MANILA: Manila’s church bells pealed on Friday to usher in “national peace consciousness month” — an event that rings hollow for conflict-stricken communities in the southern Philippines.

Ten years ago this week, the government of the largely Roman Catholic country signed a deal with a group of Muslim guerrillas called the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) that was meant to end decades of conflict. Instead, it sowed more strife.

Manila had raised hopes a peace deal could be signed this month with another Muslim rebel group. But talks have stalled over demands by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) for more territory in an enlarged Muslim homeland.

Negotiations, brokered by Malaysia, are due to resume next week but neither side has shown much urgency for a breakthrough.

In fact, both President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and MILF Chairman Ebrahim Murad have good reasons for simply maintaining the status quo with its fragile ceasefire and round after round of exploratory talks.

Forging a peace deal for the impoverished south is likely to provoke rival Muslim groups and local Christian communities with competing claims on land and governance, as well as upset military commanders whose jobs are intertwined with conflict.

Arroyo, who has survived two impeachment attempts and many alleged plots, cannot afford to upset powerful players such as the army, whose members have been part of at least a dozen coup attempts — two of them successful — in the last 20 years.

There is also little pressure from the public or media to resolve a conflict that seems remote to many Filipinos, most of whom have not been to the southern islands of Mindanao and Sulu.

But the fighting, which has killed more than 120,000 people and displaced at least 1 million since the early 1970s, risks flaring up again if Manila and Muslim leaders do not come up with a deal that addresses the frustrations of a new generation.

“The longer this goes on without a resolution, the greater the potential for the younger, more militant people and the MILF members opposed to the talks to gain in strength,” said Malcolm Cook, programme director for Asia and the Pacific at the Lowy Institute for International Policy.

A failure to hammer out agreement also plays into the hands of Abu Sayyaf, the smallest and most militant Muslim separatist group in the Philippines, which relies on the acquiescence of locals to maintain its bases on remote southwestern islands.

“I don’t think all the dangerous guys with guns will go away,” said Tom Green, executive director of risk consultancy Pacific Strategies & Assessments.

“But it’s in everybody’s interest to try and get the MILF and government to move forward,” he said. “We feel that would dry up a lot of the water that the Abu Sayyaf swims in.”

No one wants to repeat the mistakes of the 1996 agreement between the government of then President Fidel Ramos and the MNLF, which partly failed due to weak implementation.

Accustomed to guerrilla warfare in the jungle, MNLF Chairman Nur Misuari and his lieutenants were not prepared for office life as administrators.

Angered by the government failing to deliver all the funds it had promised after accusing him of mismanagement, Misuari led a botched rebellion in 2001

and is now under house arrest.

—Reuters