Ceasefire monitors to stay

COTABATO CITY – Malaysia has approved the request of the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front to extend the stay in the south of the international team helping monitor the ceasefire between military and MILF forces.

The MILF website, www.luwaran.com, however, said Malaysia Deputy Prime Minister Dato’ Seri Najib Mohammad Bin Abdul, who readily agreed to the request on his government’s behalf, urged the government and MILF peace panels to work harder for the peace talks to progress.

MILF chief negotiator Mu­haquer Iqbal said the Malaysian deputy prime minister acceded to the request for the extended stay of the peacekeeping mission in the south during a recent meeting with him and the government’s chief peace negotiator, Rodolfo Garcia, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The Malaysian-led international monitoring team, whose stay is supposed to end on Nov. 30, is continuing its peace­keeping missions until Aug. 30 next year.

“There should be substantive progress (in the talks) in order to give importance and meaning to the (team’s) presence,” Iqbal quoted the Malaysian official as telling him and Garcia during the meeting.

The monitoring team, composed of military and police officers from Brunei, Libya and Malaysia, and a rehabilitation expert from Japan, has been monitoring the ceasefire since 2003.

The Malaysian government earlier wanted the monitoring team to stay only until Nov. 30 due to lack of progress in the peace talks.

The peace talks had been stalled from September last year to October this year due to misunderstandings between the two panels on the ancestral domain issue.

The two panels broke the impasse after three executive sessions and formal talks more than a week ago in Kuala Lumpur, where both sides agreed on the territorial coverage of the so-called Moro domain, which the MILF wanted covered by a proposed governing mechanism called the Bangsamoro Juridical Entity.

Both sides also granted bilateral clearance to Canada to join the multinational monitoring team during the talks in Kuala Lumpur.

Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process Jesus Dureza said the extended stay of the ceasefire monitoring team would help preserve cordiality between military and MILF forces in flashpoint areas in Mindanao.