MILF skeptical about government-NDF peace pact

DAVAO CITY, Philippines  – The Moro Islamic Liberation Front has belittled the pronouncement of government that it could forge a final peace agreement with the National Democratic Front (NDF) and end the 40-year communist insurgency within three years.

In a statement in the MILF’s official website Luwaran.com, lawyer Lanag Ali, a former member of the MILF peace panel, said that government’s pronouncements were rather ‘too ambitious’ and impossible to happen.

“The communist-led revolutionary struggle is harder to crack than that of the MILF,” Ali said.

He pointed out that the NDF calls for destruction of the state and the replacement of the existing system.

Earlier, Undersecretary Alex Padilla, who is the government’s chief peace negotiator with the NDF, said the three-year agenda-bound and time-bound framework is necessary for both sides to reach a peace accord. Padilla said peace talks between warring groups in the Ireland conflict settled in 1998 was completed in three years, despite the fact that there were 19 parties involved.

But the MILF, he explained, is pushing only for the setting up of a self-governing entity in a portion of Mindanao, pursuant to the right of the Bangsamoro people to self-determination.

Padilla said the Aquino administration is sincere in ending once and for all the insurgency that has caused havoc to lives and property amounting to billions of pesos that could have been used for deve­lopment.

But Ali countered that the three-year period is too short a time to clinch an agreement with a party such as the NDF that has a thousand ways to call off the peace talks even without notice.

The MILF has lamented the continued delay in the resumption of long-stalled peace talks as government demands that Malaysia replaces its official designated as facilitator of the peace process.