Farmer Lot Pangaoilan gazes toward a vast cornfield in the Philippines’ rebel-infested south, hoping that one day he will be able to farm his land without fear of being killed.
For two decades, he has been plowing his 3 hectare plot by hand and with the help of a water buffalo, worried that if he uses a heavy tractor he might detonate an explosive.
“If I am not careful, I might hit a bomb... It could explode and I might die,” Pangaoilan, whose leathery skin, cloudy eyes and thin frame make him look much older than his 50 years, told reporters.
Photo: AFP
Two months ago, the farmer’s marshland village of Tukanalipao was the site of a day-long battle between Muslim militants and police officers that left more than 60 people dead as security forces hunted down alleged top terrorists.
The latest carnage has seriously jeopardized efforts to end a four-decade Muslim separatist rebellion which has claimed an estimated 120,000 lives, dimming hopes again that people such as Pangaoilan will be able to prosper in peace.
The nation’s biggest rebel group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), signed a pact last year agreeing to give up its struggle in return for an autonomous homeland in the impoverished southern region of Mindanao.
Photo: AFP
However, the Jan. 25 battle in Pangaoilan’s village — in which 44 police commandos, 17 rebels and at least three civilians died — triggered a huge political backlash that threatens the passage of a proposed national law endorsing the autonomous region.
The new region would take in large parts of Mindanao, which the nation’s Muslim minority of about 5 million people regard as their ancestral homeland, including Pangaoilan’s village.
Despite fertile farming lands, vast mineral resources and idyllic beaches ripe for tourism, the region is the poorest in the nation, with nearly half of the population living in poverty, according to government data.
Tukanalipao, with no electricity or running water, is a typically impoverished Muslim community in Mindanao.
Its 1,600 residents live in palm thatch houses on wooden stilts, with corn and rice farming their only source of regular income.
Pangaoilan has six children, but he was not able to afford to send them to school. Military leaders say that villages like his make good recruiting grounds for the MILF, which has about 10,000 fighters, and other rebel groups.
In a typical cycle of violence and poverty that builds resentment, a military offensive launched after the January battle against a small breakaway rebel group opposed to the peace process displaced 120,000 people.
Two displacement camps with tarpaulin tents lie on a road close to Tukanalipao, although the military last week declared the offensive over and hopes the displaced people will soon return home.
Corn farmer Haji Maul said he had been in and out of evacuation shelters three times during the offensive to escape bursts of fighting near Tukanalipao, but this was not unusual.
“It has been a very difficult life for me and my family,” Maul, 60, told reporters, as troops wearing helmets and with their rifles pointed to the ground patrolled the parched earth, alongside water buffaloes, chickens and dogs.
As part of its efforts to promote the peace process, Philippine President Benigno Aquino III’s administration has increased annual infrastructure spending on the region from 8 billion Philippine pesos (US$179 million) in 2010 to 24 billion pesos this year.
In Tukanalipao, a sore lack of infrastructure is symbolized by a rickety patchwork of logs that its residents use to cross a stream and get to their farmlands.
When the stream overflows during the rainy season, work stops as farmers can not get their animals across because the improvised bridge might fall apart, Pangaoilan said.
Last week, the government broke ground on a concrete and steel bridge to replace the wooden structure.
Tukanalipao and the surrounding township of Mamasapano has become a “representation” of the Muslim region, Philippine Department of Budget and Management Secretary Florencio Abad told reporters as he guided journalists through the area to witness the ceremony.
“Our presence here today and these symbolic projects are meant to deliver a message that poverty is the root cause of conflict and that we are sincere in pursuing peace,” Abad said as he stood alongside supportive rebel leaders.
The symbolic impact was deepened by building the new bridge in the same area as the deadly battle two months ago, showing that the government and rebels remained partners in peace even in the most volatile of areas, officials said.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the