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That sounds preposterous, especially after just a few days of a
single day’s fighting that left 26 soldiers dead.
Early last Thursday, armed men ambushed a
contingent of soldiers out on an administrative and logistics run.
Nine soldiers died in the fighting and another in hospital. Later in
the day, another unit from the 33rd Infantry Brigade clashed with a
band of militants. Another 15 lives were lost.
Thousands of elite Marine and Army units are
scouring the dense jungles of Sulu, often described as a no-man’s
land, in search of the Abu Sayyaf and two Indonesians blamed for the
deadly Bali bombings in 2001.
Another thousand soldiers arrived recently to
augment forces already there just as military chief Gen. Hermogenes
Esperon announced there would be no let up in offensives against the
Al Qaeda-linked outfit.
The National Disaster Coordinating Committee
estimates that nearly 1,200 families or nearly 7,500 individuals
have fled their homes in 16 villages in the towns of Parang, Indanan
and Maimbung.
And all is normal in Sulu?
A sense of normalcy is definitely what
authorities want to maintain there. They say it’s for the good of
a greater number of people to pacify worries that Sulu is burning to
the ground.
Also, NDCC head Glenn Rabonza assures that the
statistics of displaced persons in Sulu is not as alarming as
outsiders think. They went to live with relatives, away from where
the military is operating. There is no tent city in Sulu. Schools
continue to operate.
There are no reports. If there are any,
then they go by “unreported” acts of human rights violations.
Bombs do not go off as often as the birds chirped. Gunfire is not
part of the ambience all the time.
But what is normal on an island, recorded as
among the poorest in the country, with a history carved in blood?
That would be spilled blood.
Not a few officers who know or knew Sulu
intimately—meaning they’ve served, fought and have men die
there—say the intensity of fighting is not out of the ordinary.
They point out that the 26 who were killed in a single day’s
fighting is definitely a tragedy but casualties cannot be helped.
And, they note, one day cannot be used to define the rest of the
year.
Esperon, in a visit to Jolo, insists that the
military is winning this protracted war versus the Abu Sayyaf. He
explains that the only reason his boys cannot decimate the 250 or so
full-time Abu Sayyaf militants in the island is because they
haven’t the opportunity to engage them in a serious, guns blazing
type of confrontation.
He notes that the Abu Sayyaf, supposedly backed
by a breakaway group of the breakaway MNLF faction, is very mobile.
Esperon says that, so far, only the boys of the 33rd IB were
fortunate enough to have the chance to confront the radicals two
days in a row. Unfortunately, 16 soldiers—not counting the 10
killed in the ambush—were killed in those fortunate two days while
another 15 were injured.
The military’s objective in combing through
the dense jungles of Sulu is to locate and engage the Abu Sayyaf.
Sustaining such a high number of casualties is not part of the plan
but, as Esperon admits, it cannot be helped in a guerrilla war. It
is, so to speak, normal.
The civilians, especially, know that deaths come
with armed fighting. The have generations of experience. That is
why, at the first indicator of a military offensive, they pack their
belongings and rush to safer ground.
Replying to a reporter‘s question, a young
evacuee interviewed on TV said they fled their village because they
are afraid the military would come.
But that should not mean the military behaves
with impunity. At least not all the time. At the minimum, the
evacuee’s statement could be interpreted to mean that they know
military operations would be rocking their boat.
Armed groups are part of Sulu’s culture and,
over the years, military efforts to rein them in have resulted in
torrents of spilled blood—civilian, military and insurgent. The
current campaign has claimed a fair amount of blood but nothing out
of the ordinary, as an Abu Sayyaf-hardened colonel puts it.
There is intermittent fighting, deaths,
injuries, displacement in Sulu. And none of that is unusual.
Everything is normal.
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