Needing To Get Tougher on Terror

With the Philippines transfixed by the ongoing power struggles in Manila between President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and critics demanding her resignation, it’s easy to forget that the country is also ensnared in another conflictagainst insurgent communist rebels and Islamic radicals in its remote provinces. On March 27, after weeks of relative calm, an explosion ripped through a Catholic-run cooperative store on the predominantly Muslim southern island of Jolo, killing nine and wounding 20. Authorities said the bomb’s construction and its detonation via cell phone pointed to Abu Sayyaf, a roving band of al-Qaeda-linked terrorists and kidnappers operating in the restive south. Two days later a bombing by the New People’s Army, which has been fighting for over 30 years to establish a communist state, wounded eight in eastern Mindanao.

The bombings have given new urgency to the government’s drive to pass a controversial antiterrorism law. “Terror never sleeps,” Arroyo told legislators after the Jolo attack, calling for measures to “rid our country and the world of this grave threat.” The law would allow authorities to detain terror suspects for up to 18 days without charges. (Currently, police are required to release uncharged suspects within 36 hours.) Despite pressure from the U.S., the Philippines is the only Southeast Asian nation without such a law. But Arroyo’s already-besieged government may have difficulty overcoming opposition from human-rights activists, who worry the police will use the measure to curtail suspects’ civil rights. Other skeptics suggest that the government’s plan may miss the point by failing to address the origins of discontent. “As long as the Jolo natives keep on wallowing in poverty, terrorism will continue to thrive,” says Asiri Abubakar, a professor at the University of the Philippines’ Asian Center. “We may never see an end to these bombings.”