Word: mindanao
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...been too soft on the 18-year-old Communist insurgency, which has intensified since the collapse of a cease-fire agreement last February. The day after the election, ten policemen were killed in an ambush by the Communist New People's Army in Surigao del Sur province on Mindanao. At week's end 38 people were killed in scattered guerrilla attacks around the country, bringing the number of insurgency-related deaths this year to more than 1,000. Said a top-ranking general: "The soldiers are not free to move or do what they think ought to be done...
...defense bands that have proved so strong a bulwark against subversion by the insurgent New People's Army that they have gained immense popular support. They present a unique and prickly political problem for the government of President Corazon Aquino. Now firmly established on the large southern island of Mindanao, they are beginning to spread to other parts of the country. Though separate from the renegade warlords and private armies that still plague areas of the Philippines, the vigilantes are part of a tradition that Aquino's government would like to stamp out. The new constitution calls for disbandment...
...vigilantes have proved an effective tool for counterinsurgency alongside the still ill-equipped and poorly paid Philippine armed forces. Nowhere is that clearer than in Davao City, the sprawling city-state in southeastern Mindanao. A year ago Davao City and its 1.4 million people were so firmly in the control of the insurgents that Manila officials called the city a Communist "urban laboratory." But in the past eight months the N.P.A. has fled into the hills, and the city has been transformed into a government stronghold. The main agent of change: the vigilante group Alsa Masa, or Uprising...
...parade snaked through the streets of Davao City last week, but the occasion was hardly festive. As thousands of residents on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao watched, the marchers carried 105 white wooden coffins containing the remains of civilians said to have been murdered by the Communist-led New People's Army. Headed by Army Lieut. Colonel Franco Calida, the procession included 3,000 members of the Alsa Masa, one of more than a score of private paramilitary groups that are waging war against the N.P.A. Every so often, pallbearers opened a coffin and showed the remains to onlookers...
...truce broke down last month amid bitter charges and countercharges. The Ministry of Defense estimates that at least 350 people have died since the fighting resumed. The violence often plays out in a lethal tit for tat. Last week, after government troops killed 13 guerrillas on the island of Mindanao, the rebels ambushed and killed 37 soldiers in two separate attacks. Meanwhile, a bomb ripped through the grandstand at the Philippine Military Academy in the resort town of Baguio. Since President Aquino was scheduled to attend a graduation ceremony there several days later, speculation abounded that she was the target...