Gov’t, MILF prodded to resume peace talks

COTABATO CITY – Various organizations, some of them identified with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, staged yesterday a peace rally and took turns appealing for the government and MILF peace panels to resume with the stalled peace talks.

Many speakers in the supposed peace rally, however, lambasted the government for what is for them “dilly-dallying” with the peace talks, particularly in the forging of a memorandum of agreement on the implementation of almost 50 “consensus points” on ancestral domain.

The ancestral domain issue, which is the remaining still unresolved, thorny topic of the 11-year-old GRP-MILF truce encompasses the front’s concept of a Muslim homeland to be governed by its proposed Bangsa­moro Juridical Entity (BJE).

Peace talks between the government and the MILF started on Jan. 7, 1997, but gained headway only in 2003 with the help of Malaysia as “third party mediator.”

The GRP and MILF panels last met in 2007, but failed to reach an agreement on how to go about with the setting up of a territory, one that would group predominantly Moro areas in the South, to be covered by the BJE.

Talks are circulating here that the MILF was one of the brains behind the peace rally, preceded by a spate of attacks by its guerrillas in many parts of Central Mindanao.

Highly-placed government intelligence sources said the recent bombing of several government power facilities in the region and the MILF attacks at Maitum, Sarangani and other parts of Central Mindanao were meant to attract attention and project that the MILF is still a force to reckon with and, thus, the need for the talks to resume.

The latest of the MILF attacks in Central Mindanao were the simultaneous harassment of two barangays in Midsayap, North Cotabato on the eve of yesterday’s rally.

Lt. Col. Julieto Ando, spokesman of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division, said forces of the 6th ID have remained in their positions and have just been ignoring the provocations by the MILF.