This crisis has escalated beyond my wildest expectation. More than a hundred people have lost their lives till now, and the army has lost a number of their armored vehicles. Who would have expected this, in a country where less than 5% of the population is Muslim?
Curiously there was a drop in Islamist-inspired attacks in Thailand since the junta took over. Sigh, maybe that is really the only way to deal with them. They did behaved themselves when the Americans were in control of the country.
Many of the originally Muslim areas in the Philippines are just on the part of the island, the rest were populated by animists who moved up to the mountains to avoid conflict with the Muslims (as well as Christian settlers later). We've never stopped negotiating with these groups. Once we're done with one, another offshot comes out of the former and asks for more. We already gave them some autonomy. We POURED money from the more affluent regions but nothing ever came out of it.
At the risk of sounding ethnocentric, the culture is partly to blame. If you think the Catholic Filipino are easily corruptible, you have to look down south. Their politicians are basically their old nobility and act as such. There were even places were politicians run unopposed because everyone in the local government is a member of the clan and they'd just have a family meeting to select who will run for office. We call them clannish for a good reason. Seen it personally for my self. Some woman got into a fight with a Muslim woman and soon she was being mobbed by all the women of the clan. And this is here in the capital, just imagine if it was in their home base.
It also doesn't help that they still have a warrior mentality. These people are armed and some even bring this culture when moving to Christian areas. Entire towns would have to be evacuated just because some families decided to revive an old feud (yup this happens even in Christian areas since Muslims build ghettos around mosques and eventually wall up the place). They say their religion allows them to do this, to hunt after people who killed a family member or "dishonored" their family. As expected, this starts a vicious cycle of vendetta which would scare out even the most intrepid investor.
The failure of the colonizers from the past in christening the entire Philippine archipelago leads as to what it is now. The Mindanao was the one who have not been successfully Christianize then here it goes the Muslim rebels fighting for what they believe in saying that this is what the Quran said then other Muslims would say that this is not what Quran is teaching and etc. The Islam is a messed up religion after the death of their prophet Muhammad and a lot of factions has rise up. Greed of power also rise up as they want to become a leader of the entire Muslim community by establishing caliphate and become a caliph with the full control of the military and political affairs of all the Muslim around the world that is the goal of this nonsensical ISIS. This is very frustrating.
The political dynasty in Mindanao have grown huge and wild but now the president who have a great political will will punish those who are corrupt, reduce the criminality, and subdue these terrorists while making the country prosper.