"Am I therefore become your enemy,because I TELL YOU THE TRUTH...?"
(Galatians 4:16)

Clans Complicate Philippine Conflict

MANILA-Clan violence has aggravated the conflict between government forces and Islamic separatists in the southern Philippines, making the decade-long search for peace there even harder, a new study says.The study, released Wednesday by the Asia Foundation, said the peace process in Mindanao, the region in the southern Philippines where Islamic separatists have been fighting for self-determination since the 1970s, would have a better chance of succeeding if clan violence were addressed.The project’s researchers, who included Islamic scholars and anthropologists, found that in Mindanao from the 1930s to 2005, there had been 1,266 cases of clan violence-called “rido” by Filipino Muslims-in which 5,500 people were killed and thousands were displaced.While clan conflict is common in many societies, rido is an especially volatile force because it has, according to the study, “wider implications for conflict in Mindanao, primarily because it tends to interact in unfortunate ways with separatist conflict and other forms of armed violence.”The government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front have been negotiating for peace since 1997, but no substantial agreement has been reached.According to the study, half of the documented clan violence occurred between 2000 and 2004. During this period, the cease-fire between the government and the Islamic front was broken many times by clan fighting.

As in the days of Noah....