"Camps of the Sun"

When Tommaso Campanella wrote his celebrated utopian work "Civitas Solis" (City of the Sun), he was undergoing a term of punishment of about 27 years in a Spanish prison in Naples, Italy. He had been arrested in 1599 on charges of heresy and of conspiring against the Spanish government. In his 1623 masterpiece of political thought, Campanella envisioned a perfect society ruled by a philosopher-priest and patterned after the Republic of Plato. This is how he precisely described the system of government of that ideal society:

"The great ruler among them is a priest whom they call by the name Hoh, though we should call him Metaphysic. He is head over all, in temporal and spiritual matters, and all business and lawsuits are settled by him, as the supreme authority. Three princes of equal power -- viz., Pon, Sin, and Mor -- assist him, and these in our tongue we should call Power, Wisdom, and Love."

Of course, he never got the chance to see his vision realized in practice, but in the course of history many more visionaries followed and tried to revive his principles of "good governance", to use a current trendy concept.

According to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front's (MILF) ideologues, the camps that they had successfully established during three decades of struggle were exactly a contemporary version of what they intended as ideal societies for their people - the Bangsa Moro of the Southern Philippines. Above all towered Camp Abubakar - named after the first successor of the Prophet Muhammad -, the main of the 13 major MILF camps. In an interview with the author this past November, Al Haj Murad, the MILF vice-chairman for military affairs, described the camp as "a model for the society we want to establish for our people". It was, therefore, not simply a military camp, but rather "a community in itself" where they could prove that "the best system for the Bangsa Moro people was the system we envisioned for them". A system where the indivisibility of "temporal and spiritual matters" had to be central.

The Military Lashes Out

The experimental phase of the MILF, where the major camps were supposed to function as showcases of ideal Islamic societies, was called to an abrupt end by the military offensive that the Philippine government decided to launch in April 2000. Within a couple of months, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) captured most of the 46 MILF camps, and on July 9th they raised the national flag inside Camp Abubakar itself.

The reasons for the sudden toughening of the government's position towards the MILF are multiple, but Murad tends to relate the escalation of the conflict to a desperate attempt by the government to deny the evidence that the MILF had "reached a status of belligerency". His view is shared, among others, by ex-congressman Michael Mastura, who, in an earlier interview with the author, declared that the military offensive had "something to do with General Orlando Soriano, [and] with the signing of the acknowledgement of the existence of the camp [Abubakar]. They [the military] saw an opportunity to undo", to rectify, the mistake initially incurred into by recognizing a total of about 40 MILF camps in February 1999.

In international legal terms, in fact, one of the two decisive factors to determine the recognition of a belligerent status by neutral powers, is the insurgents' control over a territory ¹ , which in the case of the MILF could be proven by the existence of the camps. By formally recognizing the existence of those camps ² , the Philippine government had paved the way to the international recognition of the MILF as a belligerent party and, eventually, even to its recognition as an independent government.

Murad believed that, had the AFP not launched its offensive, the MILF would have soon enjoyed such international recognition.

A Military Update

Notwithstanding the claims of territorial control by the AFP over previous MILF-controlled areas, in November 2000 the situation was far from being normalized. The military could perhaps assert their presence along the Narciso Ramos Highway and in the major urban centers of Central and Western Mindanao, but in the rest of the countryside and in the less accessible zones, the situation was definitely less clear in terms of military control.

Even the capture of Camp Abubakar was not a completely finished business, at least according to Murad and his commanders. During the meeting we had just outside Cotabato City, they stated that about 60% of the original area of the camp was still under the control of the MILF. 1000 MILF fighters were positioned in the area, with both defensive and offensive capabilities and tasks.

They were trying to regain control of the area around Camp Omar ³ . That move was part of a wider MILF's strategy aiming at taking advantage of the recent decision by the top of the AFP - in October - to pull about 10.000 men out of Mindanao, a maneuver deemed to be partly motivated by the political instability surrounding Malacaņang.

Murad downplayed any major impact or damage to the organizational structure of the MILF, caused by the large-scale military offensive. He said that the only losses deriving from the offensive had been "material". At the same time, however, he admitted that a change of military tactics had been forced on the MILF by the AFP offensive. The MILF had to abandon the "positional warfare" strategy, originally meant to protect the communities established within their camps, for a more flexible guerrilla-inspired conduct of military operations. The loss of the camps has also resulted in a loosening of the chain of command within the organization. The General Staff of the Bangsamoro Islamic Council, which used to be located within Camp Abubakar and which was composed by 15 members, has been split into six general commands, operating in the whole of Mindanao:

1. Davao province
2. North Cotabato & Sultan Kudarat
3. South Cotabato (Sarangani area)
4. Maguindanao
5. Lanao
6. Zamboanga & Basilan

All the commands are believed to be of comparable sizes, that is to say, all of them are, more or less, of the size of one division (10.000 to 20.000 men), with Murad still in control of the central command of the General Staff, while responsibility for the various field operations has been channeled to the deployed commands. Murad denied that the more decentralized structure of the organization had created particular problems to its forces. Rather, it had caused more problems to the AFP, because "now they have to counter several commands instead of only one", declared Murad.

The End of a Political Aspiration?

Amidst a conflict which, according to a government report, as to November 2000 had already created more than 800.000 internally displaced people, and which does not seem to be heading towards a short-term peaceful solution, the MILF is left with the stringent question of defining its final political objectives.

The MILF has generally been characterized as an insurgent movement fighting for the establishment of an Islamic state independent from the Republic of the Philippines. As a matter of fact, when the MILF broke away from the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and officially declared itself a separate organization, in 1984, it did so by emphasizing the Islamic orientation of the movement, in contrast to the secular nature of the MNLF. The strategic choice by the leadership of the MILF to center the mission of the organization on the guiding principles of Islam, however, does not necessarily translate itself in an equally clear-cut 'Islamic' political agenda. On the contrary, in order to gain the badly needed support from the international Muslim community, and specifically from the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), soon after the announcement of the split, Salamat Hashim was rapid in changing a previously advocated call for secession into a more conciliatory stand towards autonomy. Although this shift could be interpreted as part of a skillful political maneuvering, dictated by the needs for survival of that period, it is a fact that autonomy, or at least "a meaningful autonomous government", has since then been a political concept often mentioned by the MILF leadership in its talks about a possible settlement of the Mindanao problem.

Besides, according to various analysts, even in the case that the establishment of an Islamic state would indeed be the ultimate political formula chosen by the MILF to crown its struggle, an appropriate and clear elaboration of the concept and of its eventual implementation is still lacking.

The MILF now, as indicated by Murad, seems in principle open to any political solution, whether autonomy, independence, federal government, or federal system. However, its ideal way to solve the problem would be to refer the final decision to the Bangsa Moro people themselves, through a popular consultation styled after that of East Timor and therefore conducted under the supervision of the United Nations. Finally, in an attempt to chase away fears of religious intolerance, Murad emphasized that even in the most likely case that the Bangsa Moro people will indeed choose for outright independence, religion would not become the only basis of the adopted governance system. A pluralistic society would rather be the final political aspiration.

Whatever the truth might have been regarding the political plans of the MILF for Muslim Mindanao, the all-out war policy of the Estrada administration has brought an abrupt end to all the possible speculations. Unclear interests have succeeded in halting the MILF's controversial experiments with their ideal societies, thereby preempting any attempt to evaluate the implementation of such political formulas. Complying with pressures for a more instinctive representation of the problem, once more, the action stage of the Moro struggle has been unfortunately shifted back to the "battlefields of God".