Estrada hopes to repair the damage this week in his first face-to-face meetings with the reclusive MILF leader, Salamat Hashim. First he’ll have to win some respect. Only seven months into his six-year term, Estrada’s Mindanao policy has been to make each blooper bigger than the last. He has called off peace talks one day only to reverse himself the next, boasted at one point that the 22-year-old rebellion would end “within a week” and vowed that the rebels would achieve their goal of an independent Mindanao “over my dead body.” Just last week Estrada suggested, incorrectly, that Hashim was leader not only of the rebels but also of the terrorist group Abu Sayyaf. “They are all his men, anyway,” said Estrada on his radio program. “They are all Muslims, anyway.”
It will fall to Hashim, an Islamic scholar and graduate of Cairo’s Al Azhar University, to explain the harsh realities of his movement. The MILF rebels are by far the largest secessionist movement in the Philippines, and they receive financial support from overseas Islamic sources, including Osama bin Laden. Their ranks include veterans of the Afghan war, and they control two self-contained communities on Mindanao where Islamic law prevails. The MILF runs mosques, courts, prisons, a military academy, farms, eateries–even a factory making rocket-propelled grenades. In short, it is deeply entrenched on the nation’s second largest island, which is why the last president, Gen. Fidel Ramos, opened talks with the group in 1997 and signed a ceasefire.
A year later Estrada’s campaign platform on Mindanao did not even mention the rebels, which many Filipinos took as a sign that he did not take them seriously. Manila Times columnist Melinda Quintos de Jesus wrote last week that Estrada still seems to think that “Mindanao is a movie in the making.” In his own defense, Estrada argues that his plans to extend a massive anti-poverty project to Mindanao will help persuade Hashim to accept autonomy. And he is still as confident as ever that “actors make the best managers,” as he once put it to an audience of corporate executives. Indeed, Estrada predicts he will be remembered as the Philippines’ best president ever, and as an “actor who makes things happen.” So far, though, he has only been making the war worse on Mindanao.
