Crossfire

Laying his nets under the night sky, Brando Cervantes often gazed across the waters at the golden lights of the exclusive Dos Palmas resort. What would it be like to spend time there, a fisherman among the rich and the foreign, playing tennis, taking a jacuzzi, sipping cocktails? At 4 a.m. on May 27, Cervantes was checking his nets with helper Alvics Cabilo, 21, when over the horizon came the throbbing of huge horsepower, more powerful than anything normally found in the waters off the Philippines’ rugged western Palawan province. The speedboat had no lights; only when it pulled alongside, its rolling wake slapping his wooden outrigger, did Cervantes see the 50-mm cannon rigged on the bows, the 24 men in jungle fatigues and balaclavas, the M-16s pointed at his chest. “Take us to Dos Palmas,” demanded a voice with a southern Mindanao accent. Cervantes was to get his visit after all.

The 23-year-old led the armed men, members of the feared Abu Sayyaf guerrilla group, to the resort, where they rounded up 20 hostages17 Filipinos and 3 Americansand transported them to their lair on Basilan Island in the far south of the archipelago. Upon arriving they seized 10 more hostages, mostly fishermen. Then the bloodbath began. At week’s end, the group had been attacked by the Philippine military and lost up to 14 fighters, including supreme Abu Sayyaf leader Khadaffy Janjalani. They raised the stakes by storming a church and a hospital and taking 200 more captives reports were sketchy, but the toll after 36 hours of fighting was up to 29 dead, including 13 soldiers and 5 civilians, and an unknown number wounded. Some of the original hostages have escaped.

For the Philippines, and anyone who has visited its idyllic resorts, the episode was shockingly familiar. A little more than a year ago, the same group of Muslim rebels kidnapped 21 people, including 9 Malaysians, 8 Europeans, 2 South Africans and 2 Filipinos, from the eastern Malaysian diving resort of Sipadan. Over the following four months, they auctioned them off for a whispered total of up to $25 million in ransom money. Bad enough that it happened again: even more frightening, it was clear from day one of the most recent crisis that the resolution would be swifter and a lot more brutal. Over the past year, the rebels spent their ill-gotten riches on firepower: M-16s, Uzis, mortars, cannons, jeeps and the 50-seat speedboat which, with three monstrous 750- horsepower outboards, could outrun anything in the Philippine navy. The faction of Abu Sayyaf (literally “Bearer of the Sword”) responsible for the raid has an unparalleled reputation for ruthlessness: when Philippine troops attacked last year, the group beheaded two hostages, including a Catholic priest, after first gouging out their eyes.

Added to that are political concerns. The Philippines has a new President, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, and she announced from the start that she had no intention of suffering the humiliation dealt predecessor Joseph Estrada last year. Estrada succumbed to Malaysian and European pleas to hold the troops back and allowed Libya to broker a ransom deal. As a result, the ragtag band of one year ago has grown into a kidnapping army that can only get more audacious with every success. With Washington’s backing, Arroyo refused all negotiation and ordered 5,000 troops into the scattered Sulu archipelago to, in the words of operational commander Brigadier General Romeo Dominguez, “rescue and destroy.” Unlike last year, the Abu Sayyaf has made no attempt to pretend the kidnappings are for any higher ideal than money. Group spokesman Abu Sabaya has talked before of the value of U.S. captives. “One American is worth 10 Europeans,” he declared last year. But the only bounty being talked about is the $2 million Arroyo has put on the Abu Sayyaf leaders’ heads.

Despite the fearsome reputation of the Abu Sayyaf, cemented in 1995 when the group massacred 53 civilians in a two-hour rampage in the southern town of Ipil, it is far from being a disciplined precision force. Cervantes, the fisherman, says the guerrillas were way off course when they spotted his lights. “They kept asking where Dos Palmas was,” he says. The sky was getting light when they finally arrived at 5 a.m. on tiny Arreceffi island. Disarming the security guards, the gunmen went straight for the cabanas on stilts over the water, which go for $720 per couple for two nights. They kicked down the doors and marched 20 guests out at gunpoint, including an eight-year-old Filipino boy and an American missionary couple who were celebrating their 18th wedding anniversary. Then the thugs started on the mini-bars and closets, grabbing sodas, nuts and chocolate, T shirts, lingerie and sunglasses. “Clothes were strewn around the rooms,” says police Inspector Rodolfo Amurao. The raiders were heading for the resort kitchen when they were called back by their leader. “Enough, enough, we have to go,” he shouted, according to Cervantes, who watched them leave. Things only got worse on the return. The rebels discovered they didn’t have enough fuel and had to beach their precious speedboat on the island of Cagayan and commandeer a sluggish fishing boat for the remaining 300 km.

Five days after the tourists were taken, Philippine soldiers in Basilan stumbled across the kidnappers as the hostages were taking a morning wash in a jungle river. It was the start of a small war. After the first firefight, 2 soldiers were killed and 14 wounded, while up to 12 guerrillas were left dead or injured. According to a source inside the group, the Abu Sayyaf held a meeting in mid- battle to decide whether they should start killing their captives. “Maybe we will stage an execution,” Abu Sabaya told a local radio station via cell phone, adding: “Welcome to the party.” As the skirmishes continued overnight with helicopter gunships backing the government troops, the guerrillas picked up reinforcements from among their 1,100 fighters in the Sulu archipelago. As the body count mountedby Saturday evening, scores of soldiers, civilians and rebels, including commander Yusup Nadjal, were lying dead on the roads and in the jungle, or expiring in a local hospitalthe Abu Sayyaf stormed St. Peter’s Catholic church and the hospital, placed snipers in the church belfry and on the hospital roof and announced they had taken 200 more hostages. “We are part of an Abu Sayyaf suicide squad,” fighter Abu Sulaiman told local radio. “If you do not stop the military action, we will execute the hostages.” A group of six Dominican nuns found themselves among the new captives.

As troops surrounded the two buildings, four Filipinos from the original hostage group escaped, including wounded Dos Palmas security guard Eldrin Morales and R.J. Recio, 8, who left his father Luis behind. The gunships and troop carriers then moved in, picking off the snipers and pounding the two buildings. The surviving rebels appeared to relish the prospect of death. Remarking that the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday was two weeks off, an Abu Sayyaf leader told TIME: “It’s jihad time. And what better time? It will be a rare privilege to die on his birthday. Thanks to the Abu Sayyaf!”

Faced with a group of career bandits, Arroyo had little choice but to come down with her promised “hail of bullets.” She is desperate to prove to the financial markets that her government suffers from none of the impotence of the Estrada administration, which proved so damaging to foreign capital and share prices during the final year of his curtailed presidency. “We must address this decisively to show the world that we can protect our citizens, our visitors and our investors,” she said. Hailing the importance of the $2.5 billion tourism industry, she reassured the business community this was just a “blip.” (She also dispatched thousands of troops to protect beach resorts in such areas as Cebu and Boracay Island.)

Tourism is not Arroyo’s sole concern. The off-and-on Muslim rebellion in the southern Philippines, which dates back to the 1970s, is threatening to graduate from domestic inconvenience to international threat. Many Philippine Muslim leaders, like Abu Sabaya, were schooled and trained in Islamist strongholds such as Libya and maintain links with insurgents across the Middle East and South Asia. Asiri Abubakar of the University of the Philippines’ Asian studies department says the south could become the “regional base of operations” for Asian Muslim terror groups. “If the Philippines does not watch out,” he warns, “the southern Philippines will become not just the world capital of kidnapping but that of Islamic extremism as well. If this band cannot be crushed, then we’re in big trouble.”

All of which can only lessen the remaining hostages’ hopes of getting out unscathed. Zulkurnain Hashim, a 30-year-old wildlife ranger kidnapped last year from Sipadan Island, comments: “If there is a military attack, the Abu Sayyaf will not think twice to kill them.” South African Monique Strydom wrote in her diary (recently published in Shooting the Moon) on June 19, 2000, day 58 of her abduction: “I hate them. I hate them a thousand times. I hate them for what they are doing to us … to our families … our parents … for everything they have taken away from us. I hate them because time is so precious. I hate them for the flies that swarm all over us. I hate them because they have taken our freedom. I hate them because they are doing all this in the name of God. I pray that God will forgive them because I cannot.”

Arroyo is in no forgiving mood either. “I will finish what you started,” she declared on national TV. “Force against force, arms against arms. That is what you asked for when you challenged me. I will give it to you.” Replied spokesman Abu Sabaya, who himself was wounded in Saturday’s fighting: “The Philippine government does not seem to care about the hostages … Why should we?” In the battle for the southern Philippines, the crossfire is getting thicker.