Paris, Tuesday, July 25, 2000 Manila Seeks U.S. Aid in Rebel War
By Don Kirk International Herald Tribune
MANILA - Mired in a guerrilla war against Muslim rebels in its southern provinces, the Philippines has drawn up a list of requests for U.S. military aid that it hopes to obtain in talks this week in Washington, officials said Monday. In making their case for the military assistance, President Joseph Estrada and his top aides are expected to be helped by reports that Osama bin Laden is involved with the Muslim militants in the southern Philippines. Mr. bin Laden, an exiled Saudi-born millionaire, is being sought by the United States as the suspected mastermind in bombings against U.S. targets in Africa and the Middle East. Philippine officials have accused Mr. bin Laden of providing funds to Muslim terrorist rebels in Mindanao since 1993.
Lieutenant General Jose Calimlim, chief of military intelligence, said that Mr. bin Laden had given $3 million for food and medicine to the largest rebel group in the Philippines, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, and that it ''planned to divert'' the money to buy weapons.
Military officials accused both the Moro rebel organization and the Abu Sayyaf rebel movement, a smaller but tougher grouping, of ''trying hard to slip through the southern backdoor weapons and ammunition they purchased from abroad.'' The portrait of the activities of Mr. bin Laden indicates the anxiety of Philippine officials as they try to strike a responsive chord in Washington this week in their bid for military aid.
Mr. Estrada plans to present the Philippine case in broad terms in a 15-minute meeting with President Bill Clinton on Thursday while top aides expand on their country's needs in talks with Defense Secretary William Cohen and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
Officials discussed Mr. Estrada's trip, his first visit to Washington since being elected in 1998, as he and his entourage took off Monday for San Francisco.
Commanders of the Philippine military, which has 113,000 troops, bolstered by an equal number in the Philippine National Police, said they needed everything from aircraft to patrol boats to tanks and armored personnel carriers.
''We have kind of a laundry list of needs,'' a Philippine military official said. ''The trip is very timely in terms of what is happening right now.''
The Philippine government is preoccupied with what is being referred to as ''the war in Mindanao,'' the worst fighting there in more than 25 years.
Before leaving for the United States, Mr. Estrada presented an impassioned defense of his military policy on Mindanao at the outset of a state-of-the-nation address before a joint session of Congress. His government, he said, ''had to neutralize the attempt of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front to amputate the southern parts of the country away from the organic whole and to convert them into an independent Muslim state.''
The war against the Moro rebel organization, with an estimated 10,000 men under arms before the armed forces overran its base this month, has hardly touched the strongest Muslim rebel group, Abu Sayyaf, on the outlying islands of Basilan and Jolo.
The Abu Sayyaf group has shielded itself by taking more than 40 hostages. It has released at least 10 but still holds 31, most of them in a jungle area on Jolo. The hostages include 21 people seized from a Malaysian resort island in April as well as three members of a French TV crew and a German journalist.
The armed forces have been standing by for an offensive on Basilan and Jolo while awaiting the outcome of negotiations to free the remaining hostages. On Monday, the Abu Sayyaf group was said to be ready to release three more hostages, all Malaysian, but the fate of the others was far from clear.
Colonel Jaime Canapoy, an armed forces spokesman, said his government placed ''top priority on more aircraft,'' which the military has been using for weeks against the Moro rebels.
''We also need a lot of tanks and armored personnel carriers for counterinsurgency,'' the colonel said. ''We don't have the budget to buy them.''