Military: Young Muslims need better options
Agence France-Presse | 07/17/2009 2:50 AM
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MANILA - Military officers fighting Islamist militants said Thursday the Philippines needed a "paradigm shift", warning the threat would fester unless marginalised young Muslims were given more chances to get ahead in life.
The Abu Sayyaf group, blamed for most of the country's worst terrorist attacks as well as numerous kidnappings, draws its support from the impoverished mainly Muslim islands of the southwest Philippines.
Senator Richard Gordon sparked a national debate by suggesting that the only solution to the threat posed by the Abu Sayyaf, who released Italian Red Cross aid worker Eugenio Vagni from nearly six months of captivity on Sunday, was to grant them amnesty.
Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) Maj. Gen. Ben Dolorfino, a Muslim convert who is set to take command of government forces in the southwest, said the problem called for "a paradigm shift in the way that we are conducting our internal security operations."
Combat operations should be just 20% while the rest would be "civil-military operations" that would see military units getting more involved in efforts by local governments to improve the lives of the large Muslim minority, he added.
Following Vagni's release, Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro ordered the military to step up the campaign against the Abu Sayyaf group, which on paper numbers just a few hundred.
Navy spokesman Lt. Col. Edgard Arevalo, the military spokesman for the Red Cross hostage crisis, said a "military solution alone may not bring about a lasting solution to the menace that (the) bandit Abu Sayyaf group brings."
He said government agencies would have to work as a team to bring to the Abu Sayyaf and "those who may yet be convinced into joining them" some form of "hope that there is a future from modest but respectable means of livelihood."
Better roads, health services and tap water supplies were needed along with a "paradigm shift that would give a premium on education that shall re-orient values and the education of the young Muslims," he added.
On the southern island of Basilan, security forces on Thursday rescued two kidnapped fishermen following a raid on the hideout of gunmen who had boarded the victims' trawler and killed three of their colleagues in March, officials said.
No casualties were reported and the identities of the kidnappers were unclear.
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