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.