by Glenda M. Gloria

IN THE middle of 1997, a brash Muslim youth met with two senior police generals at Camp Crame to discuss the likely surrender of his older, rebellious brother. The 23-year-old told the generals there would be no promises. He'll merely try his best, he said, as he turned to his sparring partner present at the meeting, Edwin Angeles, who nodded in agreement.

After weeks of haggling, the planned surrender failed to take off. And the generals never heard from the young man again—until 1998, under the Estrada government, when he volunteered his help to the police for the safe release of three Hong Kong nationals kidnapped by the Abu Sayyaf in Basilan.

For a long time, this young man had been accessible to government authorities. He had negotiated on their behalf. In 1995, in fact, he managed to escape from Camp Crame after spending three months in jail for anti-government activities. After his escape, he visited a TV station, shopped at SM Megamall, and toured Manila.

But Khaddafy Janjalani has since gone beyond the business of negotiating for anyone's surrender or release, or plotting do-or-die escape plots. He is the new boss of the Abu Sayyaf extremist group operating in Western Mindanao. And last summer, under his term, the Abu Sayyaf launched its most spectacular kidnap operations since its inception: the abduction and beheading of Christian civilians, including a priest, in Basilan, and the kidnapping of 21 people, mostly foreigners, on Sipadan Island in nearby Sabah, Malaysia.

Khaddafy's older brother, the late Abdurajak, founded the group in 1991 in Basilan, after spending many years studying in Saudi Arabia and Libya. But while many in the Islamic community had welcomed Abdurajak's initial forays into Basilan's mosques and jungles, it was never really clear what he and his group were aiming for.

In truth, of all armed groups battling the state, it is the Abu Sayyaf that has the most nebulous of beginnings. It is also met by a huge dose of cynicism from fellow Muslims, residents of Basilan and politicians. Part of this could be attributed to how Angeles and the younger Janjalani had flaunted their ties or access to police and military authorities. But part of this is also caused by the mixed signals the Abu Sayyaf has been sending the public with its kidnapping sprees.

A rebel group, after all, would want to tap even just a section of the public's support for its cause. It would not push itself to a corner where it gets isolated from the rest of the community and becomes vulnerable to all-out military attacks. But that is what the Abu Sayyaf has been doing since its inception, although at first, many thought that Abdurajak was somehow also trying to go back to the "pristine" definition and practice of Islam.

Most accounts describe Abdurajak as charismatic and religious. Born in Basilan of Muslim and Christian parentage on November 8, 1953, Janjalani went to the Catholic-run Claret College for high school in the capital of Isabela. He failed to graduate from secondary school, but somehow wrangled a scholarship from the Saudi Arabian government in 1981. Abdurajak was sent to Ummu I-Qura in Mecca where he studied Islamic jurisprudence for three years. He returned to Basilan in 1984 where he started preaching in mosques. Many of his elders in the More National Liberation Front (MNLF) saw in Janjalani the future of the rebel organization.

In 1987, Janjalani went to a religious institution in Tripoli, Libya, where he met many Muslim Filipinos his age—and recruited them later for what was to become the Abu Sayyaf, which roughly translates to "bearer of the sword."

Muslim professor Mehol Sadain, who has studied the group, says Abdurajak interpreted jihad as stipulated in the Koran differently, if not selfishly. There is nothing wrong with jihad, Sadain says, because jihad means a battle against evil. And the greater jihad is not the holy war, says the academic, but the struggle against oneself, against one's weaknesses. Abdurajak Janjalani's style was to personalize the faith so that he told his recruits that jihad was their personal responsibility, not a community undertaking. And it only came to follow, under Janjalani's concept, that the rest who happened to be non-believers were to be driven out of Mindanao—killed, if necessary.

Indeed, a man is inspired by his belief but is constrained by his environment. And Basilan, where the Janjalani brothers grew up, is a place where the laws set by men are flouted daily. Abdurajak would find it difficult later to connect the theories he learned about Islam in the comforts of religious schools abroad to the deadly environment in Basilan: grinding poverty, too many loose firearms, and men who thrive on them. All sorts of people and groups competed for legitimacy with the local government in the province: the Marines, the Army, legal and illegal loggers, the ustadz, the Catholic priests and laity, the kidnappers. The Christians who had migrated to the province controlled the economy; the Muslims remained dirt poor.

Abdurajak's preachings on Islam provided his provincemates temporary escape from all these. It did not take long for him to convince hard-core recruits that it is the Christians who continued to deprive them of life's barest essentials. The Abu Sayyaf would also gain headway in Sulu province on Jolo island, which, like Basilan, is among the Philippines' 10 poorest provinces.