American fingerprints are all over a
botched commando raid in the southern Philippines that left dozens dead and
shocked the country.
Early
in the morning of January 25, commandos belonging to the Special Action Force
of the Philippine National Police crept into the southern town of Mamasapano —
a stronghold of the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front. The elite
Seaborne Unit had come for Zulkifli Abdhir, a Malaysian bomb maker better known
as “Marwan.”
By
the end of the morning, dozens lay dead.
The episode has severely discredited
the administration of Philippine President Benigno Aquino III, jeopardized
decades of progress on peace talks with Moro separatists, and underlined the
perils for developing world governments that put themselves at the beck and
call of Washington.
The commandos were able to kill
Marwan, who’d sat high on the FBI’s list of “Most Wanted Terrorists.” But then
all hell broke loose. The insurgents woke up and opened fire on the intruders,
forcing the commandos to leave Marwan’s body behind. They had to content
themselves with cutting off the corpse’s index finger to turn over to the FBI.
As they retreated, nine of the
Seaborne commandoes were killed. They radioed for help, but they were told that
the “Quick Reaction Force” charged with covering their withdrawal was already
pinned down in a flat cornfield with little cover. Over the next few hours,
that separate unit of 36 men was picked off one-by-one by Moro snipers. Only
one of the 36 survived, by running for his life and jumping into a nearby
river.
All in all, 44 policemen died in the
bloody battle. Moro fighters estimated that 18 of their combatants and about
four civilians were killed.
A timely rescue effort was not even
mounted, since an infantry battalion in the area wasn’t informed till late in
the morning that the commandos were under fire. When ceasefire monitors finally
reached the cornfield late in the afternoon, long after the battle ended, they
found corpses that had been stripped of their weapons and other gear, some
exhibiting wounds that indicated they had been shot at point-blank range.
Biggest Casualty: Moro Autonomy
The “Mamasapano Massacre,” as it has
come to be called, upended Philippine politics.
The biggest casualty was the Bangsa
Moro Basic Law that was in the last stages of being shepherded through the
Philippine Congress. Known as the “BBL,” the bill was the product of nearly
five years of intensive negotiations between the government and the Moro
Islamic Liberation Front to put an end to almost 50 years of fighting in the
southern Philippines. It would have created an autonomous region for the Muslim
Moros, a fiercely independent people that have long resisted integration into
the broader Filipino polity.
With emotions among the Christian
majority running high, congressional approval of the BBL was thrown into doubt,
threatening an eventual return to hostilities. Some politicians rode on the
incident to stoke the latent anti-Muslim prejudices of the dominant culture —
not just to derail prospects for Moro autonomy, but also to advance their own
political ambitions.
Under congressional questioning, the
facts of the raid were extracted piece by piece — on national television — from
high administration officials. Their feelings seemed to run the gamut of guilt,
grief, disbelief, and resentment at not being “in the know” about the planned
incursion.
The decisive element in the
unraveling of the operation, it appears, was the deliberate withholding of
information from key people at the top of the police and armed forces
hierarchy. Only the president, the Special Action Force commander, and the
national police chief, General Alan Purisima, knew about the mission. Though
suspended from office on corruption charges, Purisima — a trusted aide of the
president — was effectively in charge of the operation, bypassing the acting
police chief and the secretary of the interior, who knew nothing of the mission
until disaster overtook it.
Emerging in the hearings was the
following portrait of the tragedy: The officials who conceived and implemented
the operation to nab Marwan chose not to inform the top people in the police
and military leadership. They also ignored and subverted the carefully
negotiated procedures for territorial access worked out among the Moro Islamic
Liberation Front, the government, and third-party monitors.
The Liberation Front fighters —
along with fighters from a die-hard separatist group, the Bangsa Moro Islamic
Freedom Fighters — responded that morning to what they perceived as a large
invasion force. Once the battle began, it became very difficult for their
leaders to realize the intent of the commando contingent and get their forces
to disengage.
It seemed evident, too, that some
wounded policemen were finished off execution-style, though it was not clear
which group was responsible for these atrocities.
Washington’s Hand
The big puzzle for many was why a
government that was in the last stages of negotiating an autonomy agreement to
end 50 years of warfare would endanger this goal — said to be a major legacy
priority for President Aquino — with a large-scale commando intrusion into Moro
territory without informing its negotiating partner.
To an increasing number of people,
the answer must have something to do with Washington.
Indeed, Washington’s fingerprints
were all over the operation: There was a $5-million bounty placed by the
Americans on Marwan’s head. A U.S. military helicopter appeared in the area
after the long firefight, allegedly to help evacuate the wounded. Marwan’s
finger disappeared after the battle and showed up at an FBI lab in the United States
a few days later.
Filipino officials have remained
tight-lipped on the question of U.S. participation in the raid, invoking
“national security” or choosing to make revelations only in secret executive
sessions with the Senate. Thus it has fallen on the media to probe the U.S.
role.
Perhaps the most reliable of these
probes was conducted by the Philippine Daily Inquirer, which found
that U.S. drones had pinpointed Marwan’s hiding place, guided the commandos to
it, and provided the capability for real-time management by the Philippine
commanders away from the battlefield. American advisers, the paper claimed,
were the ones who had vetoed informing top officials of the police, the armed
forces, and the Liberation Front of the planned raid on the grounds that news
of the action would be leaked to Marwan.
Finally, the original plan was to
have a fused team of Seaborne Unit commandos and the Quick Reaction Force. But
that was reportedly rejected by the American advisers, who favored having the
Seaborne Unit carry out the raid itself and the Quick Reaction Force provide
cover — a plan that proved disastrous. The Seaborne Unit, it emerged, had been
trained by “retired” Navy Seals and functioned as the Americans’ special unit
within the special forces of the Philippine National Police.
The full extent of U.S. involvement
remains to be unearthed, but it’s now clear to many that taking out Marwan was
a major priority for Washington — not Manila. As one congressman put it, the
Mamasapano tragedy was a case of “the Americans fighting to the last Filipino.”
Into the Bunker
As the details of the American role
emerge, the pressure is on President Aquino to admit complicity in a
Washington-directed operation, which he has so far refused to do.
Aquino has come under intense fire
from nationalist quarters that earlier criticized him for negotiating a
military pact that allows the United States to use Philippine
bases to implement President Obama’s so-called “Pivot to Asia”
strategy to contain China.
Already under attack for putting a
suspended police general in charge of the fatal mission and refusing to admit
command responsibility for it, the charge of laying down Filipino lives for an
American scheme appears to have forced the president further into his bunker,
creating the widespread impression of a drift in leadership that, it was
feared, coup plotters and other adventurers — of which there is no shortage in
the Philippines — could take advantage of.
There is a personal postcript to
this. As a sitting member of the Philippine House of Representatives, I
withdrew my political support for President Aquino when he refused to accept
command responsibility for the operation. Since my party Akbayan remains allied
to the administration, I resigned as the congressional representative of the
party. This article is a joint publication of Foreign Policy
In Focus and TheNation.com.
Foreign Policy In Focus columnist
Walden Bello was, until recently, a member of the House of Representatives of
the Philippines
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