Peace dawns in Philippines, but another war may erupt in Mexico

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): As one long war ends in the Philippines, another gets underway in Mexico. Or maybe not.

In Manila, on Sept. 2, Philippines President Fidel Ramos witnessed the signing of a peace accord by government chief negotiator Manual T. Yan and Nur Misuari, head of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), that ends 26 years of war by guerrillas seeking a separate state for the Moslem minority on the big southern island of Mindanao. The Philippines, said Misuari last week, are "on the threshold of a just, comprehensive, honorable and lasting peace."

Just four days before, guerrillas of a new Mexican rebel group, the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR), launched coordinated attacks on army and police posts in four states that left at least 14 dead and 40 injured. "We don't want war and we don't want to declare it," said an EPR leader known only as Oscar, "but we can't standidly by in the face of the government's crimes and its impunity."

The EPR is the military wing of the Party of the Revolutionary Worker Clandestine Union of the People/Party of the Poor, whose name almost literally does say it all. Its goal, straight out of the 1960s, is to overthrow the Mexican government and create a socialist state rather to the left of Cuba. Just what Mexico needs.

But its chances of success are slim, for it has no ethnic base.

The MNLF in the Philippines dates back to the 1960s, too, but it is not Marxist. It is one of the many guerrilla movements based on an ethnic, religious or linguistic minority, from the Irish Republican Army and the Basque ETA to the Iraqi Kurds and the Tamil Tigers, who took the dismantling of the European empires as a signal that all minorities had the right and the ability to break away from the states they lived in.

It hasn't worked out that way. Of the several dozen separatist movements that set out down this path over the past four decades, only one, Eritrea, has achieved international recognition. A couple of others -- the Turks of northern Cyprus and the separatist clans of Somaliland -- loiter in a legal twilight, in control of their territory but economically paralyzed because their independence is recognized by practically nobody. And the vast majority of these movements, from Biafra to the Punjab, have made a deal or just been defeated.

The Moros of the southern Philippines were one of the biggest of these separatist movements: an estimated 125,000 people have died in the fighting on Mindanao in the past quarter-century. The MNLF still has up to 20,000 men under arms, and breakaway groups like the fundamentalist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the extremist Abu Sayyaf group have 10,000 more.

The Moros are descended from Moslem Malays who settled in the southern Philippines in the 15th century, around the same time that the Spaniards arrived and began Christianizing the rest of the archipelago. Moslems remained a majority in Mindanao, and they retained an autonomous sultanate until 1938. But a flood of post-war immigration by Catholic Filipinos reduced Moslems to minority status in Mindanao. and they took up arms in the early 1970s.

Several Moslem countries have sent them money and arms, and at times in the 1970s up to 80 percent of the Philippines army was deployed fighting the guerrillas in Mindanao. But Manila conceded Moslem autonomy in principle two decades ago, there was never any prospect of a Moro military victory, and even most Moslem were getting fed up with the war. Besides, most MNLF commanders have ended up as prosperous businessmen on the side.

So it was time to make peace. The negotiations took three years, but Nur Misuari ends up as chairman of a Southern Philippine Council for Peace and Development, while his troops will be integrated into the Philippines army.

He will run as the candidate of President Ramos's party for the leadership of the Autonomous Region of Moslem Mindanao, a four-province area created in 1989 -- and in 1999 there will be a plebiscite in 14 provinces of southern Mindanao containing large Moslem populations to see who else wants to join the autonomous region. "If he shows he's good as the head of the Council," said Ramos's chief negotiator Manuel T. Yan, "maybe five, 10 provinces will agree. If he flops...no one will vote for him."

Misuari cannot coerce the more militant Moro groups into laying down their arms, but the new autonomous region will pull the rug out from under them by giving Moros things like an independent tax system and Moslem education in the schools. It is a sensible compromise that will lead to rapid economic development in the south -- much like the one Mexico is working on with the Mayas.

The Zapatista guerrillas who shocked Mexico with coordinated attacks across the southern state of Chiapas in early 1995 had an ethnic base in the indigenous Indian population, and a list of grievances that most Mexicans see as justified. The new Mexican government under President Ernesto Zedillo had the sense to start negotiating, and there is unlikely to be more fighting in Chiapas.

But the new guerrillas of the EPR are quite another thing: Marxists fighting for the total overthrow of the Mexican government. That doesn't leave much room for negotiation. It also deprives the EPR of any prospect of widespread public support. Mexico, unlike the Philippines, is not yet a full democracy, though it has been moving in that direction over the past few years. So there is much impatience with Zedillo's government, which has been compounded by the deep economic crisis of the past two years. But hardly anybody thinks the EPR would be an improvement.

Besides, if ethnic separatist movements had little success in the past few decades, Marxist guerrillas have had even less. They have not won anywhere since Cambodia and Nicaragua in the mid- 1970s -- and in both those places, they subsequently lost again. At worst, the EPR may succeed in damaging Mexico's economic recovery in the short term. But it will not be another 26-year war.