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Filipino Muslims Condemn 'Terrorist Label'
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A student reciting Qur'an inside a boarding school
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By
Rexcel Sorza, IOL Correspondent
ILOILO
CITY, March 29 (IslamOnline.net) - Filipino Muslims Monday, March 29,
condemned Friday’s raid of a boarding school for Muslim reverts in
Quezon City, where police claimed six terrorists were hiding.
“What
we have feared has started. The raid conducted last Friday of the
offices and madrasah (school) of the Fi Sabillah is an indication that
the NCRPO [National Capital Region Police Office] is hell-bent on
concocting anything in order to convince that terrorists are hiding in
Muslim communities in Metro Manila.
“This
kind of incident is a rampant practice of the army and the police long
suffered by Muslims, as the anti-Muslim hysteria fanned by the Arroyo
government takes on more brutal facets,” Amirah Ali Lidasan,
secretary general of the Moro-Christian People’s Alliance, told
IslamOnline.net in a statement received Monday.
“Through
such schemes,” she said, “they are conditioning the public that
their allegations that Muslims are harboring terrorists are right.
Worst, the NCRPO indiscriminately tags any Muslim as an Abu Sayyaf
member.”
Abu
Sayyaf, which has carried out high-profile kidnap-for-ransom
activities, is a group listed as a terrorist organization by the
Philippines, United States and the European Union.
Lidasan,
who is also a nominee for Philippine Congress of the Suara Bangsamoro
party, lamented: “No Muslim is safe in Mindanao, no Muslim is safe
in Metro Manila, everywhere we go in this country there would always
be reasons concocted by the government to brand us either as
terrorists or as terrorist lovers.”
Elite
teams of police officers swooped down on the four-storey Fi Sabillah
building in Cubao, Quezon City in the capital Metro Manila around 2
p.m. Friday, March 27. They were armed with a warrant to search the
building’s first floor but when they failed to find what they were
looking for there, they went up the second until the fourth floors.
The
last floor is the home of Ustadz Ahmad Santos, the imam and
administrator of the Fi Sabilillah. It was on the fourth floor that
the police said they found the prohibited explosives, and literatures
and videos on terrorism. But the residents of the building, including
the wives of Ahmad Santos, cried foul saying the explosives found in
their home were planted.
The
police had the arrest warrant for Ahmad Santos and Daud Santos, for
illegal possession of firearms under the gun ban provision of the
Omnibus Elections Code. The two were previously implicated to have
connections with the Abu Sayyaf and were supposedly training
terrorists in their madrasah in Anda, Tarlac.
Finding
no terrorist, they arrested two women, including the two wives of
Ahmad Santos - Fatima, 29 and Nur'ain, 27, who were brought to Camp
Caringal in Quezon City.
Lidasan
added that their group believes that the armlet rifles,
rocket-propelled grenades, C-4 and other explosives allegedly found by
the NCRPO in the Madrasah were just “planted” by the police
officers themselves.
Journalists,
interestingly, were prohibited from going with the raiding team inside
the building to observe the proceedings.
Daud
Santos was also a former “victim” of illegal arrest and illegal
detention conducted by the Philippine National Police in a madrasah in
Tarlac in 2002. She said they were later released because no hard
evidence was found against them.
Lidasan
underscored that this pattern of “arrest and release” has been the
fate suffered by already thousands of Moro men and even women,
especially in the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ Basilan Siege in
2001 and the “State of Lawless Violence” in Davao in 2003.
Lidasan
stressed that the combined force of the anti-terror elite force,
formed recently as the Arroyo government’s response to the Madrid
train blasts, and the “marking” and isolation of Muslim
individuals through the
national identification (ID) system may just be another
upturn of the government’s “incessant war and propaganda
attacks” against the Muslims.
She
added that that while the anti-terror elite force ensures that Muslim
communities, branded from the onset as “terrorist havens,” are
cordoned off and carefully watched, the ID system on the other hand,
swiftly and conveniently lay grounds for arrest if the individual
bears no ID.
She
expressed fears of foreboding upsurge of human rights violations
against Muslims which she said is inevitable against this picture.
“It
angers us and saddens us deeply that the Arroyo government, who has
the guts to campaign in Moro communities, has been shamelessly setting
a trend of bias and discrimination against Muslims. The National ID
System and the anti-terror elite force are not the answers to the
peace crisis in the country.
“If
only the state and its military will genuinely serve the people
instead of cow towing the insatiable greed of its foreign masters, if
only the government will sincerely respect the rights of the
Bangsamoro people, then, peace and justice will be realized.
“Sadly,
this is not the case, this hence necessitates far greater vigilance
among our Muslim brethren,” Lidasan said, as she called on all peace
advocates and civil libertarians to be on guard and be steadfast in
the quest for genuine peace.
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