MILF: Speed up peace talks

MANILA, Philippines -  The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) has urged the government to speed up the peace talks despite unresolved concerns about a renegade commander who threatens to derail the process.

MILF chief negotiator Muhagher Iqbal said formal negotiations to settle a bloody decades-long rebellion in the southern Philippines have gone on for too long since 1997.

Iqbal was speaking yesterday at the start of the latest round of talks brokered by Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur.

Iqbal said the government should leave it to the MILF to solve the problem with Ameril Ombra Kato, one of its most hardline commanders opposed to the peace talks.

Kato has formed his own group of a few hundred followers amid differences with the main rebel group’s armed wing.

For his part, the government’s chief negotiator, Marvin Leonen, urged the MILF in his opening statement to address its splinter groups.

Leonen said the MILF should give a satisfactory answer to the government’s question if it should also negotiate with Kato’s group.

He said Kato’s breaking away raises serious concern on the MILF’s ability to negotiate with the government, and endangers the ceasefire mechanisms between the two sides.

Meanwhile, the MILF, on its website, reported that Abdullah Macapaar, alias Commander Bravo, who led bloody attacks on several communities in Lanao del Norte in 2008, has sent four emissaries to prod Kato to rejoin the group.

The MILF, however, said Macapaar’s effort is just a personal initiative and did not have the official approval of its Central Committee.

But Macapaar would anyway “exhaust all efforts to make Kato and his group realize their shortcomings and return to the fold of the Bangsamoro Islamic Armed Forces (BIAF),” the MILF’s official military wing. – AP, Jose Rodel Clapano, John Unson