Once again, land concessions to jihadists prove fruitless: Anything short of everything is simply not enough.
From Reuters: “Manila says no new deadline for Muslim peace deal”
MANILA (Reuters) – The Philippine government declined on Tuesday to give a new deadline for a peace agreement with Muslim rebels as differences over territory junked hopes for a deal next month. The mainly Catholic country has been trying for 30 years to end an insurgency that has killed more than 120,000 people but negotiations with the largest Muslim rebel group have stalled over the size of their proposed homeland in the south.
“Everybody is on guard as far as territory is concerned, not only the Muslims but also the indigenous peoples and the Christian population,” Professor Rudy Rodil, a member of the government’s negotiating panel, told a foreign press briefing.
“Before May, we were optimistic. At the rate we were going, we thought that maybe September would be a good date,” said Rodil. “We realised that we were probably a bit too optimistic.”
The government has offered to add 613 villages to an existing five-province Muslim autonomous region but the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the Philippines’ largest Islamic rebel group, wants to include more than 1,000.
The Muslim minority in the southern Philippines is largely located on the western side of the island of Mindanao, where there are also large Christian cities. About 20 percent of the region’s 18 million people are believed to be Muslim.
Many of the villages earmarked for membership of a Muslim homeland lie far from the existing five-province autonomous region and Rodil said the question of how to govern them had yet to be addressed.
The two sides, in talks since 1997, have also side-stepped the question of how to share ownership of Mindanao’s mineral wealth, some of which is claimed by indigenous tribes as well as Muslims and the central government.
A peace agreement with another Muslim rebel group, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), sealed 10 years ago this week, has failed to bring peace or jobs to the local population.
Jesus Dureza, the president’s peace adviser, said talks with the MILF, brokered by Malaysia since 2001, would begin shortly without any public deadline.
“I do not think we should raise expectations in the public’s mind,” said Dureza, declining to give further details.
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On Monday, a MILF insurgent along with two suspected members of Abu Sayyaf, a smaller Muslim rebel group which the government has vowed to destroy, were arrested allegedly trying to board a Manila-bound ferry with homemade bombs.