This sidebar accompanies Rene Ciria-Cruz' two articles for Wednesday, July 5, 2000. Slugs: "warclouds" and "uprooted." Rene Ciria-Cruz, an editor at Pacific News Service, is also the longtime editor of Filipinas magazine in San Francisco. This is the third of three stories. Photos by Rick Rocamora available, please e-mail slouie@pacificnews.org.

"Moro" is the collective name for 5 million people belonging to 13 ethnolinguistic Muslim tribes.

They make up a quarter of the population of Mindanao, which includes the poorest provinces of the Philippines, a largely Catholic nation. Also native to the region are non-Muslim tribes like the Manobo, T'boli and Tiruray.

The Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), mostly Tausug tribe members, waged a bloody fight for an independent state in the 1970s. It made peace with the central government in 1996. Its leader, Nur Misuari, now governs the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

Radical elements critical of Misuari broke with the MNLF in 1977, led by Cairo-educated Islamic theologian Hashim Salamat. His Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), a 15,000-strong army made up largely of Maranaos and Maguindanaos, is now the main force of the Moro cause.

The Abu Sayyaf group, which kidnaps hostages for ransom, also began as a splinter of the MNLF, but is now mainly a bandit gang. Both the MILF and Abu Sayyaf claim ties with Osama Bin Laden's jihad network. Many MILF members fought in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation.

Critics view President Joseph Estrada's effort to crush the MILF as a wrong approach to a problem rooted in nearly 500 years of conflict.

When the Spanish began colonizing the Philippines in the 1560s, they easily took the islands' scattered native settlements -- but not Mindanao where Islam, brought by Arab traders and clerics in the 14th century, was already an entrenched way of life.

With thriving commerce and complex social structures, the Muslim territories were impermeable to Spanish power, so the Catholic conquerors demonized the Muslims as they had the Spanish Moors, hence the term "Moros." Over time the Moros' fierce resistance contributed to their economic isolation, and the endless defense of ancestral lands drained their accumulated wealth.

Some of their bloodiest battles were against Americans. In 1901, soon after U.S. forces defeated the Filipinos in the Philippine-American War, troops under Gen. Adna Chaffee subdued the Muslim South. Resistance was so tenacious the U.S. Army had to replace the .38-caliber pistol with the more powerful .45-caliber automatic to stop the "amok" Moro warriors.

The U.S. colonial authorities promoted Christian migration to the lush Southern "frontier." This set the stage for exploitation of the region's rich natural resources, first by settlers from the North, then by multinational corporations. Today, large-haul fishing trawlers from Japan and Taiwan are also viewed as threats by indigenous communities.

More waves of migrants came in the 1950s when the government promoted settler homesteads to defuse the peasant-based Huk communist rebellion in the North. With the influx of migrants came landgrabbing and discrimination against the Moros. Private armies of both Moros and Christians emerged as prejudices fed on social tensions.

Moro resentment peaked in 1968 when President Ferdinand Marcos, to keep secret an aborted plan to invade Sabah, in Malaysian Borneo, executed nearly 70 Muslim commando recruits. The crime was exposed, and hatred of Marcos unified disparate Moro clans. When Marcos seized dictatorial powers in 1972, the South exploded in a full-fledged civil war.

The MNLF tied down the Philippines' armed forces for several years. Tens of thousands of civilians and combatants died, hundreds of thousands of Moros became refugees in Sabah and in larger Philippine cities.

By the time Marcos was deposed in 1986, many Islamic governments had lost their revolutionary fervor, MNLF funding from Libya dried up, and the MNLF signed a peace pact in 1996 creating the autonomous Muslim region of Mindanao. Faced with a war-ravaged economy, Misuari grapples with charges of mismanagement. As his star dims, he rues losing members to the more radical MILF and even the apolitical Abu Sayyaf. Government officials still want a military solution, which resonates among many Filipinos blinded by years of religious and ethnic prejudices.