ZAMBOANGA CITY, 5 July 2003 — With the government insisting that separatist chief Hashim Salamat lead his group’s peace panel, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) yesterday said it may also demand that President Gloria Arroyo head the government panel when peace talks resume this month in Malaysia.

“This is to give the same dose of medicine to the government,” said the MILF’s website Luwaran.com, bewailing the government’s stiffening resolve to bring out the reclusive Salamat into the open.

Quoting Jun Mantawil, chairman of the Secretariat of the MILF negotiating panel, the website said the move to have Arroyo also sit in the peace table is getting support from senior rebel leaders, who are members of the MILF Central Committee.

The Front’s vice chairman for political affairs, Ghazali Jaafar, has denied a statement by Foreign Affairs Secretary Blas Ople that Salamat has agreed to lead the MILF panel.

Ople said the MILF has submitted five names of its official negotiators and among them was Salamat. The MILF maintains that Salamat’s vice chairman for military affairs Murad Ebrahim is still the chief peace negotiator.

Jaafar said: “Choosing our negotiators is our sole prerogative and is purely internal to the MILF.”

He accused the government of introducing so many roadblocks against the immediate resumption of the peace talks with the MILF. “One of these obstacles is the insistence of the government for the MILF to initiate move to lift the criminal charges against its leaders through the Department of Justice,” Jaafar said.

The MILF has repeatedly demanded that the government recall the warrants of arrest against Salamat, Murad and Jaafar and other key rebel leaders implicated in the series of bombings in the southern Philippines that killed nearly 100 people since early this year.

Malaysian ambassador to the Philippines Muhammad Noor Taufik has said his government would ask Manila to quash the arrest warrants against the rebel leaders.

President Arroyo has ordered the police and the military to capture Salamat and other rebel leaders dead or alive and has offered bounties totalling 50 million pesos for their arrest.

MILF spokesman Eid Kabalu said there will be no talks unless the government lift the arrest warrants.

“They should lift that warrants (of arrest) against our leader so we may pursue the talks. Right now, there is no positive developments,” he said yesterday.