By Gabriel Kahn
International bodies are concerned at a rise in mortality rates among people fleeing violence between the Philippines' army and Muslim rebel groups refusing to go along with a soon to be signed peace deal.
A World Health Organization (WHO) employee supervising medical assistance for refugees in reception centers in Zamboanga - a major port city on the southern Philippines' island of Mindanao - told the Anadolu Agency last week that 82 people had died since September.
"50 percent of the dead are children under the age of 5. It is really alarming," the employee - who did not wish to be named as he was not qualified to talk to the media - told AA.
Zamboanga City Health Officer Dr. Rodelin Agbulos told media Tuesday that in recent days another six people had died in temporary housing centers such as Zamboanga's Joaquin F. Enriquez Memorial Sports Complex - where a bulk of the refugees are temporarily sheltered - bringing the death toll to 88.
The leading cause of death was diarrhea and pneumonia, Agbulos said.
Most of those in the centers lost their homes in September 2013 during a month-long standoff between government troops and rebels from the areas of main Muslim rebel group, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF). Thousands were crammed into the Enriquez grandstand - sleeping on terraces, fighting crowded conditions, improper sanitary measures and heat - as rebels and the Philippine army fought street battles in the nearby deserted coastal neighborhoods.
Five months later, the fighting is over, but insecurity persists and the refugees remain. The government still has to reign in the rebels, and groups such as the Al Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf - an armed separatist group which has remained outside of the peace process - have vowed to continue fighting until the area becomes its own independent Islamic state.
September's fighting started when MNLF leader Nur Misuari sent his men to Zamboanga - a Christian enclave in a predominantly Muslim area - to mark his opposition to peace negotiations underway in Malaysia between the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) to end decades of fighting which has claimed tens of thousands of lives.
The negotiations represented the culmination of diplomatic efforts aimed at ending conflict in Mindanao, home to most of the predominantly Catholic country's' Muslim minority. In the last 40 years, fighting in the region has killed tens of thousands of people and helped to nurture Islamic extremism in Southeast Asia.
By the time the MILF and the government agreed to a January 24 peace deal in Kuala Lumpur more than 110 people had been killed and approximately 120,000 displaced, while many houses had been burned to the ground.
The deal - to be signed mid-March, acccording to Malaysia's prime minister Friday - paved the way for the creation of a new Muslim autonomous entity called “Bangsamoro” (Moro nation). A new law has to be approved by the Philippine Congress before the final peace agreement can be signed which will likely occur in March.
Francois-Xavier Bonnet, research associate for the Research Institute on Contemporary Southeast Asia (Irasec), told the Anadolu Agency that the autonomous entity will be entirely governed by a Muslim police force made by the Bangsamoro.
"Sharia will probably be applied," he added. "This new region will have large autonomy in terms of taxation and important controls over mining and marine resources.”
But in the Zamboanga, over 20,000 people who have lost their homes remain.
According to a survey by Zamboanga city health office, many children and their mothers are suffering from severe and acute malnutrition, some of the children dying from preventable diseases such as diarrhea and pneumonia.
But illness and malnutrition are not the sole issue. The fighting continues as Muslims in the southern Philippines are divided into many clans who support several armed groups, most of which - including Nur Misuari's MNLF faction - are in favor of total autonomy for Muslim regions in the south.
The ink had barely dried on the peace agreement in Kuala Lumpur when Philippines' forces took part in fierce fighting with the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) in their stronghold of Mindanao, the second largest island in the Philippines.
BIFF - one of the groups left out of the agreement - is considered one of the most violent in the southern Philippines. Led by Ameril Umbra Kato, it broke away from the MILF in 2008 and is in favor of complete independence for the Bangsamoro. Despite a week-long offensive by the Philippine military earlier this month - in which four BIFF camps were siezed along with a makeshift explosives factory - there were no indications that Kato had been killed or captured.
Bonnet told AA that the battle allowed the Philippine government to test the MILF's allegiance following the peace treaty.
“The army wanted to test the goodwill of the MILF and to see if it supported the attack against the BIFF, which it did," he said. "The government would like the BIFF back into the fold (of the) MNLF to defuse the apparition of a new rebellion."
Abu Sayyaf - which has carried out kidnappings, bombings and beheadings for more than a decade - also fights on. Some of its commandants have close ties with the MNLF in the islands of Sulu and Basilan, and they are determined to "derail the peace between the government and the MILF,” said Bonnet.
In Manila - thousands of miles away from the insurgency - President Benigno Aquino's strategy remains focused on the active collaboration of the MILF to bring peace to the Muslim regions.
But in Zamboanga, those packed in the stadiums say they not only feel forgotten by the central government, but also under threat of a possible resumption of hostilities.
"We all think that the grandstand is our dying place… we cannot find jobs… we don’t even have money to buy white cloth to bury our dead," a young man living in the camp told Philippine newspaper the Inquirer.
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