ABU SAYYAF and BANGSAMORO STRUGGLE A Bac

San Juan/Abu Sayyaf
THE “INVINCIBLE” ABU SAYYAF AND PERMANENT U.S. INTERVENTION IN

THE PHILIPPINES
Reflections on the Bangsamoro Struggle for Self-determination
by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.
[The 1789 Reign of Terror] is the rule of people who themselves are terror-
stricken. Terror implies mostly useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened
people in order to reassure themselves.
---Friedrich Engels, letter to March, 4 Sept. 1870 (Marx and Engels 1965)
Beginning January 2002, hundreds of U.S. Special Operations Forces

have been stationed in the Southern Philippines as part of the US “global war
against terror” after 9/11. This deployment was called “Operation Enduring
Freedom-Philippines,” part of the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. In
October 2004, then President Bush singled out the Philippines as one front
(the other two are Iraq and Afghanistan) in the US attempt to assert its
hegemony in the Middle East, Asia, and throughout the world (Docena 2008).
Last October 2010, US Ambassador Harry Thomas flexed imperial
muscles by demanding that the Philippines must eliminate, not just reduce in
size, the Abu Sayyaf (ASG), a self-styled Islamic sect which is always linked
to Osama bin Laden and the Indonesian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah (JI)
responsible for the Bali bombing in 2002 (Bloomberg 2010). In 2001 the ASG
beheaded one of three American hostages seized from a Palawan resort,
while in 2004 it bombed a passenger ferry on Manila Bay, killing over 100
people. Both groups are always connected with Al Qaeda. Thomas said that
“we are at a critical threshold” and the US will continue to send military
advisers and aid (such as 25,000 helmets and fast-deploying rubber boats,
San Juan /Abu Sayyarf
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among others), “as part of its security engagement with Manila” (Agence
France-Presse 2010). At the same time, Philippine Defense Secretary Voltaire
Gazmin stated that there was no fixed time-table for the presence of US
troops in the Philippines involved not only in military campaigns but also
in”peace and development,” as verified by US undersecretary of State
Wiliam Burns (Siam Daily News 2010). Based on photos taken by Agence
France-Press of US troops entering combat zones riding Humvee armored
jeeps fully armed, then Makati mayor Jejomar Binay commented that the
Arroyo administration was “apparently subcontracting the job of leading the
fight against Muslim insurgents to the Americans” (Tribune Online
8/16/2007).
Various websites have confirmed the active participation of the US
military (roughly 580-620 members, as of 2009) in combat operations
against the ASG and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) where 15
soldiers have already been killed, “including the ten who were lost in a
21002 helicopter crash” (Yon 2009). Civic projects (managed by US-AID and
other agencies such as Military Information Support Teams) such as road
building, schools, textbook distribution, medical programs, and information
outreach, are accessories to the military and police operations, part of the
twin policies of drying up the sanctuaries and killing or capturing the
hardcore members of ASG.
A month before Thomas’ warning, the US and the Aquino regime
staged a demonstration of the threat with the October 21 bombing in
Matalam, North Cotabato, attributed to the JIL and a new terrorist sect called
Jihadist Ulama intended to replace the ASG. Obviously this recurrent hype
about security threats occurs every time there is a move to review the
onerous Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), a travesty of Philippine sovereignty
which has kindled mass outrage. The latest attempt to amplify the panic is
the US State Department’s attempt to tag remittances from overseas Filipino
workers (OFWs) as possible funding sources for the ASG. The Department’s
October report cited the group’s appeal for funds via the Internet You Tube
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video of late ASG leaders Abdurajak and Khadaffy Janjalani (killed in 1998
and 2006, respectively) as its basis. No concrete evidence has been offered
to substantiate the suspicion. This provides a ploy or ruse not only to renew
the VFA but also for the US to intervene in the formal and informal banking
and finance sectors of the country through which billion-dollar remittances
are channeled to keep the local economy afloat (Esplanada 2010; Madlos
2010). One should also mention the widely publicized indictment of Filipino
citizen Madhatta Haipe, allegedly a founding member of the ASG, in a
Washington federal court. Extradited to the US in 2009, Haipe pleaded guilty
to four counts of hostage taking in a 1995 abduction of 16 people, including
4 US citizens, near Lake Sebu, southern Mindanao (Inquirer 2010). What this
bureaucratic legal exercise is meant to accomplish is clear: the Phiilippines is
not a safe refuge for anyone who threatens to challenge the long tentacles of
the imperial power of the United States.
US Caught In the Quagmire
A direct U.S. colony for about half a century, the Philippines remains a
neocolonial formation, with a client collaborative regime (Petras 2007)
subordinate to U.S. interests. This singular status of clientship or
subordination is erased in current historiography. Consequently, the fallacy of
treating the US and the Philippines as equal partners in inter-state relations
results in gross misjudgments and absurd expectations.
The strategic US military bases in Clark and Subic Bay, Philippines, was
evicted by the Philippine Senate in 1991. However, by virtue of the
anomalous Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) signed by then President Estrada
in 1999, the US succeeded in establishing a Joint Special Operations Task
Force-Philippines in Camp Navarro, Zamboanga City, the headquarters of the
Armed Forces of the Philippines’ (AFP) Western Mindanao Command. This
allows the US to participate in counter-insurgency operations against the
Moro fighters in the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the communist-led
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New People’s Army (NPA), and factions of the Moro National Liberation Front
(MNLF) that refused to accept the Arroyo regime. Both the NPA and the Abu
Sayyaf Group (ASG) are classified as “terrorist” organizations by the U.S.
State Department.
For now, the ASG has become the target of US surveillance by
unmanned spy planes (drones); this intelligence gathering directly aids in the
AFP’s combat operations. In 2002, for example, a Moro peasant in Basilan
suspected to be an ASG follower, Buyong-buyong Isnijal, was shot by US Sgt.
Reggie Lane; no serious investigation was made about this incident despite a
Congressional resolution. In Feb. 2008, one of the few survivors of the
Maimbung massacre in Sulu, Sandrawina Wahid, witnessed US troops
engaged in the Philippine military’s assault on the town where eight civilians
were killed, including Rowina’s husband, two teenagers, two children, and a
three-month pregnant woman. Another incident hit the headlines recently
when a Philippine Army captain Javier Ignacio was killed while investigating
the previous murder by US military personnel of a Filipino employee Gregan
Cardeno. Hired by US company DynCorp International, Cardeno was assigned
to the Liaison Coordination Element, a unit of the US military, based in Camp
Ranao, Marawi City (Carol Araullo, “Streetwise,” Business World, 11-12 June
2010). The death of Cardeno exposed the clandestine unit engaged in work
that appears in violation of Philippine laws and its sovereignty; the activities
of DynCorp and other secret companies have likewise not been disclosed,
contradicting the US Embassy claim that the US Special Forces are confined
to openly conducted civic/humanitarian projects such as building roads,
schools, etc.
On September 29, 2009, two American soldiers were killed by a
landmine planted by the MNLF in Indanan, Jolo. These two are now
considered the first casualties since the Balikatan exercises in 2001,
although several US soldiers died in fighting in Sulu three or four years ago.
This was a reprisal for the Philippine Marines’ bombing of Muslim devotees in
religious rites on September 20 in the same town. A local observer, Prof.
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Julkipli Wadi noted that the US muted this incident to avoid jeopardizing its
humanitarian stance. Wadi cites the October 2009 visit of US embassy
officials to the MILF leadership in Sultan Kudarat, Mindanao, where these
officials were lectured by the MILF deputy chieftain Ghazali Jaafar; according
to Wadi, Jaafar told them that “Washington must help in the resolution of the
Mindanao problem by addressing the root cause, which is political,
emanating from the grant of US independence to the Philippines,” which
“immorally and illegally incorporated the Bangsamoro homeland” (“US
Strategic Avoidance,” MindNews, 20 October 2009). Wadi described US
soldiers entrenching themselves in many parts of Zamboanga, Basilan, Jolo
and parts of Tawi-Tawi, and asks “how long would US authorities pursue the
policy of strategic avoidance by hiding under the veneer of
counterinsurgency and war on international terrorism while entrenching
deeper in the hinterlands and seas of the Sulu Archipelago without being
known by the American public?” Obviously, aside from propping up the
neocolonial Filipino elite and thus advancing its global geopolitical strategy,
the US would like to take advantage of the natural and human resources of
Mindanao and Sulu, and its ideal location as a springboard to intervention in
Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the whole of Indochina as a
means of encircling China, their ultimate competitor.
Certainly, U.S. power and legitimacy or cultural authority are at stake.
But the preponderant use of military power and logistics undermines any
pretense of humanitarian motives. Boston University professor Andrew
Bacevich reminds the US public that in 1903, Theodore Roosevelt ordered
General Leonard Wood to pacify the Moro province, home to about 250,000
Filipino Muslims then. In March 1906, at Bud Dajo, Jolo, just to cite one
incident, the American pacifiers killed 600 Muslims, including many women
and children—a “disagreeable” by-product, what is called by the Pentagon
“collateral damage” (“Caution: Moral Snares Ahead,” Los Angeles Times, 22
Jan., 2002). It is not just moral snare or hubris that explains this propensity to
complacently offer thousands of human lives to the altar of Empire; it is the
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logic of capitalist expansion, the motor of profit gained from alienated

labor/lives, that propels white supremacy and its civilizing mission—the
hallmark of US imperial presence in Mindanao and Sulu, an an amoral
hegemon whose crimes against humanity elude the MILF leaders, thus their
naive plea to Washington to assist their cause by mediating the conflict
between them and the Arroyo regime.
But there are other players in the scene, of course. In 1987, the Moro
historian Samuel K. Tan expressed his belief that the national community
remains divided between the Christian “national community” and what he
calls the “cultural communities,” referring to the Moros and the non-Christian
Lumads and Cordillera peoples. Is democracy coming to an end in the
emergence of “a nation of multiple state-systems”? Tan is critical of the
Christian sector’s drive to create a “Christian nation in Asia regardless of the
implications to the cultural communities,” as evinced in the program to unite
the Philippines on the basis of an ideological secular basis summed up in the
slogan “one nation, one spirit” (1987, 72). What Tan ignores is that the
secular neocolonial state as it has historically evolved cannot fully exercise
its sovereignty over all the communities without the aid of US political,
military and diplomatic assistance. It is indeed an instrument to foster global
capitalism’s welfare. Moreover, the problem of unequal power is not primarily
a question of culture but of control over resources and land, ultimately a
question of political leadership and organization. In any case, the fate of the
“three communities” is now a matter of international or global concern, as
evidenced by the sordid plight of OFWs languishing in jails around the world
and by Filipino progressives appealing to the UN Human Rights Council and
the World Council of Churches on behalf of thousands of victims of
extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, torture, and a reign of impunity
for crimes against humanity by the U.S.-funded military and police forces of
the Arroyo regime and its oligarchic allies. Since the end of the Cold War, the
upsurge of counterhegemonic forces against US imperial dominance in Asia,
Africa and Latin America cannot be ignored or under-estimated.
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At least since the Tripoli Agreement of 1976, the Moro struggle for
autonomy or independence has become internationalized. With the entry of
the OIC (Organization of Islamic Conference), the MNLF and MILF have
become dependent on the mterial and political support of Islamic countries.
The mediating roles of Indonesia and Malaysia as key members of the OIC
need no further clarification. The preponderant US role remains ineluctable.
What is occurring in the Philippines as an arena of class and national
struggles should be analyzed in this historical geopolitical context to
understand properly the significance of the Moro people’s struggle for self-
determination.
In the last twenty years, particularly after the reinstatement of “elite
democracy” with the fall of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986, the US re-
asserted its total domination of the Philippines with the Aquino-Ramos
regime. While Corazon Aquino’s “total war” on the Communist-led New
People’s Army continued under U.S. direction (sanctioned by numerous
treaties and executive agreements), the power of the nationalist movement
since formal independence in 1946 demonstrated its subterranean force in
the expulsion of the U.S. military bases in 1992. It was the loss of these
bases that confronted US imperial planners, a loss immediately solved by
means of the “Visiting Forces Agreement” initiated by Fidel Ramos, a general
tutored by the Pentagon. But this agreement required justification or
legitimacy, which explains the “Abu Sayyaf” phenomenon and the elaborate
overt and covert intervention of the U.S.—directly, this time, via the
Pentagon, US State Department (via US Embassy), US Institute of Peace, US-
AID, and others (see Chaulia 2009)—in the initially secessionist/separatist
insurgency led by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).
The Missing Link: CIA Frankenstein
What is most intriguing is the persistence of the “Abu Sayyaf” (ASG)

terrorist group as an integral part of an expanding US military presence in
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the Philippines. Not a day passes when somewhere a news report of the Abu
Sayyaf is found with always a mention of its Al-Qaida link, origin, or
connection. For example, the Feb. 2005 BBC “Guide to the Philippine conflict”
lists down the MNLF, MILF, the NPA, and the Abu Sayyaf as the “main rebel
factions” in Mindanao. It recites the oft-repeated factoids: The ASG split off
from the MNLF in 1991 under the leadership of Abdurajik Janjalani (killed in
December 1998), succeeded by his less doctrine-driven brother Khadafi
Janjalani, whose death in September 2006 precipitated the disintegration of
the group into multiple factions. From a thousand combatants in the
beginning, it has shrunk to 400 or less members
Given its record of kidnapping-for-ransom, massacres, and bombings
(often mentioned is the October 2004 bombing of the Superferry 14 in Manila
Bay, with 116 people killed, the ASG has acquired a high-profile “terrorist”
aura. The kidnappings in Sipadan, Malaysia, in April 2000 and the May 2001
raid on a Palawan resort and the subsequent rescue of Grace Burnham,
catapulted the group into the status of media celebrity. Meanwhile, the Al-
Qaida connection has been reinforced by association with the Indonesian
group Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) noted for the 2002 Bali carnage. The April 13,
2010 raid in Isabela, Basilan, by ASG members disguised as police
commandos, led by Puruji Indama, revitalized its 2 decades of deadly
mayhem.
All accounts agree about the origin of the ASG in the US Central
Intelligence Agency ‘s (CIA) role in training mujahideens from various
countries to fight the US proxy war in Aghanistan against the Soviets (1979-
1989). In May 2008, Senator Aquilino Pimentel described the ASG a “CIA
monster” trained by AFP officers in the southern Philippines and directed by
informers/spies such as its former leader Edwin Angeles (Santuario 2009). In
his book Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, American and International Terrorism,
Jon K. Cooley documented the CIA training and funding of the ASG—freedom-
fighters such as Osama bin Laden engaged in jihad against the communist
infidel—around 1986 in Peshawar, Pakistan; one of the veterans was
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Abdurajak Janjalani (Santuario 2009; Bengwayan 2002). Accordingly, Prof.

Mahmood Mamdani of Columbia University calls the CIA-created ASG and bin
Laden’s followers as “alternatives to secular nationalism,” and
fundamentalist terrorism as an integral modern project, for which US imperial
aggression around the world is chiefly responsible (2002).
A recent writeup of this “al-Qaida-linked extremist group” now claims
that its present leader, Khair Mundus, has been receiving funds from Saudi
Arabia and Malaysia. It is alleged that he once transferred these funds to
Khadaffy Janjalani in 2001-2003. No less than the US State Department
alleges that Mundus, while in police custody in 2004, “confessed to having
arranged the transfer of al-Qiada funds to an ASG chief to finance bombings
and other attacks” (“Abu Sayyaf faction,” GMANews.TV). The US is offering
half-a-million dollars for the arrest of this ideologically inspired agent. The
Basilan-based group has supposedly given sanctuary to Dulmatin, a key
suspect in the Bali carnage, hence the interest of the US State Department
(which explains why he has been reported killed several times). Aside from
Mundus and Dulmatin, another Bali bomber Umar Patek has been tagged by
the US-funded Philippine Institute for Peace, Violence and Terrorism Research
as operating in Tawi-Tawi province (ABS-CBNNews.com 2010).
Since Abdurajak Janjalani’s death, the group has lost interest in Islamic
goals and degenerated into banditry and “high impact terrorist activities.”
But Mundus is trying to revive its Islamic evangelism and unite the factions
spread out in Basilan, Sulu and Zamboanga, influencing even Puruji Indama,
the guerilla blamed for the brutal beheading of 10 marines in a 2007
encounter in Basilan. A clear tendency of the media propaganda machine
has emerged to infuse ideological and political substance to the ASG which,
since at least 1998, has simply become a criminal outfit for easy
containment by the local police, not by the heavily armed US Special Forces
with technologically sophisticated spy equipment and drones. The journalists
Marites Vitug and Glenda Gloria named Gen. Guillermo Ruiz, former Marine
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commander and police officials Leandro Mendoza and Rodolfo Mendoza as

coddlers/patrons of the ASG (Bengwayan 2002).
Anatomy of a Faction
Clearly, without the presence of this group with its flagrant, highly visible
kidnappings and bombings, the rationale for US military intervention would
lose credibility. It is not secret that the AFP, so much dependent on US
Pentagon logistics and equipment, would not really be able to challenge the
NPA, its perennial military target, as long as the political, economic and
social conditions warrant its existence. US geopolitical strategy for
maintaining hegemony in Asia and around the world requires its presence in
the Philippines, hence the need for ASG’s terrorist identity and anti-people
behavior.
We can learn more about US ideological rationale from a U.S.Institute
of Peace academic expert Zachary Abuza’s recent summing-up in response
to the April 13 raid on Isabela City, the capital of the island province of
Basilan. Abuza rehearses the founder’s past as an Afghan mujahidin and the
founding of the group in 1991 “with al-Qa’ida seed money” (Abuza 2010, 11).
Muhammad Jamal Khalifa, an Osama bin Laden connection, and Ramzi
Yousef, famous for plotting the bombing of multiple commercial airliners, are
mentioned to reinforce its international terrorist standing. ASG orientation
changed from being sectarian (1991-1996) to being purely monetary (2000-
2001), with over 140 hostages (16 of whom were killed) ranging from
Western tourists, school children, priests and ordinary people.
Clearly the ASG will never disappear, if not in reality at least in the
media. In 2003-2004, with leaders Abu Sabaya and Ghalib Andang killed
(followed by Abu Solaiman in January 2007), ASG is tied with the Indonesian
terrorist JI as well as with Malaysian terrorists. It is at this point that the ASG
becomes more frequently associated with the MILF which employs the ASG
for bombing campaigns and also for infiltrating the Sulu archipelago, mostly
controlled by the Tausug-dominaed MNLF. Despite the loss of its leaders (the
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latest being Albader Parad), the ASG keeps coming back like a hydra-headed
monster, almost chameolonic too in adapting to changing environments. Its
public face will metamorphose or metastize relative to the two main groups,
the MNLF and MILF.
The latest attempt to spread the ASG contagion to other parties in the
region may be gleaned from Abuza’s claim that the ASG has recruited new
combatants from the MNLF under Habier Malik in March 2007. But the
bombings and kidnappings did not subside in 2008-2009, with two US
soldiers killed in the 2009 Jolo bombing. Philippine generals and Marine
commanders all concur that the ASG has been decapitated and falling apart,
even while attacks are continuing. A new line is being established: the
Pakistani connection. One Abdulabasit Usman was killed by a U.S. drone
attack in Waziristan, the Afghan-Pakistan border. This Usman is suspected to
be a member of the MILP, the JI, ASG, and also “an independent gun for
hire.” Abuza nonetheless states as a fact that “What is clear is that he
worked at times as a bomber and trainer for both the ASG and MILF.” Thus
linkages are at first hypothesized, posited, and then simply asserted as a
factoid for the record.
The death of Dulmatin occasions the suspicion that al-Qai’da in
Malaysia and Aceh are using the ASG and the MILF as channels connecting
Arab militants and South Asian (Pakistan and Afghanistan) fighters with
southeast Asian organizations. In any case, the ASG and MILF are now
interwoven with Al-Qai’da operations in the Indonesian-Malaysian region. The
MILF has been accused of harboring Rajah Solaiman (recently labeled
“terrorist” by the US State Department), Pentagon Gang and JI terrorist
agents. Jihadist violence and criminal kidnapping-for-ransom characterize
ASG with close working relations with the MILF and disaffected elements of
the MNLF. Abuza concludes that despite its successes, the “Philippine military
does not appear to have the capacity nor the will to finish the job militarily,
and the government’s refusal to develop a holistic peace process in the
southern Philippines….will continue to support the ASG’s ranks” (2010, 13).
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The unstated implication is that US military intervention to advance its own

strategic geopolitical-cum-economic interest, cannot be given up lest the
whole battlefront is lost to anti-systemic Islamic-led extremism. Meanwhile,
Ibrahim Murad of the IMLF warned last August that US troops’ sojourn in
Mindanao “only complicates the situation. They are just simply justifying
their presence for terrorist elements” (News Essentials 2010).
Provisional Inventory
What is the situation now after 13 years of GRP-MILF peace talks? Let
me provide a drastic schematic framework within which to view the current
impasse affecting at least 6-9 million Muslims (10% of the total population) in
over 700 villages, mainly within the Autonomous Region for Muslim
Mindanao (ARMM).
The 2008 agreement between the GRP and MILF was scrapped in 2008
as “unconstitutional.” The MNLF is deeply factionalized, with Misuari still in
jail. From its official emergence in Nov. 14, 1972, immediately after Marcos’
declaration of martial law, to Dec. 1976, with the signing of the Tripoli
Agreement, and its final actualization in the 1996 peace agreement between
Fidel Ramos and Nur Misuari, the MNLF (with 30,000 fighters in 1973-75)
seems to have wasted its decades of lessons and experience. Misuari’s arrest
after the failed Jolo and Zamboanga rebellion in Nov. 2001 may lead to the
gradual exodus of his followers into the camps of the MILF, the ASG, or even
government fronts. Meanwhile, splitting from the MNLF in 1977, the MILF
pursued the armed struggle under Hashim Salamat as “jihad fi sabilillah
(struggle in the way of Allah)—a sectarian, fundamentalist trend which runs
immanent in the peace negotiations with the Arroyo regime (Klitzsch 2009).
The peace agreement signed on May 7, 2002, with Arroyo culminated in the
Memorandum of Agreement on “Ancestral Domain” (MOA-AD) and the issue
of the Bangsamoro Juridical Entity (JEC), which was ruled unconstitutional by
the Supreme Court in 2008. Now, the March peace talks in Kuala Lumpur
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witnessed a controversy over the use of the Philippine Constitution and the
Republic’s jurisprudence as the existing legal framework (requiring
amendment) for a revised peace agreement (Balana 2010; Rosauro 2010).
The resort to the internationalist idiom of “self-determination” (with its
Wilsonian, not Leninist precedents) does not guarantee actual
political/military control over territory and natural resources if it conflicts with
the overarching sovereignty of the neocolonial State. Misuari’s experience in
administering the ARMN fully bears this out (Dela Cruz 2006).
Given the severely uneven development of the region, diverse class
and sectoral interests are involved. The Lumads or indigenous ethnic
communities have recently mobilized. The hostility of the Christian landlords,
business, comprador, and foreign corporate fronts in Mindanao rests on
varied grounds, some diehard and some amenable to compromise. The
present regime speaks of course for the US/Washington Consensus, for
global capital and transnational corporate interests and their local allies, so
that unless the MILF addresses this structural and institutional constraints,
the iniquitous status quo will not be altered in any substantial or meaningful
way so as to improve the material lives of the Moro masses, not to speak of
the Lumads and other indigenous communities.
Meanwhile, notwithstanding the mobilization of 10,000 armed
combatants and several thousand partisans, MILF ascendancy remains
contested, hence their wobbly diplomatic stance. Overall, the primary cause
for persisting armed confrontations is the absence of any hegemonic
(intellectual and moral leadership, in Gramsci’s sense) power in Mindanao as
a whole, though the MNLF once enjoyed such in the Tausug homeland of
Sulu. The MILF has suffered from a marked opportunism, as evidenced in
Salamat’s January 2003 letter to George Bush “seeking his good offices,” and
the MILF’s assent to allowing the US Institute of Peace (USIP) to intervene. In
fact, by June 2003, the US State Department laid down its policies for the
GRP-MILF peace negotiations. USIP Philippine Facilitation Project Executive
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Director Eugene Martin’s explanation for US involvement deserves to be

quoted here:
The continued conflict was seen as a source of not only domestic

instability but a potential threat regionally and even globally. As such,
it became part of the war on terror, although the MILF is not
considered a terrorist organization. Increased military assistance to
the AFP and joint exercises, like Balikatan, were focused on helping
the AFP be more professional and effective against designated
terrorist groups such as the NDF and the Abu Sayyaf Group (quoted in
Santos 2005, 100).
Martin acknowledges that the conflict cannot be solved “by purely military
means,” so he cites the underlying causes—poverty, lack of development
and education, and displacement of Muslims from ancestral lands—as the
reason why the US is involved. This of course does not overshadow the main
concern, “the war on terror.” Unlike other commentators, Martin does not
neglect naming the NDF together with the ASG as “terrorist organizations.”
In terms of profit-centered Realpolitik, US interest in the Moro
insurgents is designed to coopt this force as much as possible and
manipulate it for geopolitical ends. This does not preclude its purpose of
serving as a pretext or cover for preparing the ground in suppressing the
NDF/NPA as well as the possibly more dangerous Indonesian and Malaysian
affiliates of al-Qaida/Osama bin Laden. Aside from USIP ideological and
political input, the US has made overtures to the MILF leadership on the
possibility of using MILF “ancestral domain” for military bases, to which the
MILF leadership replied that “everything is negotiable.” Astrid Tuminez
(2008), a USIP operative, confirms the US focus on Mindanao as a new
“Mecca of terrorism,” a half-concealed rationale which thus legitimizes the
thorough involvement of the US government in the current peace talks as
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well as the regular “Balikatan” war exercises and civic-action activities of the
US military contingent in the Philippines.
Never Again “Benevolent Assimilation”
US dominance, both political, military and ideological, cannot be

discounted. Even those who purport to be neutral or well-intentioned
observers succumb to the fallacy of believing the US a neutral or benevolent
mediator in the conflict. In his book, Dynamics and Directions of the Grp-
MILF Peace Negotiations (2005) that Soliman Santos Jr., for example, naively
claims “that US clout can play a positive role as guarantor of a just and
lasting peace agreement” even as he admits that for the US the global war
on terrorism is its chief concern.
Terrorism, die-hard separatism, is not necessarily the polar opposite of
compromise and bargaining with the Arroyo regime for temporary
concessions. Like the MNLF, the MILG knows that it cannot win solely by
military means. With the realization that conventional warfare is not feasible
to advance a separatist project of full independence, esp. with the loss of
fixed camps (first, the Abubakar camp and then the Buliok Complex) and
millions of their followers displaced and reduced to refugees, the MILF has
shifted to a pragmatic, if somewhat opportunist, mode of diplomacy. While
the aim of Islamization seems to persist as a cultural identity brand, despite
the passing of Hashim Salamat and his adherence to the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood’s doctrine of jihadism {Klitzsch has ably documented this
genealogy of Salamat’s thinking), I think the present MILF leadership has
realized that they cannot deliver immediate benefits to its ranks and the
popular base unless some gains in the diplomatic/legal front are achieved.
While Islamism (jihadist or merely didactic) appeases those militants
vulnerable to the ASG appeal, the need to produce material rewards is
urgent lest the mass base turn to the MNLF or, even worse, the traditional
Moro oligarchy. The tactical changes may be discerned in the 2004
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statement by the MILFG Peace Panel Advisor that the MILF “strives for a
‘political solution’—‘neither full independence nor autonomy, ‘but
‘somewhere in between’ “ (quoted in Klitzsch 2009, 166). Murad Ebrahim
was also quoted in saying that the territory they will administer as BJE will be
“governed with Islamic precepts” (Robles 2010). Of course, these may just
be propaganda ploys or publicity subterfuge.
Varying commentaries on the conflict register as symptoms of
disparate theoretical frameworks and axiomatic paradigms. The common
error of mainstream academic scholarship, as well as media punditry, in this
matter—i.e. the failure to locate the Moro struggle within the US global
strategy to maintain its imperial hegemony—stems, of course, from either
deliberate advocacy for neoliberal free-market worldview, or from misguided
naivete. The shift of the intellectual paradigm from leftist or progressive
historicist views to narrow empiricist and even eclectic postmodernist
stances may be perceived in a recent volume edited by Patricio N. Abinales
and Nathan Gilbert Quimpo. With the single exception of Herbert Docena’s
effort to document active U.S. military collaboration in the war against the
Moro insurgents, the contributors range from the narrow “all politics is local”
stance of Abinales to Quimpo’s endorsement of the view that the situation in
the southern Philippines is a product of internal causes, with the US as
peripheral or not centrally involved. Quimpo chimes in with Establishment
voices that welcome US intervention. Quimpo harps on the bossist,
“patrimonial and ethnocratic” Philippine state, as though it had no historical
genealogy or political provenance in US colonial and neocolonial control of
the country. He even laments that the US has not addressed the corruption
endemic to a patrimonial state. Quimpo believes that the USIP is “an
independent federal institution” (2008, 189), while the cynical Abinales
celebrates “the fading away of the US in the postauthoritarian scene”
pervaded by globalization anomie (2008, 199).
In general, the prospect seems bleak to Quimpo and his associates. In
his detailed description of the ASG included in the volume, the military-
17
affiliated academic Rommel Banlaoi dismisses the solid, irrefutable findings

of the 2002 International Peace Mission published in their report, “Basilan:
The Next Afghanistan?” that the ASG is basically the product of local political
and social conditions, in a U.S.neocolony. This judgment has been
meticulously supported by a rich trove of stories, interviews, and textured
accounts of the ASG’s symbiotic ties with the military, local politicians, and
government bureaucracy in many books published since the ASG appeared,
among them Marites Danguilan Vitug and Glenda Gloria’s Under the
Crescent Moon: Rebellion in Mindanao (2000).
While recognizing that the ASG and other groups are struggling to
solve structural inequity and injustice, as well as cultural discrimination and
the loss of sovereignty, Banloai’s recommendation is to improve governance
into one “more transparent, accountable, responsive and participatory.”
(2008, 145). Meanwhile, Kit Collier rejects the primordialist analysis for a
more instrumental, postmodernist approach, which uses an ethnographic
phenomenological method similar to the anthropologist Frake’s picture of a
contested, ambiguous, invented identity of the ASG combatant (see Frake
1998; and my critique in San Juan 2007). All deflect attention away from the
larger global context of US re-tooling of imperial hegemony in the wake of
the end of the Cold War and, in particular, the post-9/11 “global war on
terrorism” launched by George W. Bush and carried on by Barack Obama.
Toward Historical Dialectics
A more serious endeavor to grapple with the vast historical and

political landscape into which the Moro struggle is inscribed, is the volume
The Moro Reader (2008) published by CENPEG. The volume correctly defines
the subordinate role of the Philippine nation-state to the US and its neoliberal
program of globalization. What is missing is further elaboration of the
concept of “ancestral domain” and the abstract “right of self-determination”
within a rigorous historical-materialist analytic. I venture a preliminary
18
clearing of the stage for such an inquiry with a few general

propositions/theses.
Only a general review of what is needed can be made here.While I
myself (San Juan 2007) have previously endorsed the fundamental
imperative of solidarity with the Moro aspiration for independence and
separation from the neocolonial domination of the oligarchic landlord-
comprador ruling bloc, I would like to reformulate my views in light of the
more pronounced MILF ideological doctrine of Islamic evangelical
confrontation with the West (deriving either from Egyptian or Saudi Arabian
traditions). A theoretical reframing is in order.
Progressive activists need to take into account the primacy given by
the MILF and the ASG to Islamization and the project of an Islamic state
patterned after Saudi Arabia, Libya, Egypt and other Arab countries. Unlike
the MNLF program, the MILH (to my knowledge) has not come up with a
thorough analysis of Manila/Christian colonialism, nor its dependence on the
imperial US patron, despite its denunciation of settler greed, injustice, ethnic
discrimination, etc. To my knowledge (I stand corrected), the MILF has no
anti-systemic (anti-capitalist) policy or operational ideal functioning at
present. The marginalization of the secularly-oriented MNLF and the outright
rejection of Marxist and other socialist-oriented revolutionary ideas aiming
for a class-less society is symptomatic of a retrograde impulse influencing
the actual tactics and strategy for autonomy. Some have noted the
separatist motivation of the Bangsamoro nation to encourage the
development of an autocratic, tributary and highly hierarchical sociopolitical
formation. “Self-determination” cannot be an absolute principle but must
always be historicized and dialectically apprehended within the manifold
determinations of social historical development of specific formations within
a global context. Can we envisage a popular, democratic civil society/public
sphere flourishing within the Bangsamoro Juridical Entity?
Of course, the everyday practice of Moro militants yields a rich
complex of data for formulating hypothesis and theoretical propositions that
19
may engender a socialist-democratic ethos. Since culture is a creative

process, such is theoretically possible. But empirical data cannot substitute
for a valid theoretical framework. I agree with Kenneth Bauzon (2008) that
the current conjuncture has to be read within the framework of a resurgent
neoliberal restructuring of global capitalism. This is occurring within the US
hegemonic “crusade” against Islamic fundamentalism, or violent extremism,
itself framed by the neoconservative Huntingtonian paradigm of the “clash of
civilizations.” This culturalist interpretation obviates any structural or
systemic critique. This is why the understanding and theorization of terrorism
as a political phenomenon is also superficial, misleading, and tendentious. It
acquires a life of its own divorced from the analysis of dynamic political
forces (for example, the antagonism between capital and labor) and their
specific agendas and long-range platforms.
Terrorism becomes a political and moral issue when the political group
using it adopts a subjectivist mode of imposing its will on the masses. When
Marx objected to the Jacobin use of the guillotine as a tactic to impose
bourgeois interests on everyone, instead of developing it within the given
conditions, he was objecting to this means of enforcing the interests of a
particular group/class on the whole society. In opposing the conspiratorial
terrorism of utopian socialists and anarchists, Marx argued his dialectical
stand that “socialist revolution must develop from within the given social
relations and must be directed to the establishment of universal
interests’”(Hansen 1977, 102-103)—the revolutionary process, in short, is
not superadded but inheres within the existing nexus of sociopolitical
relations. Critical analysis of the interaction between the collective actors
and their changing sociopolitical environment is needed, together with
constant appraisals of the direction of the changes of both subject and object
of the field of conflict, to ascertain what can be changed and what cannot—
the possibilities and limits of radical historical transformation in the multi-
layered Philippine setting.
20
In this context, the MILF goal of claiming the sovereign power of a

Bangsamoro Juridical Entity to rule over “ancestral domain” has been
promoted through both conventional war and terrorist tactics (as evidenced
by links with Jemaah Islamiya, ASG, and others). Forced to renounce publicly
their connections with such groups, Salamat and the MILF leadership has to
resort to the OIC and the US to enhance its status as a legitimate political
party. Nonetheless, their supreme goal is no longer secession or a separate
independent state, but political power over a definite territory and its
inhabitants via combination of force and diplomacy. Essentially, it is an
attempt to universalize the Will of a political party—the agent of historical
change--that claims to represent the whole Moro peoples (across ethnic and
class divisions). Now the reality is that any revolutionary party with a
democratic-popular orientation has to take into account the social-economic
reality and the political alignment of forces both within the Philippines, the
southeast Asian region, and within the capitalist world-order (global war on
terror by the US-led bloc, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, etc. against
Iraq, Aghanistan, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and other nation-states).
Ultimately, the Moro rebellion has to confront the power of global
capital (at present led by the US power bloc) as the enemy of genuine Moro
sovereignty, freedom and progress in a planetary habitat of peoples with
diverse cultures, religions, histories, and aspirations.
Self-Determination as Means or End-In-Itself?
The ultimate goal of self-determination cannot be attained simply by fiat,

of course, but by a revolutionary program of rejecting colonial occupation
and imperialist domination. The MILF rejects the Manila/Christian state and
its military forces and affirms its subjective identity (as the MNLF did in
opposing Marcos and its US patron). However, the MILF does not mediate its
self-proclaimed Islamic identity by the otherness (the concrete social context
of a secular world of commodity-relations) in which it finds itself. Hence, it
21
imposes on its mass base a view absorbed from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and
other Islamic centers while paying lip-service to the history of the anti-
colonial struggles of Moros as a whole. It is thus caught in a unity of
contradictions. “Ancestral domain” tends to be fetishized in its purely Islamic
heritage. An abstract self-affirmation of Islamic identity (to distinguish it from
Christian/Western others) remains subjectivist/voluntarist as well as
philosophical/idealist, susceptible to terrorist realization. Its obverse is the
positivist or pragmatic dependence on the OIC, the US, and other sponsors
that it calculates will advance its self-identified agenda, given the current
volatile contingencies.
From a dialectical stance, the only way to resolve the contradiction
between the subjectivist/voluntarist Islamic self-identification of the MILF and
its objectivist/pragmatist resort to US/OIC determinants, is to analyse the
nature of the unity of these abstract opposites. In other words, the way to
resolve the contradictions is by way of discovering the universal
logic/principle underlying the project of revolutionary action, assuming that
the MILF is engaged in a revolutionary project of emancipation of the Moro
people’s potential for expressing its full humanity with others in the world.
The past and the present will have to coalesce to shape the historical agent
of change whose interests are not particular but universal, the interest of all
members of the given society. The search for the revolutionary class or agent
which, from the beginning, is the necessary condition of the present—that
agent which will bring the future to the present because of its past—is not a
theoretical problem but a practical one: “It is a problem of the unity of theory
and practice, the co-determining conditions of which are in the present
because of the past. Consequently, whereas the subjectivist [terrorist]
desires the restoration of the past by means of externalizing a particular
subjectivity, the revolutionary needs revolution to realize what is already
given in the present through the past” (Hansen 1977, 108). Hence the
revolutionary agent does not force onto people a particular view because his
22
view is already present (though occluded or suppressed) in the existing

reality.
In Quest of Critical Universality
From a radical-democratic standpoint, the crucial question then is:

what is in the existing reality that needs to be released or brought to self-
realization? What is that emerging universal within the historical present? To
answer this, one needs to critique the total situation to move beyond the
abstract subjectivist/voluntarist position and the positivist/determinist one.
One needs to achieve a concrete dialectical comprehension of the whole
global capitalist totality. To grasp the concrete universal immanent in the
historical conjuncture, one needs to generalize the unique condition of the
Moro peoples so as to get beyond the particularity that
imperialism/capitalism has imposed on it. Capitalism is precisely what
enables particularism in social relations and conflicts arising from this, so
that the elimination of distinctions cannot be carried out by presupposing
differences (cultural or religious values, for example) without unity.
One manifestation of such a unity is perhaps what Muslim historian-
philosopher Cesar Majul had in mind when, at the end of his scholarly history
of the Moro sultanates and the Moro Wars, he proposed that the Muslim
struggle should “be considered part of the heritage of the Filipino people in
the history of their struggle for freedom…part of the struggle of the entire
nation” (1999, 410). If the surveys are to be believed, more Filipinos now
than before (63% in 2005, compared to 43% in 2002) are sympathetic to the
Moro struggle for their right to govern themselves (Robles 2010).
We are not proposing pluralism or status quo multiculturalism, a bazaar
of affective flux and performative gestures, either corporate liberalism or
individualist libertarianism, both apparent opposites concretizing the
ideology of bourgeois society based on the division of labor and its attendant
disparities in the distribution of power and resources. What we are proposing
23
is to free ourselves from this enslaving ideology that teaches the idea that
authentic self-expression (or, by extension, national self-determination)
depends on an abstract property which guarantees authenticity, freedom,
fulfillment. In short, we are searching for the politicized, active mass base of
the Moro revolution that will universalize its goals by a thorough critique of
global capitalism (led by the US imperial power) and, in the process, forge
organic solidarity with the entire Filipino people struggling for democratic
socialism. Such a critical universality will resolve the contradictions between
subjectivism and objectivism I have outlined earlier.
As of now, such a critical universality is absent. One sign is the lack of
a critique of the Moro dynasties and clans and the property relations
characterizing the everyday experience of the Moro peasants, women,
workers, youth (Wadi 2008), or of the prison conditions afflicting Moros in
Camp Bagong Diwa (Vargas 2005), not to speak of taking cognizance of
analogous Lumad demands for self-determination over ancestral domains
(for Lumad aspirations, see Rodil 1993). A way of revising the deployment of
the principle of self-determination is proposed by Talal Asad by distinguishing
between the concept of Arab nationalism and a classical Islamism that
contains an element of “critical universality” by an implicit critique of the
secular bourgeois nation-state. It is necessary to define the narrow bourgeois
nation-state parameters into which the Bangsamoro nation is being confined.
Asad observes:
The fact that the expression umma ‘arabiyya is used today
to denote the “Arab nation” represents a major conceptual
transformation by which umma is cut off from the theological
predicates that gave it its universalizing power and is made to
stand for an imagined community that is equivalent to a total
political society, limited and sovereign like other limited and
sovereign nations in a secular (social) world. The ummatu-l-
muslimin (the Islamic umma) is ideologically not “a society” onto
which state, economy, and religion can be mapped. It is neither
24
limited nor sovereign, for unlike Arab nationalism’s notion of al-

umma-al-arabiyya, it can and should embrace all of
humanity….The main point I underline here is that Islamism’s
preoccupation with state power is the result not of its
commitment to nationalist ideas but of the modern nation-state’s
enforced claim to constitute social identities and arenas (2003,
197-98, 200).
One inspiring sign of “critical universality” may be found in the MNLF’s

participation in the 1981 Permanent People’s Tribunal and its solidarity with
the NDF and other forces in opposing US imperialism. At present, it is difficult
to say whether the MILF recognizes the need to achieve a “critical
universality” (Lowy 1998, 78) in its program, policies, and diplomatic
positions. In my view, subject to the pressures and exigencies of every
phase in its negotiations with the GRP and relations with the OIC and the US,
the alternating options of subjectivist/voluntarist and objectivist/pragmatist
handling of the struggle distinguish the MILF record so far. With
unpredictable dynamic changes in the Islamic world vis-à-vis the US, the
internal antagonisms in the OIC and its relations with other blocs (Europe,
Russia, China), and the advance of the national-democratic forces in the
Philippines, it is not impossible that the succeeding generation of leaders
and rank-and-file militants will respond to the need for articulating that
critical universality without which the revolutionary project of collective
emancipation will remain doomed to repeat the horrors of the past and
miseries of the present.
The Prospectt Before Us
The Moro people’s struggle in the Philippines for national self-

determination has placed under critical interrogation the hallowed theories of
cultural pluralism, liberal tolerance, and muticulturalism that continue to
25
legitimize the domination of diverse ethnic groups under elite control in

contemporary Filipino society. Bourgeois political norms and laws have led
since colonial times to the severe dispossession, exclusion, and utter
impoverishment of the Moro people as a distinct historical community united
under Islamic faith and an uninterrupted history of preserving its relative
autonomy through various modes (collective, familial, personal) of
anticolonial resistance. Since the Spanish (1621-1898) and American colonial
period (1899-1946) up to the present Arroyo government’s neocolonial polity
subservient to U.S. hegemony, the Moro people have suffered national, class,
and religious oppression. The Moro insurgents are labeled “terrorists” and
stigmatized daily by the media, schools, Christian churches, and
international business. They tend to be lumped with the Abu Sayyaf bandits,
wholly a product of gangsterism involving the military, police, local officials,
and the central government bureaucracy. It is the obligation of Filipino
Marxists and progressive organizations around the world to recognize the
Moro people’s right to self-determination and offer solidarity. In my book US
Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (2007), I have tried to express
this solidarity by a preliminary critique of neoliberal ideology, including
sectarian ultra-leftism, that apologizes for, and foments overtly and covertly,
the genocidal wars currently raging in the Moro homelands of southern
Philippines. This paper is an attempt to explore the theoretical and practical
limits of “self-determination” as a political strategy when, in this specific
conjuncture, U.S. imperial manipulations are defining this Wilsonian principle
for its own hegemonic interests. I propose that a historical-materialist
socialist perspective (following Lenin’s use of the principle of the right of
nations to self-determination), with modifications as suggested by Talal Asad,
be pursued and developed in the light of the singular historical
circumstances of the BangsaMoro struggle against local compradors,
landlords, and bureaucrat-capitalists allied with the U.S. imperial hegemon
and its transnational criminal accomplices. At the least, we need to pursue
the ideals of justice and principled solidarity with all oppressed peoples who
26
have long been victimized by global capitalism and the neoliberal market in
the name of the global North’s deadly ideas of freedom, democracy, and
cosmopolitan progress.
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San Juan/Abu Sayyaf

THE “INVINCIBLE” ABU SAYYAF AND PERMANENT U.S. INTERVENTION IN

by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

Beginning January 2002, hundreds of U.S. Special Operations Forces

US Caught In the Quagmire

logic of capitalist expansion, the motor of profit gained from alienated

The Missing Link: CIA Frankenstein

What is most intriguing is the persistence of the “Abu Sayyaf” (ASG)

Abdurajak Janjalani (Santuario 2009; Bengwayan 2002). Accordingly, Prof.

commander and police officials Leandro Mendoza and Rodolfo Mendoza as

The unstated implication is that US military intervention to advance its own

Director Eugene Martin’s explanation for US involvement deserves to be

The continued conflict was seen as a source of not only domestic

Never Again “Benevolent Assimilation”

US dominance, both political, military and ideological, cannot be

affiliated academic Rommel Banlaoi dismisses the solid, irrefutable findings

Toward Historical Dialectics

A more serious endeavor to grapple with the vast historical and

clearing of the stage for such an inquiry with a few general

may engender a socialist-democratic ethos. Since culture is a creative

In this context, the MILF goal of claiming the sovereign power of a

Self-Determination as Means or End-In-Itself?

The ultimate goal of self-determination cannot be attained simply by fiat,

view is already present (though occluded or suppressed) in the existing

In Quest of Critical Universality

From a radical-democratic standpoint, the crucial question then is:

limited nor sovereign, for unlike Arab nationalism’s notion of al-

One inspiring sign of “critical universality” may be found in the MNLF’s

The Prospectt Before Us

The Moro people’s struggle in the Philippines for national self-

legitimize the domination of diverse ethnic groups under elite control in

Abinales, Patricio. 2008. “Conclusion: Bringing America Back In.” In The US

Bauzon, Kenneth. 2008/ “Ruminations on the Bangsamoro Struggle and

Hansen, James. 1977. “Subjectivism, Terrorism and Political Activism.” In

Quimpo, Nathan Gilbert. 2008. “The US and the Southern Philippines’

Vargas, May. 2005. “Camp Bagong Diwa Likened to Auswitchtz.” Bulatlat

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