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.