MANILA, 23 May 2006 — A senior leader of a former Philippine Muslim rebel group accused the government yesterday of failing to carry out promises made in a peace accord and said several aspects of the deal needed to be changed to make it work.
The Philippine government and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) signed a peace deal in 1996 under which an autonomous Muslim area was created in the country’s south in 2001, but conflict has continued in that region of the mainly Roman Catholic country.
Muslimen Sema, secretary-general of the MNLF, said the government’s failure to carry out political and economic reforms as agreed in the peace accord was the root of the conflict.
“When we agreed to abandon our demand for independence and accepted the government’s autonomy offer in 1996, the Moro was assured that we can have anything under the sun,” Sema told Reuters in an interview yesterday.
“But it was not properly implemented. The law that created the autonomous region for Muslims in the south ignored the key provisions of the peace agreement...we want the law to be amended,” he said.
Sema said there were at least 10 provisions in the law that did not conform to the peace deal, including allowing Muslims to explore and exploit natural resources, like mines and oil.
Sema, 57, who is also mayor of Cotabato City, the commercial hub of the mainly Muslim provinces on southern Mindanao island, said the government must heed the advice of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to respect the peace deal.
The OIC, a group of 57 Muslim states, sent a delegation to the Philippines last week to help remove obstacles holding up a peace agreement between the government and the MNLF.
Disturbed by the situation in the south that led to intense fighting in 2005, Sayed Kassem El-Masry, an Egyptian diplomat and head of the five-member mission, has invited the government and the MNLF to a meeting in Saudi Arabia in July. The OIC delegation held talks with Arroyo in Manila yesterday and was due to meet MNLF leaders today before returning to Saudi Arabia. They were expected to report their findings next month during OIC meetings in Azerbaijan.
Sema said the MNLF was hoping the tripartite meeting would “plug the loopholes of the peace agreement, remove frustrations of many Muslims and restore their trust to the government.”
