The Philippines’ largest Muslim rebel group threatened yesterday to pull out of peace talks with Manila because the government has cancelled a territorial deal after it was challenged in the Supreme Court.
Mohaqher Iqbal, chief peace negotiator of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), said the rebels would only go back to the negotiating table if the government revived and signed the agreement expanding an autonomous Muslim region in the south of the Catholic-majority nation.
“The peace process is now in purgatory,” Iqbal said before he boarded a flight to the southern Philippines. “It was buried by [the] government’s decision not to sign the ancestral domain agreement.”
“We’re not only disappointed and frustrated over [the] government’s decision to turn its back on the ancestral domain deal, we’ve completely lost trust and confidence in them. The fate of the peace negotiation rests solely in the hands of the government,” Iqbal said.
MILF has been in on-off talks with Manila since 1997 to end nearly 40 years of conflict that has killed 120,000 people and stunted growth in the south, an poor region believed to be sitting on huge deposits of metals and hydrocarbons.
Malaysia has been brokering talks since 2001 and agreed last week to keep about 12 unarmed troops in the southern Philippines for another three months to monitor a ceasefire agreement.
Renegade members of MILF went on a rampage two weeks ago after the territorial deal was halted by the Supreme Court and the military has said nearly 200 people have been killed in fighting in parts of the southern Mindanao region.
On Friday, Manila’s chief legal counsel formally told the 15-member Supreme Court the government would no longer honor the ancestral domain agreement with MILF, which was supposed to be signed in Kuala Lumpur on Aug. 5.
Jesus Dureza, the president’s spokesman, said the government has decided to review the entire peace process and consult all sections of society in the south before sitting down with Muslim rebels to find a more acceptable deal based on the Constitution.
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