The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (39 page)

On July 26, 2006, I
hovered two thousand feet above the crystalline water in a U.S. helicopter, with Colonel James Linder, commander of the U.S. forces in the Philippines, as he explained what had gone awry with the Burnhams’ rescue. When the U.S. Special Forces arrived in the Philippines after September 11 to free the Burnhams, many came from the jungles of Central America, where they were well trained in rescuing kidnap
victims. Global jihad, however, was totally foreign to them.

“What began as a rescue attempt quickly became a classic counterinsurgency,” Linder shouted into his headset microphone over the
thwup thwup
of the helicopter’s blades. Over the past twenty years, Linder, a forty-five-year-old South Carolina native with remnants of a southern drawl, had led operations in the Middle East, Central and
South America, and East Africa, and now he was fighting the “gee-watt”—the GWOT, the Global War on Terror. By 2006, the United States was trying something new in Southeast Asia: proportional response. If a large military footprint created a large-scale insurgency, as it had in Iraq, then the United States was gambling that a softened approach in the Philippines would result in a less explosive reaction.
Linder, for instance, was wearing a green felt beret, not a combat helmet. His elite soldiers spoke the language and learned the culture, and many saw their mission more as an armed Peace
Corps than a counterterrorism force. The less visible the U.S. military, the less militant the Moros would become, the argument went, and in 2006 it seemed to be working.

Through the helicopter’s open door,
Linder pointed proudly as we passed a brand-new Jollibee fast-food franchise on a neighboring island. The accessibility of fast food, he seemed to think, meant that America had scored a point in the culture war. Maybe he was right; people here welcomed any hint of development, which Jollibee certainly provided.

In 2006 (and still through the end of 2009), if there were a thumbtack stuck in the
geographic center of militant hideouts in Southeast Asia, it would have been pushed into the tiny island of Jolo (HO-lo.) As a reporter working for an American magazine, I had asked Linder to take me there so that I could observe the softened U.S. military approach firsthand. Below us, limestone reefs surrounded its 345 square miles. Slightly larger than New York City, this volcanic burp in the
middle of the Sulu Archipelago jutted out of a North Pacific basin more than 18,000 feet deep, and rose to a series of steep, bottle green ridges. Among them, some of the world’s most wanted terrorists were hiding. Almost every large-scale terrorist attack has been planned in Southeast Asia, including 9/11, which was born out of Operation Bojinka—“explosion” in Serbo-Croat—named by Al Qaeda fighters
on Balkan battlefields. It was in the Philippines during the nineties that Al Qaeda’s Khalid Sheikh Mohammed dreamed up the scheme to hijack twelve airplanes and fly them into CIA headquarters. Until it proved easier to hijack them in Boston and Newark, the planes were supposed to come from the Philippines, among other Southeast Asian nations.

Linder’s helicopter buzzed above a tiny U.S. base
in a clearing, and the rotor wash sent three American soldiers scrambling and grabbing at their floppy green hats. The mechanized wind flipped the palm fronds and flattened the blades of sword grass. Nearby, solders were lifting solar panels, which glinted like chewing gum wrappers, onto the roof of a new school, where they would power the school’s modem—the island’s first Internet connection. Since
World War II, largely because of corrupt officials, most notably President Ferdinand Marcos, the Philippines has gone from being one of the richest countries in Asia to one of the poorest, and its population is among the fastest growing on the continent. Before the Americans
arrived on Jolo, its people had no electricity, little fresh water, and no roads. Since the Moros had no relationship to
the Filipino Christian–led government, being a Filipino meant very little, if anything at all. It was Islam that held Moro society together.

The soldiers had clear-cut ribbons of red earth into the jungle. Along these rude roads, the ethnic Tausug people—a Moro subgroup of nearly a million—could carry their cows and papayas from their farms to a brand-new market courtesy of U.S. largesse. Roads
and roads and roads—in Sudan, it was oil companies; in Malaysia, logging companies; and in the Philippines, it was the American military. The contours of each road signified its use: logging and market roads meandered around rivers and rocky outcroppings; the oil roads were thousand-mile grids blasted straight through whatever stood in their way.

Watching in real time, we spluttered above as
the last vestiges of Jolo’s rain forest wilderness were connected to the outside world for the first time in history. Some of these incursions extended far beyond Jolo, thanks to the solar-powered Internet. If globalization had introduced the Philippines to the radical theology of Afghanistan’s jihad, then the Americans could use a competing version to their advantage. Globalization was part of the
American strategy: give these isolated children a look at the wider world, and extremism would seem a less attractive career path. In a counter-version of
JihadMagz
, the Americans were about to distribute a comic book—the story of a Tausug man who leaves home for the Merchant Marine. (The Tausugs are sailors, their name roughly translating to “men of the current.”) Returning to find that pimply
faced thugs have taken over his island, the hero battles the “backward” gang and defeats them, restoring the island’s honor. Comic books, solar panels, computers, schools, and farm-to-market roads: all were part of America’s counterterrorism effort in the Philippines. Colonel Linder did not believe that religion had anything to do with the conflict playing out beneath us, and he hated the expression
“hearts and minds.” “We’re not trying to change anyone’s culture, or religion, or mind,” he said.

The colonel was right, to a point. These problems were rooted in poverty, not extremism—one reason the United States was succeeding in the jungles below us. This was a campaign of hearts and stomachs, and for the moment, on Jolo, it was going well. “The enemy is an idea of intolerance and subjugation,”
he went on. “We are freedom-loving people looking for the opposite.” Yet his freedom agenda, like Christianity, was also an ideology,
and although the Tausug people cheered when they accepted their new tractors, talk about freedom was not relevant.

“It’s not about how many people we shoot in the face,” Linder added. “It’s about how many we get off the battlefield.” This involved building an economy
that could create jobs other than kidnapping. The question was whether that economy was sustainable in the long term without a U.S. presence. As long as America was willing to pay for vaccinations and tractors that made farming profitable, great. But what about when the few smiling soldiers went home, the tractors rusted out, and the cows grew too sick to give milk? What ideology would dissatisfaction
and disappointment breed then?

We landed to visit one of the new American solar-powered schools, where Butch Izquierdo, the local mayor, was waiting to meet us. He shook my hand vigorously. All Americans were welcome here, he told us. “We thought at first the Americans wanted to build a base, or dig up Yamashita’s gold,” he said, referring to the legendary Japanese treasure from World War II.
But America had proven it wasn’t out to take anything from Jolo; to the contrary, both the military and USAID, which provided $29.7 million
¹
and $69.9 million,
²
respectively, in 2006, had been very generous. Gifts guaranteed no commitment, he hastened to add: “This island is like a beautiful woman. You can love her, but you cannot marry her.” We continued on to the U-shaped elementary school—its
new tin roof was the first the school had had. At recess, children ran through the courtyard, still piled with dirt from construction. Teachers ventured out, too, where a pleased Linder shook hand after hand.

After a few more meetings with local farmers, and other photo opportunities, it was time to go. We took off from outlying Jolo to fly one hundred miles back to Mindanao, the main island
of the Muslim south. On our way, the helicopter headed for one of Jolo’s defunct volcanoes. The blown-off top had left a crater so deep that what looked like a jeweled pool of water in its center was actually a pocket of trees. On the slope of this volcano one hundred years ago, American forces confronted Islamic fighters for the first time in history. The United States saw the Moros as the Native
Americans of the Philippines: uncivilized, brazen, and in need of taming. On March 7, 1906, fearing that American schools would make their children into Christians, two kinds of Islamic fighter revolted against the forces of Captain John “Black Jack” Pershing, a veteran of America’s campaigns against its own natives, the Indian wars. Juramentados, suicidal
fighters, launched attacks against the
U.S. soldiers. Amoks went homicidally berserk on the battlefield. (Our word
amok
memorializes them.)
³

“Captain Pershing chased a bunch of Moros up that old volcano and killed them,” Linder said, pointing down at the tree-lined crater where more than a thousand men, women, and children fought and died. “It was commonly referred to as a massacre,” he said. Then, as the island shrank behind us,
he repeated something I’d heard him say several times, like a mantra: “We’ll spill American blood on Jolo.” I took this as the kind of hard-talking overstatement designed to impress a listener with his men’s courage, which turned out to be wrong. On September 29, 2009, two U.S. soldiers, Christopher D. Shaw, thirty-seven, and Jack M. Martin III, twenty-six, were killed, along with a Filipino marine,
Private First Class Estrada. They died in a coconut grove when their Humvee hit a landmine Abu Sayyaf had planted on the road leading to a solar-powered school.

The current conflict in the Philippines is less a product of terrorism, or any ideological clash between Catholics and Muslims, than the result of American involvement during the early twentieth century. The United States employed a policy
of shipping Filipino Christians from the Catholic north to the Muslim south. The United States believed that Christian farmers—rather than Muslims—would better safeguard American rubber, banana, and pineapple plantations and secure foreign business interests. To further break the Moro ancestral land rights, the United States pushed forward laws stipulating that only individuals and corporations—such
as Dole, B. F. Goodrich, Del Monte, Weyerhaeuser, and Goodyear—could own land, not Moro tribes or clans.
⁴
A few years before independence on July 4, 1946, more than one hundred Moro leaders wrote President Franklin Roosevelt to ask for their right to form a government. “Our religion should not be curtailed in any way,” they wrote the American president. “Once our religion is no more our lives
are no more.”
⁵

Nevertheless, Washington ceded the south to the Catholic north, and the newly independent Christian-led government stepped up its policy of relocating Christians to what had been traditionally Muslim land. The Moros began to form armies to fight for their land: first, in the early seventies, the Moro National Liberation Front, then, in 1977, the more conservative splinter group,
the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which is still at
war with the Filipino government today, in a conflict that has claimed up to two hundred thousand lives. On the other side, the Christians settlers became foot soldiers for the new state. Given weapons bought through the military and financial support of the government from the 1970s onward, the Christians protected their new farms from the
Muslims fighting to reclaim them. Some formed Catholic gangs called Ilaga, which means “rat.” These militias were paramilitaries doing the government’s dirty work while perpetrating horrific violence in the name of Christianity. This is the legacy of the conquistadores in a former Spanish colony: a dark skein of Christianity bound up with violence and oppression. The southern Philippines now seethes
as a gangland rain forest, where religion legitimizes a conflict over resources and political hegemony.

In 2006, as the peace deal between the Muslim south and Catholic north looked likely to fail once again, a new Ilaga was forming on the southern island of Mindanao. Domos, a farming village not far from the northern town of Marawi (also known as “the Islamic City of Marawi”), is located within
the 1,085 square miles the Moros claim as their authentic homeland, the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. One July morning, I paid a visit to a family of Catholic farmers who belonged to a Christian militia. To defend their land against the Muslims, the police, fellow Catholics, had provided about a week’s training to militia members, they told me. Their son, Bernard Joval, twenty-five, had
died weeks earlier, shot to death on the night of June 30 while guarding his farmland against a Muslim splinter group called the Pentagon Gang (the name a typical twist of Filipino black humor). Next to a hammock in the living room, the family had erected a shrine to Joval, whom they called “little Jesus.”

On an altar next to photos of Joval stood an icon of Jesus with His heart aflame; another
of the Virgin Mary marbled with votive candle wax; and a line of pinkie-size paper scrolls. After the family granted permission, I unrolled one talisman and read its nonsense verse:
HINIT PINIT PICA HINT AGRAMEUM EGU SOME PER DEUM MATAR
. As much as I could puzzle out this higgledy-piggledy Latin, it said something about a farm, I am for God, and kill.

The scroll said more than the family could.
Joval’s brothers, fellow members of this resurgent Ilaga, had little to add, beyond that their religion allowed them the right to shed blood. They were more eager to pose
for snapshots in front of their shrines with their homemade shotguns—as if they possessed a divine kind of muscle.

The leading authority on the Ilaga death squads was a Catholic priest named Peter Geremia, a seventy-one-year-old
motorcycle-riding, bandana-wearing member of the Pontifical Institute of Foreign Missions, which has sent missionaries into non-Christian lands for more than a century. A few days after meeting the Christian farmers, I went to visit him at the Lady of Guadalupe House, a Catholic refuge in the Diocese of Kidapawan, located in the district of Cotabato, about seventy-five miles to the south of Marawi
and outside the designated Moro ancestral land. In the classroom where we met, the blackboard was chalked with arrows and tiny cars: the priests, who have been outspoken critics of the government since the days of Ferdinand Marcos, were learning how to escape assassins. A month earlier—on June 19, 2006—George and Maricel Vigo, two married journalists and parents to five children, had been gunned
down while leaving the sanctuary after meeting with Geremia. I came to meet Geremia to learn about the Ilaga, but also because George Vigo was supposed to have been my interpreter on Mindanao.
Interpreter
doesn’t quite cover it; he was to be my fixer, a term reporters use for the local person who knows everything, sets up meetings, guarantees safety—does everything but report the story, and sometimes
even that. I’d corresponded with Vigo, known among friends and reporters as intelligent and kind, but never met him, and I found out that he and his wife had been killed just before I left New York for the Philippines. The Vigos were casualties of another war: between Communist rebels called the New People’s Army and the northern government. From what I’d heard from the Moro Islamic Liberation
Front, on occasion they shared training camps with the Communists, but not usually. The United States had designated the Communists as “terrorists,” which made it possible for the Philippine government to use American funds to fight against them. The Vigos had been reporting on this conflict when they were gunned down by right-wing paramilitaries. Geremia’s life was currently under threat, too,
but he was used to it. In some ways, he was an anti–Colonel Linder: a lefty, organic rice farmer who could not be less interested in establishing American-style order. He was eager to expose injustice and corruption in the name of the people—and God—whenever the need arose. When Geremia first spoke
against the Ilaga, almost thirty years earlier, the Christian gang sent an assassin—a man named
Manero—to kill him. (Manero, however, murdered the wrong priest on a motorcycle, a young Italian colleague of Geremia’s, Father Tullio Favali.) Afterward, Geremia learned all he could about Manero, who had reportedly once cooked and eaten an Islamic teacher. “If you take the name of God to kill, you become fear,” Geremia said. “The more atrocities you commit, the more power you have.” He led me outside
to Father Favali’s grave. Behind the wooden cross was the old, rusted red motorcycle overgrown with vines. It looked like a bush of abandoned tomatoes. The old priest knelt in the dirt and prayed.