Peace negotiators burn midnight candle in Kuala Lumpur
Prof. Miriam Coronel-Ferrer File Photo
MANILA, Philippines – Negotiators for the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front decided to work into the night Saturday in Kuala Lumpur in an effort to complete the power-sharing section of a comprehensive agreement to end the decades-old conflict in Mindanao.
“We are trying hard to finish it tonight. We made a lot of progress on a lot of items but we still have several difficult issues to discuss,” government chief negotiator Miriam Coronel-Ferrer told the Philippine Daily Inquirer by phone Saturday evening.
“We’re still working on several items like on government structure, transportation, and telecommunications. We’ll be meeting overtime,” she added.
The 41st formal session of talks in the Malaysian capital began on October 8 and was expected to have been completed on Friday. The MILF also expressed hope that the power-sharing annex would be completed by late Saturday.
In July, the two panels also worked overtime to complete the contentious wealth-sharing annex.
But unlike the wealth-sharing annex, “all is calm” with the discussions on power-sharing, a source privy to the talks told the Inquirer.
Before the wealth-sharing annex was completed, the negotiators walked on a tight rope and the talks were put on hold for nearly four months after the government and MILF panels could not agree on the status of an earlier document on the subject that they already had initialed.
If the power-sharing annex is signed on Saturday night or on Sunday, it would leave the parties with only the section on normalization to finalize.
The sections involving transitional arrangements and modalities were signed earlier this year.
All four annexes will comprise the comprehensive peace agreement that the government and the MILF hope to sign before the year ends.
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