MANILA, 17 November 2007 — The Philippines and the country’s largest Muslim rebel group have agreed to allow a team of Swiss demining experts to recover tons of unexploded ordnance in conflict areas in the south, officials said yesterday.

Rodolfo Garcia, a retired general and the government’s chief peace negotiator, told Reuters the recovery of unexploded rounds of mortar, howitzer and aerial bombs was among issues the two sides had agreed in two days of talks in Malaysia this week.

“Both sides agreed that these unexploded ordnance pose real dangers to civilians in Muslim communities in the south,” Garcia said, adding the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) would also draft an agreement on the demining activities.

Since 2004, a French non-government organization and the Japanese Embassy in Manila have provided artificial legs to hundreds of Muslims, including children, who were victims of these unexploded ordnance.

Garcia said the Philippine military no longer used deadly anti-personnel mines after Manila ratified a UN convention banning them in 2000.

Communist rebels continue to use improvised land mines.

On Thursday, Manila and the MILF overcame a major hurdle in talks on a proposed ancestral homeland for 3 million Muslims in the south of the mainly Roman Catholic country in Southeast Asia.

Garcia said he was confident of signing an agreement on ancestral domain with the MILF in January 2008, paving the way for a possible, historic final agreement in August.

Cautious Response

A prominent Muslim group in the Philippines, meanwhile, reacted with caution over the announce breakthrough in the government’s talks with the MILF.

Amina Rasul, head of the Philippine Council for Islam and Democracy, said it was interesting to find out what exactly was agreed upon in Kuala Lumpur “to determine how this relates to the existing peace agreement between the government and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF).”

The MILF, which broke away from the MNLF in 1978 over tactical differences, refused to accept the agreement signed between the government and the MNLF in 1996, opting to conduct its own negotiations with Manila.

Rasul said a new peace agreement could complicate matters. She said the main concern was how the proposed new Muslim homeland would relate to the existing self-rule area now dominated by the MNLF.

“You are talking about the same constituency and the same territory,” she said in a phone interview.

She noted that the MNLF chairman Nur Misuari, now under house arrest and on trial over a failed rebellion in 2001, had warned last week that, “If there’s going to be a peace agreement (between the government and the MILF) it would be illegal’ because it would violate the 1996 agreement.”

The agreement on the extent of territory to be handed over had been a major stumbling block in the peace talks that opened when a cease-fire was forged with the MILF in 2001.

The two sides did not disclose the new borders agreed after two days of talks in Kuala Lumpur, but Malaysian officials said the territory would be greater than the present autonomous region in the troubled island of Mindanao.

The land in question is known as an “ancestral domain,” consisting of untitled communal farms that came under formal state ownership when the Philippines became a Spanish colony in the late 16th century.

Rasul said the 1996 peace accord has not even been “effectively implemented” because the regional government did not really have financial autonomy and a subsequent amendment effectively returned control over the region’s “strategic” natural resources back to the national government.

She said Manila was also remiss in promoting the implementation of Islamic law and Islamic education in the self-rule area. “It looks like more programs are being supported by the international community as compared to the national government.”

“All of these details — and these are not minor details mind you — need to be threshed out,” Rasul added. (With Reports of Reuters & AFP)