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Peace In Mindanao If Muslims Given Their Lebensraum Dues
Manila, 3 Feb. (AKI) - Lasting peace will only come to the Philippines' restive, mostly Muslim Mindanao region, if the country's Muslims are granted their full rights, no matter what the outcome of this weekend's talks between the government and separatist rebels, experts say. "The biggest stumbling block to peace in Mindanao remains the feeling amongst our Muslim brothers that they are [treated] as second-class citizens both politically and economically," says Jose Bayani Baylon, a Manila-based political analyst.
"We needs our own state or else!"

Saturday's "informal" meeting in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia is the seventh between representatives of the Manila government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) since formal talks were broken off by former Filipino president Joseph Estrada. Both sides have in recent weeks said that they are close to signing an agreement that will end the 40-year-long conflict which has claimed an estimated 120,000 lives.
40 years this go-around, the United States was fighting their great grandfathers when we ran the place. I think they were fighting the Spanish before that. They just don't play well with others
Much of the optimism derives from the apparent resolution of the issue of the so-called "ancestral domain" - territory which Muslims have historically regarded as theirs, but which is now mostly inhabited by Christians.

The population of Mindanao, the second largest island in the Philippines archipelago was almost wholly Muslim or animist until the Manila government started after World War II to encourage people from other regions to migrate there. Today Muslims make up a mere 18 pecent of the island's population. "In part this [position] is due to the Manila-centric policies of [successive] governments, but it is also due to the corrupt practices of Filipino Muslim political leaders over the years," says Baylon.

The failure of past accords between Manila and the MILF's predecessor, the Moro National Liberation Front, don't augur well for the current round of talks, Baylon says. "Add to this the growing militancy of Islam in the country, which is the only [mostly] Catholic nation in Asia, and you have the ingredients for a highly volatile situation," he says.

Mindanao's separatist tendencies are rooted in a profound sense of Muslim alienation, agrees Zainudin S. Malang, director of Mindanao's Bangsamoro Center for Law and Policy.
They alienate pretty much everyone...., oh, that's not what he meant?
Research has shown that Muslims are systematically shut out of jobs or study opportunities on account of their faith. Results of a study carried out by the Philippine Human Development Network, showed that 55 percent of Filipinos think that Muslims are more "prone to run amok", that Muslims are probably terrorists or extremists (according to 47 percent of the sample group surveyed).
"Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins" by William and Mary Morris: Amok is "a variant spelling of amuck -- actually much closer to the Malayan word 'amoq,' from which it is derived. The word was originally used to describe the actions of Maylayan tribesmen who, frenzied by hatred and hashish, would rush furiously into hand-to-hand combat." And these would be the ancestors or relatives of the Philippine muslims
"Pro-independence sentiments arise out of a lack of feeling of belonging, of being outcasts, of being second class citizens to whom concessions are only made grudgingly," says Malang. "Prejudice by the largely Christian 'body-politic' rears its ugly head in the media, and other sectors of civil society." As for the latest attempt to end the fighting, Malang said he believes that signing a peace agreement will be the easy part, but that it would be very hard for President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to "sell" the deal to a the largely hostile population.

Muslims meanwhile remain inadequately represented in the two-house parliament, where out of 236 members of Congress, only 12 are Muslim. There are no Muslims in the Senate. Mindanao is among the poorest regions in the Philippines with most of its meagre external investments coming from abroad rather than from other parts if the country.
Posted by: 2006-02-03
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=141389