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  • RP: Terror fight also needs development

    RP: Terror fight also needs development

    By MARTIN ABBUGAO
    AFP

    SINGAPORE - Philippine success in smashing the leadership of Al Qaeda-linked militants is proof that a combination of military action and development aid is needed to defeat terrorism, the country's defense chief said Sunday.

    Development projects in parallel with military operations had improved the level of trust between the government and local communities, constricting the operations of Abu Sayyaf militants, Defense Secretary Hermogenes Ebdane said.

    Local communities provided troops with information on the whereabouts of the militants, leading to the killings and arrests of top Abu Sayyaf leaders, Ebdane told an international security conference in Singapore.

    He said the killing last year of the group's founder and leader Khadaffy Janjalani during a gun battle with troops on Jolo island in the country's south had caught the world's attention.

    Another top Abu Sayyaf leader, Abu Solaiman, was killed by government troops earlier this year.

    "What the world did not see were the operations that applied the combination of hard and soft approaches to addressing terrorism," Ebdane told the Shangri-La Dialogue of senior Asian defense and security officials.

    He was referring to infrastructure projects including roads, bridges, schools and medical facilities on the island, where poverty, decades of government neglect and lawlessness have fed the rise of the Abu Sayyaf as well as a Muslim separatist rebellion.

    "It is this combination of developmental and military tools that led to the fall of the top leaders of the Abu Sayyaf," Ebdane said.

    "Defense for development sets the framework for lasting solutions to insurgency, poverty and illiteracy," he said.

    "This same framework can provide a lasting solution to piracy, terrorism and other security threats in our waterways and our region."

    Armed forces chief Hermogenes Esperon said in a paper presented at the conference on Saturday that the latest offensive against the Abu Sayyaf had "decapitated its command and control structure."

    It also cut the militant group's membership to 400 from an estimated 1,270 in 2000, said Esperon, who added that US military assistance was also important.

    "The armed forces of the Philippines has now seized the initiative, denying the Abu Sayyaf group of sanctuary and disrupting their recruitment, training and planning efforts," he said.

    Because it has been "effectively weakened", the Abu Sayyaf was not able to launch planned attacks during the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in the Philippine city of Cebu in January, Esperon said.

    The Abu Sayyaf, which officials have linked to the Southeast Asia-based militant group Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), has been blamed for the worst attacks in the Philippines, including the bombing of a ferry off Manila Bay in 2004 which killed more than 200 people.

    Based in Mindanao, it gained global notoriety following its kidnapping of foreign tourists on a remote Malaysian resort island for ransom in 2000.

    Two of Southeast Asia's most wanted suspects, Indonesian nationals Dulmatin and Umar Patek, are believed to be in Mindanao where they are being sheltered by the Abu Sayyaf, officials have said.

    Both bomb experts, Dulmatin and Umar Patek are wanted for the nightclub bomb attacks on the Indonesian resort island of Bali in 2002 that killed more than 200 people, many of them tourists.
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  • #2
    Indeed. Development is essential.

    However, without security, development is a in a hiccup mode!


    "Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

    I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

    HAKUNA MATATA

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    • #3
      Originally posted by Ray View Post
      Indeed. Development is essential.

      However, without security, development is a in a hiccup mode!
      Yeah..especially when you have no equipment and resources..and that, modernization I think is a way to boost our security development..
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