Love your enemies: building peace in the Philippines.

In the Santo Nino Chapel in a poor squatter area of the southern Philippine city of Zamboanga, Claretian Father Angel Calvo paces back and forth, microphone in hand. He is leading his congregation in an interactive homily on the day's gospel reading: '"To you who hear I say, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.' So tell me, who are your enemies here in Zamboanga and across the straits on Basilan Island?"

With little hesitation, a middle-aged woman replies, "The Muslims."

"All Muslims?"

"The Abu Sayyaff," comes back the answer, naming the rebel group that over the past 13 years has made its gruesome mark in this region by abducting hostages for ransom, by assassinations, beheadings, and bombings.

Calvo spells out the challenge of Luke's gospel: "'Bless those who curse you'--will you bless the Abu Sayyaf? 'Pray for those who mistreat you'--will you pray for the Abu Sayyaf? 'To the one who strikes you on one cheek, offer the other one as well.'"

As he gives his listeners examples for actively reaching out to and loving their enemies, people are visibly and uncomfortably shifting in their pews. Sharing food with or giving presents to Muslims, even to terrorists? He can't be serious, can he? The teen who minutes ago had proclaimed that for him doing the right and Christian thing was an "easy" task, now, along with the rest of the congregation, has some serious second thoughts.

But Calvo, a Spanish-born missionary priest who has been active in peace, justice, and interreligious reconciliation in the area for more than 30 years, is not talking pious sentiments. As president of Peace Advocates Zamboanga (PAZ), he knows first-hand that "everyone pays when you answer violence with violence." And he also knows and has experienced striking examples of how actively loving and doing good to one's enemies can transform communities and help resolve dangerous conflicts.

It wasn't long after Calvo first arrived on the lush and strikingly beautiful tropical island of Basilan in the early 1970s that it became engulfed in war and bloodshed. The Marcos regime declared martial law, and Muslim rebels in the southern Philippines took up arms. That armed struggle and the brutal response by the Marcos government left a trail of blood and horror on Basilan that is still etched in Calvo's memory. On the southern islands an estimated 120,000 people lost their lives to violence during the martial law period (1972-86); many more were uprooted and displaced from their homes and communities. In the 1980s, Calvo led a pioneering community rebuilding effort with Muslims and Christians in Kapatagan in the half-jungle interior of Basilan.

Zamboanga, the multiethnic and strife-torn city at the tip of the western peninsula of Mindanao, is a place the International Herald Tribune last year described as "so far beyond normal travel warnings that the country's own government warns foreigners to stay out." Many of its 600,000 residents are refugees displaced from other parts of the island as well as from Basilan and the string of troubled islands of the Sulu archipelago further south.

Traveling around the city and to nearby Basilan with Calvo as tour guide leads one to countless sites of previous violent incidents, attacks, ambushes, killings, kidnappings, bombings, and confrontations. But it also leads to encounters with many hope-inspiring people and the sites of peace-building initiatives, events, and projects.

With its many troubles in recent years as well as a long history of colonial and economic oppression and interethnic strife reaching back centuries, the level of mistrust and hostility between the region's different ethnic and religious groups remains very high.

Priscilla Valmont is the executive secretary of PAZ and secretary of the Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue of the Archdiocese of Zamboanga. She remembers well how, growing up on Basilan, some members of her family kept telling her never to trust a Moro (the originally pejorative Spanish but now reclaimed regional term for Muslim). "My papa employed Moro workers, and sometimes they would bring us food. But my grandmother would always tell us not to eat the food. She also told us not to walk ahead of a Moro, and I heard people say, 'The only good Moro is a dead Moro.'"

These attitudes, she says, were reinforced during the martial law period and the atrocities and dislocations of that time. Valmont says it took a very personal, spiritual conversion for her--brought about by her involvement in the secular Carmelites and by friendships with Muslims--to rid herself of the prejudices she had internalized. "Today I see my involvement in PAZ as a response to the gospel call that 'all may be one.'" To this day, though, news of Abu Sayyaf atrocities leads to family feuds with her brothers, who disapprove of her peace work.

Grace Jimeno Rebollos, director of the Center for Peace and Development at the Western Mindanao University in Zamboanga and vice president of PAZ, sees "the pervasiveness of the culture of violence" as the main challenge for peace workers. Working for peace, she says, has to start with addressing the local climate of hostility and animosity and being serious about building relationships with people in other faith communities and ethnic groups.

Calvo adds that the region's Christians, who tend to see themselves solely in the roles of victims of the Abu Sayyaf terror, need to realize they have contributed to the conflict and oppression that has led to the current situation. On Mindanao over the past century the formerly majority Moro population has become a minority (from 76 percent in 1903 to 19 percent today). And the Christians who have settled here have taken over much of the best land as well as economic and political power.

Meanwhile, the central government has consistently neglected much of the south, particularly the provinces that have majority Moro populations; today all of these provinces are among the nation's poorest.

On Basilan, the American colonial period in the first hall of the 20th century led to large multinational corporations taking over much of the fertile agricultural land and setting up coconut, rubber, cacao, and cassava plantations. A badly managed land reform in the late 1980s redistributed some of the multinationals' plantations to cooperatives, but most of the reform beneficiaries were Christian settlers brought to Basilan by the multinationals. Few native Muslim Yakan benefited. Today, while Muslims make up 71 percent of Basilan's population, Christians own 75 percent of the land, while ethnic Chinese control 75 percent of the trade.

The 10-year-old peace Advocates Zamboanga (the acronym PAZ means "peace" in the Local language of Chabacano, a derivative of Spanish) focuses on many different aspects of peace, but promoting and building understanding, reconciliation, and peace between Christians and Muslims and among the many ethnic and cultural groups of the region remains the primary goal. In this work PAZ collaborates with a Muslim partner organization, Salam (Arabic for "peace").

"The Muslim-Christian relations in our area are shaped more by belligerence than understanding," says Edward Lim, a leader of Salam who runs an elementary school in the city. Lira is also the executive director of a World Bank-assisted social development fund that grew out of a 1996 peace agreement between the Philippine government and the Moro National Liberation Front.

"There has been a great divide. But working together with Muslims and Christians in Salam and PAZ," says Lim, "is like opening your windows. The openness and collaboration we have been able to achieve with each other is really unprecedented in this city. In fact, it is viewed with some suspicion by elements in both our communities."

Miriam Suacito, coordinator for interreligious dialogue for the Catholic Prelature of Isabela on Basilan, encounters those suspicions frequently. In her work she experiences the "deep-seated biases and prejudices [of many local Catholics] against Muslims. They say, 'Why does the church help the Muslims when they are the ones doing violence against Christians?'"

One of the cornerstones of the joint efforts of PAZ and Salam is the impressive, multifaceted Mindanao Week of Peace, which they started in 1997. Held annually in late November and early December, it consists of a broad range of cultural, political, religious, and educational events.

Last year's Week of Peace included a new event: an all-day open house for Catholic children to attend and participate in the Eid-al-Fitr celebrations that occurred during the week. Twenty-one children, 11 to 14 years old, joined Muslim host families for the festivities marking the end of Ramadan. Some of the kids even stayed overnight.

"This brought a whole new, other dimension to our usual open-house activities during this feast," Lim remembers."We expanded the customary hospitality to not only welcome friends and families into our homes but to share it with strangers. It was very appropriate to the concept of forgiveness that is at the heart of the celebration. The children enjoyed both being welcomed as one of us and also taking part in serving food to other guests."

The commitment to the gospel challenge of loving your enemies that Calvo preached at Santo Nino, however, does not mean that he or his fellow peace workers are in any way naive about the terror the Abu Sayyaf is wielding. His own religious community has been a repeat target of the group's brutality.

In 1993 Claretian Father Bernardo Blanco was one of the first kidnap victims of the group on Basilan. In 1999 a jeep carrying six catechists from the Claretian parish of St. Vincent Ferrer in Tumahubong, Basilan was ambushed by still unidentified gunmen; five of them were killed. And in the swing of 2000, an Abu Sayyaf commando kidnapped and abducted 52 students and teachers from Tumahubong--among them Claretian Father Rhoel Gallardo, principal Reynaldo Rubio, and three other teachers from the Claret School. In the course of the ordeal that for some of the hostages lasted four months, six of the hostages, including Gallardo, were killed.

The Claretians have been active on Basilan since 1950. One of their main ministries has been providing education to Christians and Muslims alike, and today they maintain four schools there. In a tragic twist of irony, the Abu Sayyaf founder, Abdurajak Janjalani, was educated at the Claretian high school in Isabela. He did not graduate, and at the time, according to Calvo, was "not unusual in any way." Janjalani later received a scholarship to study in Saudi Arabia, where he was radicalized and from there joined up with the mujahideen in Afghanistan.

After several painful years of constant threats, kidnappings, and attacks, "we are experiencing a relatively more peaceful situation in Basilan today," says Suacito. "People can travel again around the island without constant fear of being kidnapped or ambushed. In remote communities people no longer have their things--clothes, kitchen utensils, etc.--packed and ready for instant evacuation. Most communities now are again having regular classes and activities."

To a large degree the current reprieve from the terror is due to the increased military presence and counterterrorism activities on the island over the past few years. In 2002, during the high-profile, yearlong Abu Sayyaf kidnapping involving, among others, the American missionaries Gracia and Martin Burnham, the United States and the Philippine governments conducted joint military exercises (dubbed Balikatan--Tagalog for "shoulder to shoulder") on Basilan.

The American presence on the island--with a total of 660 U.S. Marines, Navy SEALs, and special forces--lasted 10 months. Even after the Americans' withdrawal, the Philippine military remains highly visible on Basilan with check points, convoys, armed guards, and military camps. The U.S. involvement--part of the Bush administration's "Second Front" of the War on Terror--was controversial in the Philippines, as its constitution expressly forbids foreign troops from conducting military operations in the country.

But "the current relative calm counts for much for ordinary people here," says Calvo, who along with other local peace activists has been critical of the overreliance on military means. Still, he acknowledges that "peace is very complex in situations of violence, and along with cultural, political, economic, and religious components, there may also be a place for a military component."

But Calvo is skeptical about government claims that the Abu Sayyaf has been decisively weakened. "Few of the group's leaders have been captured. They have chosen not to engage the overwhelming firepower of all those forces, but they may just be waiting for the next opportunity to strike again."

Suacito, who worked with Calvo in Kapatagan 24 years ago and since then has dedicated her life's work to community development on Basilan, says, "My hope is that as a community we will be able to grow in love, peace, and justice and be able to better understand and appreciate each other's religion and culture, while working together for a common cause. This is a dream that continues to motivate us amidst all the struggles and difficulties in Basilan. As we always say: 'We are an Easter people, and alleluia is our song.'"

MEINRAD SCHERER-EMUNDS is the executive editor of U.S. CATHOLIC. EDWIN REYES is a photographer based in Quezon City, Philippines.