BEIJING—President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is set to meet Friday morning with Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi to discuss the suspended peace talks with the secessionist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).
The talks will take place before the opening Friday of the Seventh Asia-Europe Meeting (Asem) here.
The meeting will allow Arroyo to personally discuss the peace talks with Badawi, more than two months after government negotiations with the MILF were scuttled following the aborted signing of a provisional agreement to create a separate homeland for Muslims in Mindanao to be administered by the MILF.
Malaysia had been brokering the talks with the rebels and also headed a multinational ceasefire monitoring team.
“We don’t have to explain, but we will only inform them about what happened,” Presidential Peace Adviser Hermogenes Esperon told reporters in a phone patch from Wuhan, China on Thursday.
Esperon was noncommittal on whether the meeting with Badawi was a move to have the peace talks resume soon.
“We will have to conduct dialogues first before we go into that,” he said.
Following the Supreme Court’s rejection of the provisional agreement, the government has embarked on a new policy with regard to the Muslim insurgency. The new “DDR policy” calls on the Moro rebels to accede to disarmament, demobilization and rehabilitation before formal peace talks could take place.
Esperon said the meeting with Badawi would also tackle the drawing up of a “new framework” for the international monitoring team.
Senator Rodolfo Biazon earlier raised concerns over Malaysia’s involvement in the peace talks with the MILF, citing “conflict of interest.”
He warned Malacañang that letting Kuala Lumpur continue as the mediator of the peace talks would compromise the Philippine claim to Sabah, Malaysia’s East Malaysian state, and of the Spratly group of islands.
Biazon is pushing for Indonesia, which brokered the 1996 peace agreement signed with the main Muslim insurgency, the Moro National Liberation Front, to replace Malaysia.
