February 11, 2002	Monday	Ziqa’ad 27, 1422

BANGKOK: The hostile reception that some 600 US troops are receiving in the Philippines is a pointer to the opposition that lies ahead for US military adventures beyond Afghanistan, analysts in the region say.

Thus far, the most vociferous objections have come from activists in Manila. There, street protests against US military presence — and cries of “Yankee go home” - are being heard in a reminder of the atmosphere during the eighties when the Philippines was host to Washington’s huge military bases.

Local media have been asking questions about the “help” that US soldiers will give Filipino troops to crush the small extremist Muslim group in the southern Philippines, and whether it merits the large troop deployment from Washington under the two countries’ agreements on military cooperation.

To the United States, the group in question, the Abu Sayyaf, is a Muslim radical organization with some links to the Al Qaeda terrorist network of Osama bin Laden, who the United Sates says masterminded the Sept 11 acts of terror in New York and Washington.

US officials consider this opening of its second front in its “war against terror” essential to combat the presence of militant Islamic groups in South-east Asia. But it is a view that has observers in the Philippines’ neighbouring countries worried about Washington’s real agenda, and long-term implications of a bigger US military presence in the region.

But the United States is serious in its aims, the officials say. Washington is prepared to accept injury and death of its troops in this military effort due to last for six months, a US general told the media in the southern Philippines on Wednesday.

But Filipino political analysts disagree about Washington’s reading of the Abu Sayyaf, labelling them a “band of local kidnappers”. Writing in the English-language daily “Philippine Daily Inquirer”, columnist Randy David states that Abu Sayyaf’s members are “homegrown criminals, bred by endemic poverty, social marginality and a perverted understanding of the Muslim faith”.

“It is a bandit group or in earlier times would have been called pirates,” Robert Karniol, Asia-Pacific editor for “Jane’s Defence Weekly”, says of the Abu Sayyaf, whose fighters are estimated to number less than 1,100.

Like Filipino analysts, Karniol argues that if the US wanted to target Filipino rebels advocating the militant brand of political Islam, it should have zeroed in on bigger groups like the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF). “These groups have ideological objectives,” says Karniol.

From Malaysia, human rights activist Chandra Muzaffar sees something more sinister in the Washington’s attempt to gain a military foothold in the Philippine archipelago. “The dispatch of troops is part of the larger US agenda of demonstrating its military power and imposing its hegemonic will upon other nations,” asserts Chandra, president of the Penang-based International Movement for a Just World (JUST).

The entry of US troops to help quell a local extremist group is a development that will unnerve people in South-east Asian countries that are home to Muslim radical groups, he adds. “The Malaysian government and, perhaps, a significant segment of the populace have always been uneasy about US hegemony and the expansion of its global military might,” he explains.

Concern has been expressed in other quarters too. “Indonesia may be the next target of the United States to combat terrorism,” says Sartika Soesilowati, political science lecturer at the University of Airlangga in Surabaya. Such thinking from Indonesia, with a 170.3 million Muslim population, and Malaysia, with 10.8 million Muslims, comes in the wake of increasing reports about cross-border ties between radical Muslims in South-east Asia.

For instance, intelligence reports have identified the “Jemaah Islamiah” organisation as among those pursuing such links. Described by regional security officials as a “terror group,” it seeks to create “Daulah Islamiah”, a Muslim state spanning the southern Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.

There are also other traces of the region’s like-minded Muslim youth taking to arms, some reports say. Youth from the southern Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, for instance, were drawn to Afghanistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion to join the thousands of Mujahideen who pledged to fight a jihad.

And once the United States declared war last year on Afghanistan’s Taliban regime for harbouring bin Laden and his allies, another generation of Muslim youth lined up to participate in another jihad in that South Asian country, according to IslamOnline, a Doha-based electronic magazine.

“The proportion of those who share the Al Qaeda ideology in South-east Asia is not disproportionate to that of other Muslim countries. It is the same,” explains Karniol, the defence expert. “It is a concern: the Al Qaeda presence in the region.”

But he doubts that the United States will go full steam ahead with a heavy military showdown in the region, as it pursued in Afghanistan. The region will not witness a replication of the Philippine scenario in other countries, he says, but there will be increased intelligence activities by the US in the region.

“The United States will seek to expand its intelligence to achieve the objectives,” he explains. “The US has a presence in all the countries in the region and there are different agreements with each government.”

Even then, the region’s governments have not done much to pursue a common security strategy. There has been little movement on a call made last year by Philippines President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to create a South-east Asian anti-terrorism coalition. —Dawn/InterPress Service.