WASHINGTON, May 3 -- The deaths of four Christian hostages Wednesday in a shoot out on the island of Basilan catapulted a previously obscure dispute to the world headlines.
The Abu Sayyaf, or Bearer of the Sword movement, is a tiny, radical Islamic movement that erupted into violence in 1992 trying to impose an extreme, puritan version of the faith within the majority Christian and traditionally tolerant Philippines.
Like many other radical cults before it, it has become more violent and extreme as time passed, culminating in the March 20 kidnapping of 58 hostages from the Claret and Tumahubong Roman Catholic run schools in the town of Tumahubong on the island of Basilan.
Some of the captives had been released in exchange for food by the terrorists but a Roman Catholic priest and 22 children were still being held Wednesday morning when Philippine troops stormed the kidnappers. The priest and three others were killed in the shoot out.
Abu Sayyaf made its violent debut on the Philippine scene in 1992 in bomb attacks on Catholic churches in the southern Philippine island of Zaboanga.
So radical was the group that it never won much support. Philippine security authorities believe it peaked at 600 activists and today only has around 200 active members. But like other violent fringe groups before it, it soon tried to compensate for its lack of popular support by waging ever more extreme and merciless terror attacks.
In 1995, in an atrocity more reminiscent of the Serb ethnic cleansing terrorism in Bosnia than of the Philippines, Abu Sayyaf forces killed 54 people in the town of Ipil and burned the entire town to the ground.
Janjalani himself, a noted Islamic scholar, appears to have tried to restrain the forces he had unleashed. But he died in a gun battle with Philippine police in 1998. His younger brother Khaddafi succeeded him as the group's leader and the upcoming May 5 analysis in Asiaweek dryly notes, "Khaddafi is an expert not in Islamic jurisprudence but in explosives."
The descent into horror has been continual since then. After the children were kidnapped on March 20, the group threatened to behead some of them.
Although the current crisis is over -- at a tragic human cost -- the conflict that generated it looks likely to continue.
Abu Sayyaf by itself is extremely small. But its militancy has fed on a growing sense of frustration among Muslim activists in the southern Philippines who have made no progress in their efforts to win recognition for an independent Muslim state on the island of Mindanao.
The Islamic activists continue to maintain that they will settle for nothing less than full independence on Mindanao and the Manila government has vowed to crush them. In this atmosphere of stalemate, extreme terror groups like Abu Sayyaf see their opportunity to polarize opinion.
As a result, Manila Times commentator Adrian Cristobal concluded in a column April 18, while the hostage standoff was continuing, "Clearly, the only peace that can be won in Mindanao is a peace in which both sides give up what they consider to be 'beyond negotiations'."
Like so many tiny extremist groups before them, the activists of Abu Sayyaf appear to believe that by carrying out monstrous crimes against Catholic civilians - in this case children - they can provoke the Manila government and the majority Catholic population into taking cruel, sweeping retaliatory measures which will radicalize the mainstream Muslim population.
But initial signs are that their cruelty backfired and only isolated them further.
Asiaweek's upcoming May 5 issue says that Basilan's Muslim governor Wahab Akbar, who has admitted to once sympathizing with the group, now has vowed to crush them and has issued a "shoot to kill" policy.
His outspoken reaction indicated that the human "sea" in which the tiny terrorist "fish" of the Abu Sayyaf movement wanted to swim has just turned toxic for them.NEWLN:
