MANILA: Zorayda, peddling pirated DVDs of Hollywood movies in Manila’s business district, is looking forward to a happy ending of her own. Five years ago, her Muslim family was scattered to different corners of the Philippines as fighting raged between government troops and Muslim guerrillas in southern Mindanao island.
But this year her parents, who remained in Mindanao, wrote to the 26-year-old Zorayda and her four siblings telling them it was finally safe to come home to their village.
“I hope a peace agreement is signed soon so we can go back to our farms again. Life in Manila is much more difficult,” Zorayda said.
But her optimism is not shared by many political analysts, despite a ceasefire in the volatile south that has held for nearly two years and talks last month that were described by negotiators as a breakthrough in the decades-old conflict.
Although progress was made on the thorny issue of ancestral domain — lands claimed for a Muslim homeland by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) — there was no formal agreement.
And the two sides have yet to tackle the political details of a final deal. A peace deal signed with the then largest rebel group in 1996 is widely seen as a failure because the autonomous region it created remains heavily dependent on Manila and mired in poverty.
“Signing an agreement is not a guarantee to end the conflict,” Abhoud Syed Lingga, executive director of Mindanao-based Institute of Bangsamoro Studies, told Reuters. “What will end the conflict is the implementation of an agreement that will satisfy the legitimate grievances and aspirations of the Bangsamoro people,” he said, using the local term for the Muslims of Mindanao.
MILF leaders and members are due to gather in Mindanao at the end of May in a rare open consultation ahead of the next round of preliminary talks with the government in Kuala Lumpur in June.
Malaysia has been brokering talks since 2001 to end more than 36 years of guerrilla war that has killed at least 120,000 people and stunted development on resource-rich Mindanao.
Analysts say the MILF leadership risks a backlash from the movement’s younger, more radical generation if it accepts an agreement that falls far short of independence. But it is also keen to avoid further delays as the population grows increasingly war-weary.
“The MILF feels a sense of urgency in the negotiations that the government does not,” Zachary Abuza, an expert on the conflict at Boston’s Simmons College, wrote in a recent article for the Philippines’ Newsbreak magazine.
“The reality that confronts (MILF Chairman Ebrahim) Murad is that an agreement for the sake of an agreement, one that falls far short of the Front’s stated goals, will cause the MILF to explode, sowing the seeds of the next conflict.”
Failure to bring the whole of the MILF into a peace deal would likely deal a blow to Philippine and US government attempts to root out members of militant groups such as Jemaah Islamiah believed to use Mindanao for training and refuge.
Even as negotiators struggle to address old problems, new ones are emerging. Lingga warned that the implementation of an agreement could be hurt by the revival of several armed Christian vigilante groups in some parts of Mindanao.—Reuters
