5.5 Philippines: an overview
Philippines officially known as the Republic of the Philippines is a sovereign state in Southeast Asia in the western Pacific Ocean. To its north across the Luzon Strait lies Taiwan. West across the South China Sea sits Vietnam. The Sulu Sea to the southwest lies between the country and the island of Borneo, and to the south the Celebes Sea separates it from other islands of Indonesia. With a population of more than 92 million people, the Philippines is the 7th most populated Asian country and the 12th most populated country in the world. An additional 12 million Filipinos live overseas. Multiple ethnicities and cultures are found throughout the islands.
Philippines: Colonization, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency
The island of Mindanao and the southern island chains of the Sulu Archipelago have been ethnically and linguistically distinct from Luzon and the northern islands for centuries. When the United States conquered the Philippines in the 1898 Spanish-American War, it carried out bloody massacres in the South, notably the first battle of Bud Dajo (1906) where up to 1,000 Moros were slaughtered by U.S. Marines in the crater of a volcano.
In the early 1970s, an insurgency arose in the Muslim population leading to the founding of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF). The Front received backing from the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and the Qaddafi regime in Libya. Initially landing blows against the AFP, the MNLF suffered military reverses as the government resorted to indiscriminate bombing, mass rape, burning of whole villages and massacres.