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Issue Number 25/26, December
2005
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Kapatiran Issue
No. 25/26, December 2005
NZ MILITARY
SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PHILIPPINES
- Murray Horton
The Philippines
Solidarity Network of Aotearoa (PSNA) recently learned
that the head of the New Zealand Army, Major General
Jerry Mateparae, made a September 2005 official visit to
the Philippine military forces stationed in the
southernmost part of the country, which the US and
Philippine governments have designated as “’the
second front’ in the War On Terror”. The far
south of the Philippines has been the scene of a brutal
civil war between the Philippine military and Muslim
separatists since the 1970s.
Major General Mateparae’s visit to the Armed Forces
of the Philippines’ Southern Command HQ in Zamboanga
City, southern Mindanao, was reported in the local
newspaper, Zamboanga Today on September 17 (“New
Zealand military officials watch RP [Republic of the
Philippines] anti-terror campaign”). The caption for
an accompanying photo says: “Canberra (sic) and
Manila are allies in the fight against international
terrorism”. Are we? Who gave the NZ military and/or
Government any mandate to get involved in the extremely
murky and bloodsoaked politics of the southern
Philippines?
The Philippine military has an appalling record of
systematic human rights abuses, not only against the
Muslim population in the south, but throughout the entire
archipelago (a second civil war has raged throughout the
whole country since the 1960s, between the military and
Communist guerrillas). The military operates in a culture
of impunity i.e. nobody is ever held accountable for the
innumerable murders, abductions, disappearances, torture,
terrorisation of entire communities, etc, etc.
Things have got so bad that, in August 2005, the
Philippines’ embattled and courageous human rights
movement invited foreigners to join an International
Solidarity Mission to five of the worst human rights
hotspots. Four New Zealanders took part (the reports by
all of them are in this issue) and one of them, Tim
Howard, spent more than a month travelling from one end
of the country to the other, including down south to the
Muslim frontlines of the “War On Terror” and
saw graphic evidence that what is being waged is actually
a War of Terror, by the Philippine military and
Government against its own people. He saw the grisly
reality of what Mateparae’s visit was implicitly
endorsing.
NZ Military “A Role Model”
On October 5, 2005 Tim took the trouble to ring Major
General Mateparae and interview him directly about the
latter’s visit to southern Mindanao. Mateparae
described his visit as a “fact finding one” and
one in the context of the NZ Defence Force being a”
role model” for how a professional military should
operate in a liberal democracy. This is pie in the sky
stuff – the Philippines is very far from being a
liberal democracy, or any other sort of democracy; and
its military is professional only in respect of being
monumentally corrupt and murderously oppressive of its
civilian population, Muslim, Christian, and everyone
else.
Mateparae may have downplayed his visit in his phone
interview with Tim but his was not a one off. Few New
Zealanders would be aware that we have a Defence Attaché
at our Embassy in the Philippines. Kapatiran 20, January
2002 (“Back In Bed With Uncle Sam”, by Murray
Horton, section headed “Is New Zealand Military
Getting Involved In Philippines?”) quoted Philippine
media reports that military attaches from 15 countries,
including New Zealand, had visited Zamboanga in October
2001 to assess how things were going in the Philippines
after the September 11 terrorist atrocities in the US.
The Philippine Daily Inquirer (24/10/01) quoted the
Philippine military’s Southern Command Chief as
saying: “They are here to assess and find ways of
helping the Philippine military fight terrorism. If this
did not happen in Afghanistan (i.e. the American-led
invasion and occupation, which started the open ended
“War On Terror”), they would not have come
here”. PSNA wrote to the Government and got a reply
from the Secretary of Defence (21/12/01) saying that the
Armed Forces of the Philippines provided a briefing to
the NZ Defence Attache “as part of a regular
official Defence Attaches tour of the country” and
refused to reveal the contents of that briefing. This
reference to our Defence Attache getting briefings from
the Philippine military on a routine basis is interesting
because Mateparae told Tim that it was often difficult
for him (the Defence Attache) to “get around the
country” and that a visit by a senior NZ military
figure (Mateparae, the head of the NZ Army) gave the
Attache access to senior levels of the Armed Forces of
the Philippines. Something doesn’t match up here
– in 2001, the Secretary of Defence told us that the
NZ Defence Attache gets briefings from the Philippine
military as a matter of course; in 2005, the Army Chief
of Staff tells us that it is necessary for the Attache to
coat tail on his visit in order to get access.
Who Really Are The “Islamic Terrorists”
In Mindanao?
The Zamboanga Today report says that Mateparae was there
to monitor the progress of the Philippine military in its
campaign against the Abu Sayyaf Group in Mindanao. This
requires some explanation for New Zealanders, who might
think that this is a good thing in that it may actually
achieve something against the Islamic terrorists believed
to have carried out atrocities like the October 2005 Bali
bombings. Abu Sayyaf are just a tiny band of criminals,
the latest manifestation in a long history of pirates and
bandits in that part of the world. They specialise in
spectacular kidnappings for huge ransoms, along with a
penchant for beheadings. In that respect they are
terrorists, but they are not remotely political, and have
been disowned by the genuine Muslim separatists operating
in Mindanao.
Even more ironic, Abu Sayyaf owes its very existence to
the US and the Philippine military. Exactly as with Osama
bin Laden and his merry men, it was founded by Muslims
recruited by the US Central Intelligence Agency to fight
the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s. What happened
in both instances is called “blow back”. There
is incontrovertible evidence that, to this day, Abu
Sayyaf has a thriving relationship with corrupt senior
officers of the Philippine military, with the latter
getting a cut of the huge ransoms, whilst allowing the
bandits to mysteriously “escape” when
they’ve been surrounded during yet another
“total war” offensive that will supposedly wipe
them out. Kapatiran has regularly reported the facts
about Abu Sayyaf over recent years.
And all is not what it seems when it comes to who is
supposedly responsible for “Islamic terrorism”
in Mindanao. In 2003, disillusioned Philippine Army
officers and men staged a mutiny* right in the heart of
the capital, Manila. They revealed that one of the things
they objected to was being ordered to conduct deadly
bombings against civilian targets in Mindanao, bombings
that were then blamed on “Islamic terrorists”
and cited as justification to get the US militarily
involved in this Philippine civil war. And there is
evidence of direct US involvement in his very same
“Islamic terrorism”. In 2002, a mysterious
American was seriously injured when a bomb exploded in
his Mindanao hotel room. There was no suggestion that he
was a target; it was his bomb which had apparently
exploded prematurely. Before he could be questioned, US
Government agents whisked him out of the country. The
Philippine media openly speculated about his connections
to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and his role
as an agent provocateur. *For details about the Oakwood
mutiny - named after the hotel and shopping complex in
the Makati financial district where it took place –
and about Michael Meiring, the mysterious American who
blew himself up with his own bomb in his Davao City hotel
room, see Kapatiran 23, November 2003, “George And
Gloria: Two Of A Kind”, Murray Horton. This latter
article can be read online at
http://www.converge.org.nz/psna/KapNo23/kap23art/art102.htm.
Ed.
Murky waters indeed. And ones that the NZ military would
be very strongly advised to stay right out of. New
Zealand undermined our credibility with the long
suffering Filipino people when our military made regular
use of the massive US bases there during the Marcos
dictatorship. Marcos is gone, the bases are gone, and
thanks to our being kicked out of ANZUS, we don’t
get invited to use US bases anywhere any more. Let’s
leave it that way and make sure that our military stays
right out of the Philippines.
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