RP anticipates peace parleys to end strife
RP anticipates peace parleys to end strife
MANILA (AFP): The Philippines hopes to conclude peace talks
with Moslem rebels who are demanding self-rule in the south, in
order to end two decades of fighting by mid-1995, Manila's chief
peace adviser said yesterday.
Retired army general Manuel Yan said in a statement that
committee-level talks between Manila and the Moro National
Liberation Front (MNLF) are to resume this month on the southern
island of Mindanao.
These talks are expected to lead "to the third, and hopefully
the last, round of formal talks in Jakarta in June," said Yan,
who is also the head of the Philippine government's panel in the
talks with the MNLF.
He also issued assurances to exiled MNLF chairman Nur Misuari
on his security during the talks, saying that Misuari's presence
"would be indispensable to sustained forward movement in the
peace negotiations."
Misuari, who is based in the Middle East, has expressed fears
about his safety amid an ongoing army offensive against an MNLF
breakaway faction, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), and
the Moslem fundamentalist group Abu Sayyaf.
The MNLF waged a short-lived but bloody war for an independent
Moslem state in this largely Roman Catholic nation in the early
1970s, but the rebellion has fizzled out.
With an estimated 15,000 armed fighters, the MNLF is now
seeking autonomy for Moslem-populated provinces on Mindanao
island.
The MNLF and the Philippine armed forces have signed a cease-
fire pact since the start of the talks in Jakarta in late 1993.
The talks are being supervised by the Organization of the Islamic
Conference.
Manila is also holding formal talks with rightist military
rebels and is inviting communist guerrillas to the negotiating
table.
New policy
Meanwhile the Abu Sayyaf, waging a kidnapping and bombing
campaign in the southern Philippines, has a new policy against
keeping prisoners alive, a police official said here yesterday.
Chief Inspector Benjamin Misuarez, the police operations chief
of Basilan island, told reporters the beheading of a Christian
village chief and his son in the nearby town of Maluso by the
Moslem group appeared to signal the policy shift.
The Abu Sayyaf, a recent fundamentalist offshoot of a Moslem
guerrilla movement that waged a war for secession in the south in
the early 1970s, has been bombing churches and other Christian
targets and kidnapping missionaries since 1992, and in some cases
had released captives for ransom.
Misuarez said Abu Sayyaf leader Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani
has recently ordered the group, believed to number about 200
gunmen, to "kill and behead all Christians" during fire fights or
hostage-taking situations.
The group is still holding five land surveyors who were
snatched last November and are demanding a one-million-peso
(US$41,666) ransom.