MILF doubts peace pact by 2010

COTABATO CITY – The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) is convinced that no final peace pact with the government would be signed until President Arroyo’s term ends in 2010.

The MILF leadership doubted a peace deal would be reached this year and blamed President Arroyo’s ongoing political crisis over alleged corruption as the main reason for constant delays in the negotiations.

“The “uncertainty of concluding a peace pact with the government” was causing anxiety among the rebel ranks, said MILF chief Murad Ebrahim, flanked by his top military aide Abdul Aziz Mimbantas and political officer Ghazali Jaafar, at the end of a four-day meeting in Mindanao.

In the movement’s website, www.luwaran.com, MILF deputy information chief Khaled Musa said theArroyo administration is running out of enough material time to conclude a peace settlement for Mindanao.

Peace talks between the government and the MILF started Jan. 7, 1997, but gained headway only in 2003 with the help of Malaysia as mediator.

The government and MILF panels last held formal talks in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia late last year, but failed to reach a consensus on how to establish an area which the front wants to govern through the proposed Bangsamoro Juridical Entity.

Musa, right-hand man of MILF chief negotiator Muhaquer Iqbal, said the government merely handled its peace overture with the MILF as a “counter-insurgency tool,” not as a decades-old problem that has peculiar political, socio-economic, racial and religious ramifications.

Musa insinuated, however, that there is still a chance for Mrs. Arroyo to strike a peace deal with the MILF as long as she would have enough political determination to pursue it.

Thousands of MILF guerrillas converged in Butig, Lanao del Sur the other day and discussed in a lengthy dialogue the prospects of the front’s 11-year-old peace overture with the government.

MILF officials who took turns presiding over the “extended central committee meeting” in Butig have insinuated, one after another, that the peace talks now hang in the balance, as they challenged Malacañang to use its political and administrative powers to peacefully resolve the so-called “Bangsamoro problem.”

The MILF wants remaining Moro-dominated communities in the South, including the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, fused together and be placed under the BJE without a plebiscite.

The government has stood pat in asserting constitutional restraint, saying to concede to such a demand would not be consistent with the principle of national sovereignty and territorial integrity.

The MILF has persistently been demanding recognition of Moro lands in the South, which it says have long existed under the rule of the sultans, whose political and administrative principalities were already in place even before the coming of the Spaniards in the 16th century.