Japanese tourists are welcome in Asia everywhere today...

It starts this way:

It wasn't till I got to the center of Jolo town in the late 1980s, some days after the fight between Mayor Saud Tan and Vice Governor Kimar Tulawie of Sulu that I became aware of the scale of the damage. There was a burned out area measuring about 1,000 x 1,500 meters that had been reduced to a flat stretch of blackened timber, twisted galvanized iron sheeting and pools of water. The hospital where I stood was on a hill, and therefore seized by Tulawie's men first. They had set up a mortar in the courtyard and machineguns in the windows where they could overlook the mayor's house 800 meters downrange. The doctors related, with a finely honed appreciation for the absurd, how the panicked patients had jumped out of the windows some still clutching bottles of dextrose hooked up to their veins, and scampered for their lives, the halt overtaking the lame. Tulawie's men found the range by walking the shells up to the Mayor's house, which in Jolo is another name for a fortification, and in the process set fire to the shantytown whose ruins stretched out before me. Two or three dozen people died, more than half a square mile burned out, and it didn't even rate a newspaper story in the capital of Manila. It didn't matter: the dead were buried and the warlords reached a modus vivendi .

And you clearly have a tin ear for writing if you haven't already CLICKED THROUGH to RTWT...