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.