ZAMBOANGA CITY, 30 June 2006 — At least 300 villagers were forced to flee their homes yesterday amid fierce fighting between separatist rebels and militiamen in the southern province of Maguindanao, officials said.
The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) said its fighters killed at least 10 of the militiamen and overran a military command post in the town of Shariff Aguak, scene of a bomb attack last week that killed five people and injured 14 others.
Two rebels were reported wounded in the clashes, said Eid Kabalu, a spokesman of the MILF.
“The fighting is still going, I can hear the sounds of automatic gunfire and explosions from where I am now,” Kabalu told Arab News by phone from a rebel base in Maguindanao just before nightfall yesterday.
Kabalu said MILF guerrillas attacked the outpost of the militiamen — armed civilian volunteers under the control of Maguindanao officials — in retaliation.
“We don’t subscribe to the dictum that if somebody throws stones at us, we should throw back a loaf of bread,” Kabalu also told The Associated Press by telephone. “In this case, they’re throwing 81 mm mortar shells at us.”
Lumala Gunting, police chief of Maguindanao province, said it was the MILF that provoked the hostilities when rebels ambushed a team of security forces on its way to serve arrest warrants against guerrillas suspected in the attacks on June 23.
“There were many fatalities on the enemy side,” Gunting told reporters. “We cannot determine the exact number because fighting is still raging.”
The military also denied the allegations and said rebels fired rockets on an army post, manned by soldiers and militias, in the village of Koloy in Shariff Aguak, sparking a fighting that spread to four other villages.
“CVO elements from (the villages of) Tapikan, Koloy, Nabundas and Pulang Lupa, all of Shariff Aguak, Maguindanao were simultaneously attacked by heavily armed group (of rebels),” said Capt. Jose Ritche Pabilonia, a spokesman for the military’s Southern Command based in Zamboanga City.
A government-rebel cease-fire committee was taking steps to settle the conflict, which could have been set off by longtime land or political feuds, he said.
Maguindanao’s governor, Andal Ampatuan, who has had differences with some MILF commanders, escaped a car bomb attack that killed six people, including two of his relatives, early last Friday in Shariff Aguak. Police blamed two MILF commanders for the attack.
MILF rebels suspect the militiamen, some of whom are under Ampatuan’s control, may have launched attacks on the guerrillas in retaliation for the bomb attack on the governor, Kabalu said, but he acknowledged his group had no evidence to back up the suspicion.
Government troops were not involved in the conflict in Maguindanao, about 900 kilometers south of Manila, a military official said.
A local Red Cross unit said 60 families, sensing the brewing conflict, fled villages near the scenes of fighting early Wednesday.
The MILF and the government forged a cease-fire in 2003, halting widespread fighting and fostering peace negotiations being brokered by neighboring Malaysia. Both sides are optimistic they could sign a peace accord as early as this year.
The MILF, which the military says has at least 11,000 armed fighters, has been waging an insurrection for self-rule in the impoverished southern region of Mindanao for decades.
Kabalu warned that the fighting would escalate in other areas and could affect the peace talks if the militias continue to attack MILF forces.
“We fear this trouble will worsen if they continue to attack us. We are only fighting back in self-defense,” he said.
Kabalu said the MILF had nothing to do with the bomb attack against Ampatuan. “The military is only using the issue to justify attacks on us,” he said, adding that those who attacked MILF strongholds were allegedly followers of Ampatuan, a staunch supporter of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.
“The militias belong to the armies of Ampatuan, there could be hundreds of them,” he said.
The latest fighting coincided with the failure of government and rebel peace negotiators to sign an agreement last month on the Muslim ancestral domain.
President Arroyo opened peace talks in 2001 with the MILF in an effort to put an end to more than three decades of fighting in Mindanao.
