U.S. sends teachers to join war on terror

U.S. sends teachers to join war on terror

Agencies, Manila

The United States is sending English-language teachers to the Philippines and Indonesia to open a new front in the war on terrorism in Southeast Asia.

The U.S. ambassador here, Francis Ricciardone, said he was scheduled to meet with Philippine President Gloria Arroyo's special adviser on education later on Monday.

Teaching English to more Filipinos, and promoting democracy and the rule of law, could contribute in the war on terrorism, Ricciardone said.

"We'd like to see whether we could help revive an English- teaching program that your government is operating here. That's another way of fighting terrorism," he told reporters.

"Education is very important in promoting and strengthening democracy and defeating the forces of radicalism that want to undermine democracy," Ricciardone said.

Washington sent volunteer teachers aboard the USS Thomas to the Philippines when it became a U.S. colony in the early 1900s.

The Americans, dubbed the Thomasites, introduced the concept of American public education that eventually became the basis of the Philippine system.

Ricciardone said a similar program had been underway for some time in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country which has been identified as a potential breeding ground for Islamic extremists.

Ricciardone said English-language teaching officers were key components of U.S. diplomatic missions abroad "throughout the Cold War."

Aside from teaching the language, they spread "materials that taught of course democracy, the history of democracy, constitutional issues and so forth."

He told the Foreign Correspondents' Association of the Philippines that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network was trying to undermine Southeast Asia by supporting local Muslim radicals.

"It's ... some kind of a franchising operation ... by having people come here, training people outside or providing funds or providing knowledge on how to make bombs and place them," Ricciardone said.

He cited the arrest in the Philippines of suspected members of the Jemaah Islamiyah, a group accused of links to al-Qaeda and of plotting to blow up U.S. and other Western targets in Singapore.

Ricciardone said, without elaborating, that "outside forces" have tried to promote intolerance and extremism among the Muslim minority in mainly Roman Catholic Philippines.

Philippine police officials worry foreign Muslim radicals could be using some religious schools to recruit al-Qaeda sympathizers.

He further said Washington believes the program "helped us defeat communism, which was the threat against the previous generation. Now we face a new threat, an extremism of a different sort."

The strategy was adopted worldwide by the U.S. government to counter communism during the Cold War, he said.

"Now, we face a new threat of extremism," he said, where Muslim radicals "teach hate, they teach that if someone is different, you should hate them and kill them."

About 1,000 U.S. troops are nearing the end of a six-month mission in the southern Philippines to advise Filipino troops fighting Abu Sayyaf guerrillas, described as local proxies of the al-Qaeda network.

"You tend to think of special forces out there as anti- terrorism Rambos," the ambassador said.

"But Rambo isn't what counter-terrorism is all about. (It's about) strengthening democracy."

The counterterrorism exercise ends July 31.