I’ve seen jihadist training camps on the island visited by the Bondi shooters. The memory will never leave me |
Mindanao, the second-largest island in the Philippines, has white beaches, turquoise waters, and a lush tropical hinterland. It could be up there among places vying for the Queensland tourism slogan; Beautiful one day, perfect the next. Except that tourism and indeed the island’s economy have been gutted by a decades-long Muslim insurgency, which is estimated to have cost more than 120,000 lives since 1990.
The island has a Muslim population as high as 20 per cent in some areas. Rival Islamist militant groups have carried out bombings, kidnappings and even beheadings, fighting with each other and the Philippine military, climaxing in a months-long showdown with the army in 2017.
Soldiers being deployed to the front line of Islamic militant-held Marawi in 2017.Credit: Getty Images
But despite various battles and peace processes, the insurgents have never been vanquished entirely.
This is the reason there is so much focus on Bondi gunmen Sajid and Naveed Akram’s choice of Davao city in Mindanao for a month-long visit this November, two weeks before the Bondi shooting.
I was one of a handful of Australian journalists who visited the militant training camps in Mindanao at their height in the 1990s, on a reporting trip with my colleague Catherine McGrath for the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent program. We were on the island to interview rebel leader Nur Misuari, a Muslim academic who had set up the main insurgent group, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) in 1972. It had a separatist agenda for the island’s Muslims, based on a more secular vision, reminiscent of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s original ambitions for Pakistan.
By the time we were there in 1996, following nearly 25 years of the MNLF campaign, Manila was ready to set........