Seven-nation mission set to assess Philippine
Muslim rebellion
MANILA, Oct 11 (AFP) - A
seven-nation team from the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) will make a landmark
trip next week to look into the plight of Muslims in the southern Philippines where a
rebellion has raged for three decades.
The OIC helped broker a 1996
peace accord between Manila and Muslim guerrillas but the agreement failed to silence guns
in the Mindanao region.
Ahead of the fact-finding
mission from October 16, the largest Muslim rebel group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front
(MILF) has warned it would intensify guerrilla warfare to forward its cause.
The MILF in June failed to win
observer status in the 56-member world Islamic body.
"We recognize the
leadership of the OIC, we have to give respect to them even if we don't have an official
relationship with them yet," MILF spokesman Eid Kabalu told AFP in a telephone
interview from an undisclosed hideout in Mindanao.
But in the same breath he said:
"It is still all-out war here in Mindanao. We have a war plan, and we have to follow
that with or without the OIC mission."
Kabalu said leaders of the MILF
would "communicate" and hand over a position paper to the OIC mission led by
Indonesian foreign minister Alwi Shihab.
The four-day mission will look
into the implementation of a 1996 peace accord between Manila and the former rebel group
Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), from which the MILF split in 1978, officials said.
The mission was announced after
MNLF founder Nur Misuari accused Manila of reneging on parts of the peace deal, including
promised development aid.
Manila denied the allegation,
saying it has provided enough funding for Misuari, who under the pact became the governor
of a four-province Muslim autonomous region in the south.
Mission members Pakistan, Saudi
Arabia, Libya, Somalia, Senegal and Brunei are also to check on the living conditions of
the Muslim minority in the south, many of whom were displaced in fighting between
government troops and the MILF in recent months.
Most of the nations represented
in the mission were in a OIC panel which helped broker the Manila-MNLF peace accord four
years ago.
The agreement did not cover the
MILF and the smaller Abu Sayyaf group, which went on a kidnapping spree over the last five
months and is still holding five mostly foreign hostages in the southern island of Jolo.
MILF's Kabalu said the OIC
should report the "real score" in Mindanao, where government troops in a
four-month blitz earlier this year stormed the rebel group's main headquarters and 40
other camps, forcing a collapse in the peace talks.
The 15,000-strong MILF launched
a "jihad," or holy war, after the setback and has been blamed for a series of
massacres and bombings across Mindanao targeting Christians.
Retired Major General Guillermo
Ruiz, who was Manila's ceasefire committee chairman in the MNLF talks, hoped the MILF
would not make good its threat of violence during the OIC mission.
"That is a normal action
by any political group to catch attention, but I don't know if that would serve well in
gaining sympathy from the OIC," Ruiz, who now runs a risk consultancy firm said.
Ruiz said he believes the MILF
"is still a force to reckon with," noting their mass-based support in areas
across central Mindanao, where many of the past battles raged.
The MILF has said it may return
to the peace table if President Joseph Estrada agreed to hold talks abroad and lifted
bounties slapped on MILF leaders.
But group spokesman Kabalu said
it would not go the way of the MNLF which agreed to limited autonomy.
"We can resolve this
problem through political settlement -- an independent Islamic state," Kabalu said.
"Until we achieve that, war will continue."
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