foreign terrorist organisations.

Observers such as the International Crisis Group and JI defectors have reported that as the Philippine military threatened Camp Hudaibiyah, JI retreated into a more remote, mountainous MILF region and set up a new camp known as Jabal Quba. But under the terms of a ceasefire signed in July 2003, government forces are barred from approaching Jabal Quba without prior permission from the MILF – though the rebels routinely invite government officials and members of the press to come on three-day guerrilla-supervised hikes to the Jabal Quba area, where up to 30 JI terrorists are reportedly training at any one time, according to Rohan Gunaratna.

“Mindanao is JI’s strategic base. As long as the camps are active, JI will replenish itself,” says Gunaratna, a former principal investigator for the United Nations’ Terrorism Prevention Branch. Indeed, key to the MILF’s long-term ceasefire strategy might be seen in the very name Camp Hudaibiyah: In the early days of Islam, when the Prophet Muhammed lacked sufficient military force to take the town of Mecca from the Quarish tribe, he signed the Hudaibiyah Treaty, a 10-year mutual non-aggression pact. But within three years, the Prophet’s army had grown more than fivefold, so he slaughtered the Quarish men, enslaved the women, and seized the town. This theologically-justified technique of using a treaty to rebuild forces became known as a Hudna, and Hudaibiyah was its first application.

Mindanao is a threat to the world.

Mindanao is a sprawling, mountainous island, shaped like a leprous poodle that’s just been kicked in the rear. My plane flies over the rugged forests of the snout-like Zamboanga Peninsula on the island’s west and banks steeply to land at Zamboanga City, known as the City of Flowers due to its bougainvilleas and other distractions.

The predominantly Catholic seaside city also has a reputation for danger. Unfairly, according to locals quick to point out that no-one has been killed in a bombing for years (well, about two, which is a long time in the action-packed Philippines). And as for the menace of kidnap-for-ransom-groups (known as KFRGs), well, that’s a problem all over the country. Just don’t wander around at night and try to avoid routines. And maybe don’t visit the countryside, because of the bandits. (“You have bandits in Australia?”). Foreigners are told not to even trust the police near the labyrinthine Muslim ghetto of Rio Hondo, they say. Anyone could be an agent of the Abu Sayyaf, or in their pay. The people staring at you from every doorway and window will think you are rich, or work for a big company that will pay a ransom. Or that you are a US soldier. Or CIA.

One afternoon I walk through markets and find the usual smiles and calls of “Hey, Joe!” replaced by dead-eyed glares. Then I hear a man pass the word: “Military”.

Someone blew up a US soldier just outside Zamboanga City in 2002 – killed him and three locals at a side-street bar next to the joint US-Filipino training facility. When I land at the airport, a fit young American in casuals from my flight is met by a pick-up full of uniformed US soldiers. My guess is they’re whisking him out to base.

A large “caliber” pistol is used to put a photojournalist down nearby Jolo while I’m in Mindanao. One shot to the head as he takes sunset photographs.

I sit and watch Baslian’s peaks and ranges glimmer blue to black as the day fades from the outdoor bar of the grand and empty Lantaka Seaside Hotel in Zamboanga City. All along the horizon, Basilan’s peaks and ranges glimmer blue to black as the light fades. Pearl hawkers and sea gypsies on the beach climb back in their boats, some to cruise home across the strait. The barman serves icy bottles of San Miguel beer and talks about how good business was when Marcos held the country under martial law. The Muslim and communist rebellions were even worse then, but the hotels, restaurants, beaches and shops were packed with Germans, Japanese, Koreans, Americans, Swedes, and Australians, he says. Democracy brought political instability followed by Islamic terrorism and the kidnapping of foreigners. Now business is so bad that half the hotel is mothballed, with patronage only picking up when journalists flock to cover the latest Abu Sayyaf outrage out on the islands.

Yet even in quiet times, the Armed Forces of the Philippines remains an important source of income for Zamboanga City, which hosts the headquarters of the military’s Southern Command, a.k.a. Southcom. The AFP divides the nation into three theatres, one for each of the Philippines’ major island groups (Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao), with Southcom handling military operations in and around Mindanao.

At Southcom’s helm is Lieutenant General Alberto Fernando Braganza. Braganza has only been on the job a couple of days when we talk, but his office is already well set-up, and he leads me past the leather sofa set and ornate mahogany furniture to admire his statue of the Blessed Virgin, a framed photograph of his first parachute jump, and various awards and citations. Mindanao is the largest of the three Philippine commands, so Braganza’s ten-month posting marks a distinguished end to a long career. Commissioned as an officer in 1972, he will retire in September this year. And if what Braganza tells me is correct, then Mindanao’s reputation for mayhem is also due to hang up its boots. Terrorism, rebellions, and lawlessness? Dead and buried, by and large.

The general commands 40,000 troops in the Philippines’ most volatile region – an area viewed worldwide as contested ground in the war on terror – and with every smile, every carefully selected reminiscence, every casual flex of the arm, he seems to project that all worry is unnecessary. Thus Braganza is piqued by warnings to avoid his domain. Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, as well as the US State Department, say they have information about terrorists planning attacks, possibly against coastal resorts, and recommend deferring all non-essential travel to Mindanao.

Braganza tells me that although “local cells” of JI are active in the Philippines, including those caught casing the US Embassy, such criminals have no future because “the people want peace”.

“It is really unfair to have this travel advisory not to go to Mindanao – it’s a very peaceful place,” Braganza says. I ask how he can say that when the Indonesian courts are full of JI members talking about their carefree student days in Mindanao learning the dos and don’ts of bomb-making and guerrilla warfare. I ask how his reading of the island’s peacefulness jells with the simple fact that large regions of Mindanao are held by JI’s allies and protectors, the MILF.

“We control all territories,” Braganza says, smiling. Once upon a time, Mindanao suffered from “the threat of terrorism, insurgency, criminality and lawlessness”, but today it is “very safe”, he says. And generally fine for tourism. Heck, even the four most wanted Abu Sayyaf commanders are taking advantage of the new Mindanao.

“They have been moving around. They are enjoying Mindanao.

That these fugitive sightseers have little to do but relax in sleepy backwaters or visit relatives on Basilan, shows that the military is “making great strides” in taming Mindanao. “Abu Sayyaf is a spent force. We have destroyed their will to fight, although to some extent there could be recruitment.”

“There has been no major incident for about two years now, except for the Superferry,” Braganza adds.

The Abu Sayyaf’s bombing of the Superferry 14 as it left Manila Bay bound for Zamboanga City killed about 130 people and is the Philippines’ worst ever terrorist outrage. I ask how this fits with the “spent force” theory.

“We are on top of the situation,” he says.

Reassuring news, provided we also ignore carnage in Mindanao’s Davao City, the Philippines’ largest metropolis after Manila. Braganza made his remarks in November last year, but bombs twice hit Davao City the year before, killing more than 40 and injuring about 170, the deadliest in a wave of bombings across Mindanao in 2003.
Still, Braganza assures me that Mindanao is mine to explore. “It’s very safe,” he says.

“But what about all the locals telling me I’ve got a 50/50 chance of making it if I go for a drive up into the mountains?” I ask.
Braganza scoffs. “No. Not at all. I go everywhere in Mindanao, and it is very safe.”

“OK, well, I’ll drive around then.”

Braganza smiles and leans forward. “Because you don’t know the area and might not find your way, I will have you escorted,” he says.
Five weeks after I interviewed General Braganza, a bomb exploded in a market at Mindanao’s General Santos City, a major tuna fishing port, killing 15 people and injuring about 70. The regional police chief said after the 12 December blast that he would keep an open mind about who might be the guilty party, because of the large number of rebel groups operating in the city. Filipino authorities are notorious for destroying evidence, sometimes ordering blast sites cleaned up before forensic crews are finished.

But perhaps this bombing will yield a greater amount of evidence than usual with the help of more methodical investigators – a senior officer of the Filipino Marines told me that the Australian Federal Police now have a presence in General Santos City. The Federal Police had not answered questions about this claim at the time this went to press.

Braganza proves as good as his word. I don’t feel in any danger whatsoever of getting lost touring Basilan. Not while sitting in the centre vehicle of a three Humvee convoy, cruising with the colonel responsible for mili-tary operations on the island, an army information officer, a plain clothes intelligence officer from the Filipino Marines, and a dozen or so troopers in full battle gear. With Rosary beads dangling from the rear-view vision mirrors, we cruise the mainly Muslim province, checking out paramilitary checkpoints, sites of notorious terrorist crimes (hospitals stormed and nurses dragged away to be raped and killed; Catholic schools raided with 53 students and staff dragged away; teachers tortured, raped, their breasts cut off), the lush mountains, far-flung combat bases, and other attractions.

The man in charge is Colonel Raymundo B. Ferrer, commanding officer of the 103rd Infantry Battalion. He talks me through the early stirrings of Basilan’s terrorist madness.

“We were hearing some things through the Afghan war, how some Muslims were recruited from the Philippines,” the colonel says. “After the Afghan war they have to come back. They’re jobless, but with training and ideology. The Abu Sayyaf Group emerged.”

Abu Sayyaf champions an Islamic state across the Basilan and the Sulu archipelago, but its rampages belie a strong profit motive. Ferrer says that waving the Islamic flag is itself just another money-making tool for the Abu Sayyaf. “They just have to use the word ‘jihad’ so they get support from Muslim countries. They are not like the Taliban,” he says.

Yet the Taliban and the Abu Sayyaf have some common friends. “Mindanao has al Qa’ida cells. ASG definitely had training from al Qa’ida,” Ferrer says.

Ferrer wears jungle fatigues for the island tour, but at night he sports an Elmo t-shirt. while his men pile the tables high with fried chicken, grilled fish, limes, rice, mangos, papayas, and beer.
Ferrer tells me the US approach has had better results than Germany’s earlier payment of US$25 million. The ransom was ostensibly for community development projects, but the terrorists threw a little around to beef up their popular support, and then invested in better weaponry.

“They bought speedboats with two outboard and two inboard motors – they could do 50 knots. Our boats could not keep up,” Ferrer says.

“And the Abu Sayyaf are sea people, they know the sea like a highway.”

“The politicians raised bad memories of Americans fighting there when they colonised the Philippines one century ago, but that was just a smoke screen,” Ferrer says. “The truth is that this is a feudal country, and the reason that ASG were not finished off on Jolo and Tawi-Tawi is because the politicians like things to be backward. They are very rich from how things are and they do not want anything to change or to be developed. People will not question the status quo if they are not educated”. Ferrer says, then shifts in his chair and rests in his thoughts. If terrorists, insurgents, or anyone else wants to sneak up on the camp, now is the time, because the militia rock band starts rocking in one of the huts. Ferrer comes out of his reverie, and looks at me. “We are kept as a guerrilla force, you know. The government only gives us enough resources to remain as a guerrilla force, so that we are not too strong. I don’t know how long I can sustain the peace,” he says.

Cotabato City, half Christian, half Muslim, is a gunned-up frontier town of about 150,000; a transit point for terrorists, bandits, kidnappers, evacuees and rebels en route to the interior of the Philippines’ major southern island, Mindanao. “Wanted for Kidnapping” posters decorate sidings around Cotabato City, each showing twenty or so fugitive members from some of the Philippines’ multitudinous kidnap-for-ransom groups.

Police cradle M-16s as they patrol the town, given the region’s well-armed outlaws. Yet the situation the Cotabato City constabulary handle is rosy compared to their colleagues to the east around Davao City, where the communist New People’s Army frequently kill cops in ambushes and raids.

Stroll the Cotabato City streets and you will also see Government soldiers driving by in trucks and Humvees, part of the 6th Infantry Division which is headquartered beside the airport on the outskirts. The 6ID are the ones likely to be doing the shooting and the getting shot at during the occasional ceasefire violation.

A couple hours’ drive from Cotabato City will take the intrepid into what the army calls “MILF communities”, majority-Muslim regions in which able-bodied men are presumed guerrillas with ready access to serious firepower. In many of these areas, both the military and police would be inviting serious violence if they entered, so they don’t, even if General Braganza entertains a different story. Jemaah Islamiyah, on the other hand, is welcome.

Arrests, confessions, and raids have shown conclusively that the town has a JI problem, but only to those who want to believe.

I attend a dinner for the International Monitoring Team – the multinational inspection force tasked with keeping both sides moving towards a peace deal - where the mayor of Cotabato City, Muslimin Sema, dismisses “the alleged presence of so-called terrorists”.

“This is a peaceful city,” says Sema, as he complains that the United States is holding up aid money until counter-terrorism is taken seriously. Sema is on the executive of the MNLF and holds substantial power over civil administration in the five majority Islamic provinces which were designated the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) in the 1996 peace agreement. The ARMM is kept afloat courtesy of a United Nations trust fund.

The next day Major Dickson Hermoso, who chairs the Government’s side of the Coordinating Committee for the Cessation of Hostilities, a ceasefire panel working through a peace process with the MILF, shows me a JI safe-house where the police found preparations for bio-chemical attacks – just another bland little building in a narrow street not far from his own home. “They like it here because it is a good neighbourhood,” he says.

The ceasefire chairman dresses his family with Kevlar when central Mindanao is in the mood to celebrate. Hermoso has already been shot a couple of times, not from the wild sky-firing at Cotabato City during Ramadan, Christmas, or New Year’s Eve, but in “engagements” with communist rebels elsewhere in the archipelago.

“I am friends with my God,” says Hermoso, smiling as he displays scars where bullets passed through his wrist and side without crippling damage.

Yet the Catholic Hermoso prefers that during festivities, his family’s faith not be similarly tested.

“With my kids we all wear Kevlar helmets and hide under a concrete roof, because my house was hit twice and once a bullet lodged in my bed,” Hermoso says. “It is illegal to shoot into their air, but there is not much the police can do to stop it, because when people see them coming, they just play hide and seek with their guns.”

And when Ramadan ends, the 4AM call to prayer of the Cotabato City muezzins has a distinctive percussive accompaniment.

As pleas to Allah, the compassionate, the merciful, and to His prophet Muhhamad wail across the still-dark tropics, jarring blasts from automatic weapons suggest that many believers are not yet in the mosques. The shooting continues for about 90 minutes.

In a van with blacked-out windows speeding through Maguindanao province towards the edges of Government control, the casually-dressed major draws a pistol from his picnic basket. “I brought this because you are coming, and my boys also have guns,” he says, gesturing towards the plain-clothes pair up front. “Your white skin is an incitement, because to the Muslim you represent the infidel – the one who refuses to accept Allah.”

We drive through poor districts where people hang in doorways and under shade, waiting until sunset to break their Ramadan fasts, pull up at a ceasefire monitoring station at Buliok – a traditional MILF heartland currently enduring an army presence.

Government forces overran Buliok in 2003, using tanks, air-strikes and infantry to kill perhaps 100 guerrillas, and reportedly suffering a similar number of casualties.

Now the barangay looks like any other – tidy thatched houses lining the paths; kids shooting baskets on a pair of the Philippines’ ubiquitous backboards; hut-front stalls offering Coca-Cola and cigarettes.

Normal, except for the Philippines army jeep pulling up with
“Armageddon” painted across the windscreen and its load of soldiers fanning out with their weapons. And normal except for the Local Monitoring Team (LMT) board stuck up showing cell-phone hotlines to call should the ceasefire come to an abrupt halt.

A chubby guy hired on to the government side of the LMT strolls over, but the MILF representatives are nowhere to be seen.

Hermoso walks me past the mosque to the edge of the Mindanao River, where we watch a constant run of boats moving passengers and goods. Many are piloted by young boys and some can be seen carrying pistols. Across the river a row of huts sit before light forest, with no one visible, nor any sign of human habitation. I have never before seen a collection of clean, empty buildings in the Philippines.

We had hoped to meet the guerrillas working for the Buliok LMT, but it turns out they are somewhere over the river.

“That is MILF territory,” Hermoso says.

“So can we cross the river? Go and talk to people over there?”I ask.

“No, not without prior arrangement with the MILF, or it would be a ceasefire violation,” Hermoso says.

“So how can anyone know what’s going on in MILF areas?” I ask.

“The IMT arranges visits as part of the peace process.”

“But if they’re arranged in advance with the MILF, won’t JI or Abu Sayyaf terrorists know to go away for the weekend, and pop back when the monitors are gone?”

“Yes, but this JI is not part of the problem or mandate of the IMT,” Hermoso says.

I remind Hermoso that the MILF has made the presence of terrorists in their camps a peace issue by inviting Australia and the US to join an IMT visit to a facility where scores of JI and Abu Sayyaf are known to have trained and strongly believed to continue training, Camp Jabal Quba, tucked away in a remote volcanic region north of Cotabato City.
The MILF spokesman, Kabalu, told me that the rebels had nothing to hide from Western governments, and an arranged visit in the company of guerrillas to an area three days’ hike from the road would “determine once and for all the presence of alleged Jemaah Islamiyah or any suspected terrorists”.

However, Australian and US embassy officials told me that they ignored the offer because the visit would determine nothing.

Hermoso says that is true. “By telegraphing the moves of the government in going up there, we will not see anything, but we appreciate the gesture of the MILF in inviting us,” he says. Welcoming this gesture is part of “confidence building”, which may gradually turn the MILF from its support of terrorists.

When I point out the deadly futility of this strategy, Hermoso smiles. “We have to build confidence. It is gradual but it is the only way,” he says.

Major General Raul Relano, commanding officer of the 7,000-strong 6th Infantry Division, apologises for the heat. He has ordered the 6ID to do without air conditioning for the next few months to cut energy consumption, and his headquarters by the airport
are sweltering.

We sit down to coffee, and Relano talks about the terrorist groups he hunts. “In the Philippines we have the Communists, Abu Sayyaf, JI, and religious organisations connected to al Qa’ida.”

The JI presence in rebel areas has been reported by informants, Relano says. The MILF routinely issue denials, “but their statements are always cloudy.” Relano tells me the military tries to monitor movements, but “these are areas not easily accessible to troops.

Whenever they go there, skirmishes ensue.”

These altercations can get very bloody, because “they have heavy weaponry, RPGs, mortars that they got from their counterparts in the Middle East, and some they have manufactured in country. They have money from their kidnapping activities, and are able to buy heavy weapons. Informants tell us they have so many money, probably some from Saudi sympathisers,” Relano says.

Of prime concern are the scale and spread of JI training in ceasefire-protected zones. Relano talks about rebel strongholds, heavily defended regions with large standing forces where the MILF trains its guerrillas.

“And is JI also training in those areas?” I ask.

“I have two ideas on this – if you’re having confidence building measures and peace talks, you have to trust them. But in Cotabato, we always have these doubts,” Relano says. “Being a soldier is being smothered somewhat by being a peace-lover, otherwise we would be confrontational and no peace would be ensuing,” he says. “I know they’re training in bomb making and terrorist activities. I was informed by my informants within that they have invited bomb-makers of MILF as part of their tactical operations,” Relano says.

The ceasefire committee of Major Hermoso and his MILF counterparts is meant to be gathering evidence of what goes on “in these disputed areas …but as of now, they have not been able to do that,” Relano says.

And so it goes. Terrorists trained in Mindanao keep detonating explosives in public places, adding to the several hundred civilians killed and thousands wounded over the past few years across South East Asia.

The MILF spokesman, Kabalu, sent his sons to pick me up and so I sit in his Cotabato City house one night, struggling to wear down his ad nauseam denials of the guerrillas hosting terrorists in their camps.

“Have JI ever trained in MILF areas?” I ask.

“No.”

“So why do so many JI terrorists say they have?”

“What I believe is the source of this information, is that during the time that Chairman Salamat Hashim decided to open up Camp Abu Bakar to all walks of life … have gone to the area. Because the Chairman’s intention is to demonstrate somehow to the people of the world the kind of community that he envisioned to be established in this part of the world,” Kabalu says. “It was a model community. That is why people from other parts of the world came to the area … Indonesia, Malaysia, even Thailander.”

Kabalu leans back, aglow at the thought of his ideal world. Then he looks at me again. “We do not discount the possibility that some might have infiltrated at the time, but the idea there was not to invite terrorists, but to show to the world that we have this kind of community that would cater to the needs of our people, the Bangsamoro people,’ he says.

I ask if the model community involved explosives training.
“There might be some, but as far as the MILF is concerned we do not have a relationship or connections with this group,” he says.

I tell him that JI defectors and captives have told investigators that they trained for up to three years in MILF camps. I tell him that the International Crisis Group reports that JI operatives had instruction in weapons, demolition, traditions of the Prophet, bombing, ambushes, Islamic law, jihad, and other essentials of contemporary militancy.

“It’s a possibility,” Kabalu says. “But we made it very very clear that the academy … is only for the armed forces of the MILF. It is not for foreigner. In fact, outsider is not needed in the camp. But they are free to observe. There are some limitations, but as part of our campaign to expose the real intention of the MILF, we allow them to stay and observe. There might be some sort of possibility that they might, shall we say, manage to enter the camp. Maybe pretend as Tasaug [a Muslim tribe from which come most Abu Sayyaf] from Jolo, Basilan, or Zamboanga. Because facial identity – Indonesians look almost the same as Filipinos. This Malay race has very similar appearance,” Kabalu says.

So Indonesian terrorists – including many of the Bali bombers – snuck into the MILF’s military classes, quietly living and training or up to three years, but no one noticed because they look like Filipinos. My head spins. I’m starting to feel that I’m in an alternate universe where all the world is a stage, but the actors are packing real guns.
Turning the conversation to Australia, Kabalu says that the MILF did not have a problem with Prime Minister John Howard’s comments last year that he would launch attacks on terrorists overseas if they were planning strikes against Australians and local authorities did not seem to be stopping them. “If there’s really a terrorist cell here, why not?” Kabalu says.

Furthermore, there was little the MILF could do to stop Australia, a country “groomed to become a superpower”, from attacking its camps. Yet, without an “honest investigation” preceding pre-emptive strikes, Howard’s actions would only complicate matters in Mindanao, Kabalu says. “Instead of using force, his concern about Mindanao and the issue of terrorism could be channelled to the peace process.”
Rather than needlessly sending in the SAS, Australian officials are welcome to join the IMT’s MILF-supervised camping trips to destinations such as Jabal Quba. Such visits will “conclude it once and for all, because as far as the MILF is concerned, there is no terrorist haven in our area and in our camps”, Kabalu says.

EPILOGUE
The Philippines is in trouble. Terrorists and their allies control territory that the government cannot. From rebel sanctuaries, the Islamists perfect satchel and car bombs, and the use of electronic detonators, and absorb the religious indoctrination that allows them to justify the slaughter of commuters, tourists, shop assistants, church congregations and many others. That “son-of-a-gun JI” which murdered 88 Australians and sent hundreds of others limping home is sitting pretty in the wilds of Mindanao, training new generations of terrorist commanders to replace those arrested, killed or snatched by the US.

A culture of jaw-dropping denial flourishes in the Philippines, where many continue to take aim at foreign requests to take terrorism seriously. “Outdated” was how the chairman of the Filipino House committee on foreign affairs, Antonio Cuenco, recently
described US travel warnings about possible terrorist attacks in the Philippines.

“The Philippines has succeeded in addressing the threats posed by the terror groups Jemaah Islamiyah and the Abu Sayyaf Group … JI, for its part, is now merely a ghost,” Cuenco told the Philippine press.
The Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Gerry Salapuddin, agreed, saying that the terrorist threat was at its lowest.

Salapuddin, who represents Basilan island, the birthplace of the Abu Sayyaf, dismissed the threat on three counts: the MILF’s involvement in peace talks; the MILF’s denial of links to JI, and a flying visit by the US ambassador to the Philippines, Francis Riccardione, to Jolo, which is listed as dangerous by the US State Department.

Rohan Gunaratna says that Westerners must take Filipinos’ stoic nature into account when trying to comprehend what seems to outsiders like a lack of resolve about terrorism. “The Filipinos have a much higher capacity to take violence, even 100, 200, 300 people can die [without shocking the nation], because these are systemic problems and the Filipinos can live with these,” Gunaratna says. Terrorism is just one abrupt way to die in a country that offers many – an environment that cultivates the Filipinos’ apparent acceptance of some level of carnage. “They are not like Australians, Europeans or the Americans.

They have a very high capacity for suffering,” Gunaratna says.
Nevertheless, terrorism and lawlessness deter investment and feed the country’s fiscal woes, so the Filipino fatalism and casual hope in a duplicitous peace process is dangerous in many ways. The country badly needs leadership, Gunaratna says. More worrying, the Philippines’ flip-flopping, inattentive, rhetoric-rich yet follow through-poor leadership, has led to growing calls for a return to dictatorship. Numerous politicians, business leaders, and even the chair of the Asian Institute of Management, have called for a return to authoritarian rule. It is a view that I heard from a wide cross section of average Joes in my travels.

Until the terrorist groups are neutralised, “you must understand, the threat in South East Asia will eventually affect Australia,” Gunaratna says. More than attacks on bars and embassies, the terrorists will target shipping and significant economic assets, inflicting more mass casualties, but also seriously damaging trade in the region – and worsening the poverty of millions.

Gunaratna says that Australia already offers intelligence assistance, but with constant revelations of corruption, ineptitude, and apparent collusion between elements of the army and its foes, “the real investment is to provide more extensive training to discipline the Filipino police and military.” Another valuable contribution would be offering legal expertise to help the Philippines develop counter-terrorism legislation.

Aborting the peace process would be a mistake, Gunaratna says. “The largest number of terrorists have been produced from regional conflicts, such as Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Mindanao, Kashmir, and Maluku. So it is important for us to have peace processes and resolve these conflicts wherever possible, and right now the MILF is willing to talk and I think we should not waste that opportunity,” he says.
The ICG’s Collier agrees, saying that the long term solution lies in making the peace “agreement as attractive as possible. The more you can offer, the fewer discontents there will be”. Collier suggests that Australia could start funding the peace process to ensure it is more than a sham. “The local monitoring teams aren’t being properly funded. They have a very Spartan monthly allowance, and the Cotabato LMT hasn’t been paid in two months. So if they’re sent out to investigate an incident, they have to pay for the petrol out of their own pocket. We’re not talking big money … it would be AUD $13,000 a month for all the LMTs,” Collier says. Other measures include giving the Philippine navy faster speedboats and other border security measures to stem the free flow of terrorists and weapons between the Philippines, and Indonesia and Malaysia.

Yet the peace-first approach led to the MILF’s “model community”, where Camp Hudaibiyah quietly trained scores of mass murderers in how to best shred civilians in their war for Islamic totalitarianism. Right now, the training continues in other areas under MILF control, including Camp Jabal Quba. When the US went into Basilan, the exercises were denounced by commentators from the right and left as American imperialism in action, yet it worked. Areas under MILF control need to be worked over with M16s, engineers, and aid workers. Mindanao needs to be freed from the vendetta system and its feudal warlords. Peace deals which hold the backwardness in place through autonomy deals with corrupt chieftains offer the average citizen little hope for a prosperous future. The lies, duplicity, and dangerous allegiances of the Philippines’ Islamic warlords will continue to threaten South East Asia until their lands are brought under the rule of law.