Battle-scarred generals: RP's unlikely peace warriors
Battle-scarred generals: RP's unlikely peace warriors
By Martin Abbugao
MANILA (AFP): The battle-scarred generals who led a bloody war to crush a Moslem rebellion in the southern Philippines were the unlikely peace warriors in the negotiations that settled the conflict.
When President Fidel Ramos took office in 1992, the retired general created a panel that included three of his former comrades-in-arms to forge a peace pact with the Moslem insurgent group, Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF).
In nearly three years since the talks began in October 1993, the men of war accomplished on the negotiating table what they had failed to do in the battlefields of the southern island of Mindanao for over two decades.
MNLF chairman Nur Misuari is now head of a government- sponsored Moslem autonomous region, and 7,500 of his grizzled fighters will be integrated into the armed forces under the newly-signed peace accord.
"As soldiers, we know the pains of war more than anybody else because we are the ones out there in the field," said Representative Eduardo Ermita, one of three retired generals in the Philippine negotiating team, which also included a Moslem congressman.
"If there is anybody who yearns for peace, it is the soldier," added panel member Alexander Aguirre, a former deputy armed forces chief.
Ermita and Aguirre, graduates of the elite Philippine Military Academy, had earned their spurrs in Mindanao as young officers.
Ramos' former boss, retired armed forces chief of staff Manuel Yan, headed the Philippine negotiators. Still ramrod straight despite a limp at 76, Yan was assigned in Mindanao but retired shortly before the MNLF rebellion broke out in 1972.
Ramos, who initiated the peace talks and doggedly pursued it despite a firestorm of opposition from Mindanao's Christian majority, is himself a veteran of the Mindanao campaign in which 120,000 people were killed and millions more were displaced from their homes.
A brigadier general when the rebellion was launched in October 1972, Ramos successfully led the defense of a camp besieged by Moslem rebels in the city of Marawi, earning himself the distinguished conduct star -- one of the country's highest military awards.
Ramos, who was then commander of the paramilitary Philippine Constabulary, was on a routine inspection in the central city of Cebu when he got news of the Marawi attack, one of the raids that marked the beginning the MNLF's campaign for a separate Islamic state.
The West Point-trained soldier, who had fought in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, sneaked into the besieged Camp Keithly "at a time when government troops could barely hold on to their position," a presidential palace statement said.
A record of the battle quoted by the statement said Ramos "issued timely orders and provided firm leadership that uplifted the spirits of the battered defenders and emboldened all of them to hold on and resist the rebel offensive" that lasted until dawn.
Veterans of the Mindanao war, which reached its peak in the early 1970s, can vividly recall the ferocity of the Moslem guerrillas, who they said mutilated the bodies of fallen soldiers.
Thousands of young men from as far as Luzon island in the north -- many of them from the equally ruthless head-cutting mountain tribes -- were pressed into training and deployed to Mindanao, where over 60 percent of the armed forces were tied down.
An army sergeant who had fought in the war welcomed the peace agreement, but remains wary if the Moslems will honor it.
The soldier, who asked not to be identified, recalled the massacre by MNLF rebels of army Brigadier General Teodulfo Bautista and 35 of his men on Pata island, in the mainly Moslem Sulu island group, on Oct. 10, 1977.
Bautista and his men had gone to Pata for peace talks and were unarmed when they were mowed down, he said.