EDITORIAL - Resume the negotiations

There was a bit of good news in a week dominated by a brawl between presidential friends, the falling peso and collapsing stock market. Surfacing for the first time since being driven out of their main camp, Al-Haj Murad of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front expressed his group’s willingness to pursue peace with the government. Murad, the MILF’s vice chairman for military affairs, was rumored to have been seriously wounded or killed in the military’s assault on Camp Abubakar, once the rebel group’s stronghold.

The government, for its part, appeared ready for compromise to restart the stalled peace talks. Defense Secretary Orlando Mercado said the government could even consider the MILF’s demand to resume the negotiations abroad, as the government did with the Communist Party of the Philippines. Meanwhile, continuing his carrot-and-stick approach, President Estrada welcomed back into the fold more than 500 MILF members and promised to help them start a new life.

A team from the Organization of Islamic Conference is arriving this month to observe the implementation of the peace pact signed in 1996 by the Moro National Liberation Front with the government. MNLF chairman Nur Misuari, the holdover governor of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, has offered to help broker the resumption of peace talks with the MILF. Murad also welcomed the forthcoming visit of the OIC and said the MILF wanted the talks held in one of the Islamic Conference’s 56 member-countries.

The MILF has lost all its camps and has no territory to speak of. Although still capable of guerrilla warfare and terrorism, it will be bargaining from a position of weakness. Murad said the MILF is ready to settle for autonomy instead of the impossible aim of independence. The MILF is greatly weakened, but it can regain its strength if poverty and other problems that fuel insurgency in Mindanao are not addressed. Peace, or at least some respite from armed conflict, is vital if the go-vernment wants to reduce poverty and bring development to the South. Any opportunity for peace in Mindanao must be pursued.