Peace mission seeks non-military solution to Moro conflict
Peace mission seeks non-military solution to Moro conflict
Oliver Teves, Associated Press, Manila
Members of an international peace mission said on Friday they will seek a non-military alternative to a U.S.-Philippine campaign against a Moro extremist group holding an American couple and a Filipino hostage on a southern island.
Ongoing military training aimed at wiping out the extremist Abu Sayyaf group involves 660 U.S. soldiers, including 160 from the Special Forces who have been deployed with front-line Filipino soldiers hunting the guerrillas on Basilan island. The U.S. soldiers are not allowed to engage in combat.
The 14-member mission includes peace and human rights advocates, parliamentarians and Muslim scholars from the Philippines, the United States, France, Ireland, Japan, Australia, India, Britain, Thailand and Italy.
The peace mission will make an "independent assessment" of the impact of the conflict, which has become the "second front" of the U.S. global war against terrorism, said Philippine sociology professor Walden Bello.
"We would like to express our solidarity with all the communities that have been affected by the violence, but we also want to express the fact ... that the record of military solutions to such phenomena as the Abu Sayyaf is very poor," Bello said.
Bello said the group wants to "create a space for dialog" among the various communities affected by the conflict, dealing with economic injustice and cultural and religious discrimination in one of the Philippines' poorest provinces.
Earl Martin, an instructor at the Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, who lived in the Philippines' southern Mindanao region in the 1980s, said he wanted to listen to, grieve with and pray for victims of violence on Basilan.
However, he said the Abu Sayyaf problem had been oversimplified.
"There is no love lost for those who terrorize others or those who kidnap others against their will," Martin said. "But always, as we enter into this situation, we discover they are more complex than the characterization often given in the brief stories we read."
The peace mission will be in Basilan from Saturday to Tuesday. Members have sought meetings with Philippine and U.S. military and civilian officials and local Catholic and Muslim religious leaders.
Bello said the government asked them to postpone their visit because of security concerns.
The group will also visit the Basilan provincial jail where some Abu Sayyaf suspects are held and attend a congressional hearing on alleged human rights violations in the military campaign.
Last year, the Abu Sayyaf seized dozens of hostages, including three Americans, and evaded a massive military operation involving thousands of troops.
Most hostages escaped or were released for ransom. Some have been killed, including Guillermo Sobero of Corona, California, who was beheaded. Those still in rebel hands are Martin and Gracia Burnham of Wichita, Kansas, and Basilan nurse Ediborah Yap.