The Wrong Guys?

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Terrorism has hit the Philippines hard in the last couple of weeks—including five bombings that killed 13 and a grenade attack Oct. 17 in Manila's financial district—and President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has responded with a show of political testosterone intended to impress her APEC summit partners this week in Los Cabos, Mexico. She backed a controversial plan for a national ID card that will help keep tabs on bad guys. Her government also announced the deployment of 500 "secret marshals," plainclothes cops who will scour the nation looking for hoodlums. Arroyo's crackdown contrasted nicely with the foot-dragging of Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, and could win her a private meeting with George W. Bush at APEC and, with luck, more financial and intelligence assistance from the U.S. But the war on terror requires more than fierce talk, and the rest of Arroyo's campaign has been flagging lately.

Arroyo, known in Manila as the "Photo-Op Queen," has sought to burnish her tough-on-terrorism image by appearing on television with arrested suspects. One such photo-op, on Oct. 19, however, went badly awry when Arroyo marched out a prisoner and introduced him as Abu Pula or "Doctor Abu," a forty-something leader of the kidnap-for-ransom group Abu Sayyaf, who allegedly engineered the 2000 abduction of 11 European tourists from a Malaysian beach resort. Alas, the perp she walked wasn't Doctor Abu: he was Mark Bolkerin Gumbahale, a 21-year-old Abu Sayyaf member arrested while playing video games at an Internet cafe in a Manila suburb.

Arroyo also held a press conference last Wednesday with five alleged terrorists supposedly responsible for bombing a Zamboanga shopping center last month. High-level military sources now doubt that the young men on television had the technical expertise required to execute this type of sophisticated attack. Police are still stumped about the Oct. 18 bombing of a bus in Manila. One possible lead, three tons of ammonium nitrate seized last week outside Manila, turned out to be part of a legitimate shipment of fertilizer. So far, Arroyo has been eager to take the fight to the bad guys. Her problem, like many other heads of state, is the difficulty of actually finding the terrorists.