Troops disarm roadside bombs in Mindanao

COTABATO CITY, Philippines (Mindanao Examiner / Oct. 14, 2008) – Philippine soldiers disarmed Tuesday two powerful roadside bombs planted by suspected Moro Islamic Liberation Front rebels in the restive Muslim autonomous province of Maguindanao, officials said.

Officials said the explosives, assembled from 90mm and 81mm mortar bombs, were left on a highway near the village of Magaslong in Datu Piang town where military patrols frequently pass.

“Members of the army’s explosive ordnance team disarmed the improvise explosives believed planted by MILF rebels,” said Major Armand Rico, a regional army spokesman.

He said the mortar bombs were connected to radio transceivers used as a firing device to trigger explosion. “This technology the rebels are using must have come from the New People’s Army which is notoriously known in using landmines in attacking military targets,” he said.

Rico was referring to the NPA, the armed wing of the outlawed Communist Party of the Philippines, accused by the military of using anti-personnel landmines which is banned around the world under the Geneva Conventions, in carrying out attacks against security forces.

”The use (of landmines) is banned around the world, but the NPA continue to use such explosives, and now the MILF rebels which threatens the safety of innocent civilians,” he said.

Aside from the Geneva Conventions, the 1997 Ottawa Convention, also known as the Mine Ban Treaty prohibits of the use, stockpiling, production and transfer or anti-personnel mines and on their destruction.

Rico said the MILF rebels got its technology in the manufacture of landmines from the NPA, which has been fighting the government the past four decades for the establishment of a Maoist state in the country.

The Philippine Army said the MILF have forged an alliance with the NPA as early as 1999. The alliance covers among others the exchange of information, sharing of training, manufacture of arms and ammunition, particularly rocket-propelled grenades.

Colonel Daniel Lucero, commander of the Army's Civil-Military Operations Group, said this explains why the Mindanao-based NPA rebels were reported to have used anti-tank rockets, loaned by the MILF, in battling government soldiers.

He said there were many occasions that MILF forces had disrupted military operations against the NPA in the past.

“What is more revealing in this alliance is the deafening silence and refusal of the CPP-NPA-NDF and its allied organizations to condemn the terror acts perpetrated by the MILF rebels (in recent attacks in Mindanao),” he said.

The MILF, which is fighting for a separate Muslim homeland, admitted forging an alliance with the NPA, which has been waging a secessionist war for decades for the establishment of a Maoist state in the Philippines. (Mindanao Examiner)