US plays down threat from rebels

Published: 8:14PM Monday February 21, 2005 Source: Reuters

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The United States played down a threat from Philippine communist rebels as 300 unarmed US troops joined Philippine forces for exercises focused on providing relief for areas hit by floods late last year.
   
The Maoist New People's Army (NPA) warned US soldiers on Saturday against entering rebel areas in northern Luzon island where storms in November washed away villages and killed more than 3,000 people.
   
"There's no concern for us going there," Joseph Mussomelli, a senior US embassy official, told reporters after a ceremony opening the annual "Balikatan" (shoulder-to-shoulder) exercise involving US and Philippine troops.
   
"We think it is mostly just talk," he said of the rebel threat.
   
Mussomelli said the US troops would help 650 Philippine soldiers build schools, roads and bridges and provide medical, dental and veterinary services to tens of thousands of people in Quezon and Laguna provinces.
   
"It's shocking that an organisation that claims to be supporting the poor and the oppressed is upset that we are going to help the poor and the oppressed," he said.
   
The US military has scaled back its role in this year's exercise and for the first time since 2000, when the war games resumed after a break of six years, there will be no large-scale mock battles and amphibious landings.
   
Last year, about 2,500 US troops took part.
   
US military spokesman Captain Dennis Williams said US forces were busy with relief efforts in tsunami-affected areas in the Indian Ocean and in operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
   
The United States has had a long relationship with the Philippines, first as a colonial ruler after the defeat of former colonial power Spain in 1898 and then as an ally who made use of the country's air and naval bases during the Cold War.
   
Besides the annual exercises, US soldiers routinely train Philippine troops in its troubled south but they are prevented by the Philippine constitution from combat.
   
Cooperation in recent years has focused on ways to defeat regional Islamic militants, homegrown Muslim rebels and the NPA.
   
The 8,000-strong NPA, fighting an insurgency since 1969 in which at least 40,000 people have been killed, has issued similar warnings before previous exercises.

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