Abu Sayyaf’s reminders

Last Wednesday, the Abu Sayyaf struck again. The bandit group, or one of the many gangs that occasionally or opportunistically form part of the kidnap-for-ransom enterprise, raided a diving resort in Semporna, Sabah. The group, apparently led by Murphy Ambang Ladjia, also known as Haji Gulam, abducted a Chinese tourist from Shanghai and a Filipino woman, who is a member of the resort staff. According to both Philippine and Malaysian intelligence sources, the bandits and the abductees moved to Simunul, a small

municipality in Tawi-Tawi some 145 kilometers from Semporna, and then to Jolo.

The raid and subsequent kidnapping bring back unwelcome memories of the Sipadan incident of 2000, when a group of Abu Sayyaf bandits led by the infamous

Commander Robot raided another Malaysian resort; abducted 21 victims, mostly foreign tourists; and held them in Abu Sayyaf strongholds in the Philippines. The crisis took months to resolve, and gave the Abu Sayyaf the international notoriety it craved.

In the decade and a half since, the Abu Sayyaf has been the target of intense military operations, with considerable overt and covert support from US troops in the country, fighting what the American government believes is another front in the so-called war on terror. Its most senior or prominent leaders have either been killed, jailed or gone missing. And yet the bandit group remains a threat—in part because of the forbidding terrain in those parts of Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi where the Abu Sayyaf draws its support; in part because crime draws more support than religion or ideology.

When the Abu Sayyaf began, it purported to follow a political vision based on Islamic principles; all that has been forgotten, even by Abu Sayyaf members or recruits themselves, primarily because of the “success” of the Sipadan and then the Dos Palmas abductions. The ransom generated by these brazen raids ran into the millions of dollars, and some part of that money trickled down to the Abu Sayyaf’s supporters.

Business, in other words, is the simple reason why, from time to time, the Abu Sayyaf  or some group using its name continues to emerge out of the shadows. And Sipadan is the business model.

It is for this reason that the raid on the Singamata Reef Resort in Semporna must be given the government’s highest priority. The last thing we need is another dramatic Sipadan-like incident which will validate the Abu Sayyaf business model with millions of dollars in

additional revenue.

(To be sure, Malaysia has a decisive role to play too—something it has already acknowledged. Resort owners have been asked to improve their security measures, and the Eastern Sabah Security Command, a new structure set up in the wake of the incursion by Nur Misuari’s Moro National Liberation Front renegades into Lahad Datu, is facing a serious review.)

But the Semporna incident also reminds us of a much older era, before national boundaries were defined. Most Filipinos, even the millions who live in Mindanao, are

accustomed to think of the great island of Mindanao and the archipelagos it hosts as the Philippine south—that is, as “below,” with Manila and dominant Luzon as “above.” And yet hundreds of years ago, Mindanao was understood as located in the northern reaches of a differently conceived territory.

As the Mindanao scholar Patricio Abinales wrote: “The essential error here is in accepting the Philippine frame as a ‘given’ …. Yet, if one stands on a hill in Cotabato and turns one’s back on Manila, one is drawn into an expanse in which the colonial Philippines was but a minor cog—the Southeast Asian trading zone Anthony Reid calls ‘The Lands below the Winds.’”

The Abu Sayyaf raid forces us to confront this forgotten truth. We should seek to remember, not in an attempt to revise Philippine history, but rather as part of a continuing effort to understand Philippine geography. The reason Abu Sayyaf bandits can sail into Sabah and then retreat to Sulu is, geography allows it; those of us accustomed to thinking of, say, Jolo as a thousand miles away from Aparri will receive and respond to the news of the latest hostage-taking as something happening in a remote place. Those who realize they still live in the Lands below the Winds know they are in the thick of it.