COTABATO CITY, 25 June 2003 — Officials of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) said yesterday their chairman, Salamat Hashim, will sign for the group should it reach a peace agreement with the Philippine government.

Al-Haj Murad Ebrahim, the separatist group’s military chief, also said they are not also ruling out the possibility of allowing Salamat to lead the MILF’s peace negotiating panel. Murad issued the statement in an interview yesterday morning with Manila-based radio DZRH.

Murad issued this statement in the light of the insistence by Malaca?ang Palace for Salamat to participate in the peace talks so that any agreement reached would be binding to him and his followers.

The government has cited the case of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), in which chairman Nur Misuari himself participated in the talks until they reached a final peace agreement in 1996. Murad said it is still the MILF Central Committee that would decide who would lead their negotiating panel. But since all the Front’s three vice chairmen have headed the peace panel in separate occasions, he said, “it would not be remote that Chairman Salamat would take over the leadership of the panel.”

He recalled that during the opening of peace talks in 1997, it was Ghazali Jaafar, vice chairman for political affairs, who headed the MILF peace panel. In 1999 Abdulazis Mimbantas, vice chair for interior, took over until the talks collapsed when then President Joseph Estrada launched “all out war” against the MILF. Murad got his chance to lead the panel when the talks resumed in 2001 after Estrada was ousted from power the President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo took over.

Murad said, however, said the matter of who should be head of the MILF peace panel “is internal to front, in the same manner that the MILF is not interfering to GRP’s (government’s) decision on the composition of its own panel.”

“What is important is that whoever sits there will have the authority and mandate that would bind their respective principals from acts they officially entered into,” he added.

MILF spokesman Eid Kabalu, however said, the Central Committee’s decision as of yesterday was for Murad to continue heading the panel.

“In the rules and procedures in the conduct of negotiations, it’s the mandate not the personality that’s important. Even if you put (Chief Justice Hilario) Davide, if he has no mandate, the talks would amount to nothing,” he said.

What is sure, Kabalu said, was that when a final peace agreement is reached, it would be Salamat who will be their chief signatory to ensure that the accord was binding.

“He will be the one to sign the final peace agreement, that’s a given,” Kabalu said.

Earlier yesterday, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said she was taking steps to stabilize Mindanao, having earlier rejected a temporary cease-fire offered by the MILF.

“The government is preparing a blueprint for stabilizing the situation on the ground, effecting the speedy return of evacuees to their homes and (jump-starting) the peace negotiations,” she said in a statement without elaborating.

MILF rebels have been observing a temporary truce and have called on the government to call off military operations against MILF units blamed for a series of deadly bombings and raids in the region since March.

The president has urged the MILF to do more by renouncing alleged links to foreign terrorist organizations. She said that formal talks could not resume until the MILF hands over the bombing suspects.

Amid the tough rhetoric, Arroyo has quietly sent a high-level government mission to Malaysia for informal talks aimed at brokering a cease-fire.

She said she acknowledged “the clamor for a cease-fire among those affected by conflict” as well as the “cry for justice among the victims of terrorism.”

“It is the job of government to keep an even keel and balance out these imperatives,” she said.

The military, meanwhile, reported that it had recovered high-powered firearms and ammunition from the site of a clash between soldiers and MILF rebels in Kabuntalan town in Maguindanao province Sunday.