RP opposition warns U.S. of Muslim quagmire

RP opposition warns U.S. of Muslim quagmire

Reuters, Manila

The Philippines' top opposition leader warned the United States on Thursday against involvement in combat with local Muslim insurgents, saying this could unleash an Islamic backlash and lead to his country's breakup.

"I am sure the Americans are smart enough to know that they won't be sucked into that kind of turmoil but one can never tell," Senator Edgardo Angara, head of the main opposition party Laban, told Manila-based foreign correspondents.

"When policymakers 10,000 miles away in Washington see some casualties among their people and when the fight is clothed in anti-terrorist trappings, who knows? Even the Washington policymakers may be entrapped into that kind of disastrous situation," he said.

Angara recalled U.S. involvement in Vietnam started with a few hundred advisers "and then it became a conflagration".

Hundreds of U.S. troops are training Filipinos in counter- terrorism to help Manila defeat the Abu Sayyaf guerrillas. The United States has linked the group to Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, prime suspects in the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

The Abu Sayyaf, which has been holding a U.S. missionary couple hostage for almost 11 months on Basilan island, is a breakaway faction of Muslim separatist rebels fighting for an Islamic state on the main southern island of Mindanao and adjacent areas.

Angara said the political opposition welcomed U.S. military help in vanquishing the Abu Sayyaf, which he described as a bandit group, but said American troops should avoid getting involved with mainstream separatist groups.

"We will pay a high price if we entrap and engulf the Americans into fighting our insurgency war," Angara said.

"The whole Arab world will go against us. Our own Muslims will become even more fanatical and I think we will ultimately lose Mindanao," he said.

Muslims make up only about four percent of the Roman Catholic Philippines' 77 million people but most of them live in Mindanao.

Angara said the breakup could happen because the separatists could win the sympathy of neighboring Islamic countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia.

"If they see that their own brothers in Mindanao are now the target of joint Philippines and American operations, that would set off a big backlash among Muslims in that region," he warned.