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Court halts Manila’s MILF deal

An armed female supporter of the Muslim separatist rebels from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) displays her weapon at a guerrilla camp in Al Barqa town in southern Basilan Province on Oct. 8 last year. The Philippine Supreme Court in Manila issued an order yesterday stopping the government from signing a land deal with the MILF following massive street protests against it. PHOTO: AFP

The Philippines’ Supreme Court issued a temporary restraining order yesterday halting a territorial de al between the government and Muslim separatists in the latest setback for peace in the nation’s volatile south.

The agreement between Manila and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the country’s largest Muslim rebel group, had been set to be signed in Kuala Lumpur today after more than 10 years of stop-start talks.

“There will be no signing tomorrow. I got a call from the [Supreme] court,” Jesus Dureza, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s spokesman, told reporters yesterday.

“The court issued a TRO [temporary restraining order] restraining the respondents from signing the MOA [memorandum of agreement],” court spokesman Midas Marquez told reporters.

The deal was meant to widen an existing autonomous region for Muslims in the south of the largely Catholic country and give them wide political and economic powers, including control over mineral wealth in an area rich in nickel, gold, gas and oil.

“I don’t know what will happen next,” Mohaqher Iqbal, the MILF’s chief peace negotiator, told reporters.

Catholic politicians in the south had asked the Supreme Court to halt the signing ceremony arguing that they had not been consulted on the deal, which they fear will carve up the southern island of Mindanao into Muslim enclaves.

“Do not build a Berlin Wall among the people in Mindanao,” Celso Lobregat, mayor of the mainly Catholic city of Zamboanga, had earlier told a crowd of around 15,000 people.

The Supreme Court has asked both sides to present their cases on Aug. 15.

The agreement was meant to formally reopen peace talks to end nearly 40 years of conflict that has killed more than 120,000 people, displaced 2 million and stunted growth in the region.

Analysts, however, are skeptical about whether the territorial deal will ever leave the drawing board, given its implementation is dependent on a comprehensive peace deal.

Both the MILF and Manila have committed to agree a final deal by November next year but deadlines have consistently been missed in over a decade of talks, punctuated by violent conflict.

Two petitions had already been filed with the Supreme Court calling for a temporary restraining order against the government not to sign the treaty.

Protesters carrying placards saying “MILF go home” blocked streets around Zamboanga’s city hall voicing their anger over the deal. The rally was attended by a number of prominent Roman Catholic church leaders and local officials.

Congressman Erico Fabian, representing the predominately Christian city of Zamboanga, filed one of the petitions with the Supreme Court yesterday asking the court to block the signing.

Although the city is located in Muslim Mindanao, Lobregat is on record saying he will never allow the city to be incorporated into a Muslim state.

The agreement has also put a question mark over the future of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), which is due to hold elections later this month.

Established in 1996 after a peace agreement between the government and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), the semi-autonomous ARMM was to have solved the so-called Muslim problem in the southern Philippines but was seen by many Muslims as a “sell out.”

The MILF, which split from the MNLF in 1981 after ideological disagreements over the direction of the movement, continued to fight for a Muslim homeland.

“The MILF does not represent the Muslims in Mindanao,” said Caloy Bandaying, a former Muslim rebel who has since joined sides with the government.
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