Peace deal won’t abandon 1996 pact

By: Nikko Dizon - 11 years ago

MILF chief negotiator Mohagher Iqbal. AP FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines—The chief negotiator of the rebel Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) on Saturday said the peace deal forged recently with the Aquino government in Kuala Lumpur would not entirely abandon an earlier peace agreement between the government and the rival Moro National Liberaton Front (MNLF).

MILF leader Mohagher Iqbal said his group would integrate the “good parts” of the 1996 Peace Agreement between the government and the MNLF in a new proposed Bangsamoro Basic Law.

The MILF, a breakaway faction of the secessionist MNLF, had withheld its support for the peace deal between MNLF founder Nur Misuari and then President Fidel Ramos. It eventually agreed to separate peace negotiations with the government.

“We are looking into the 1996 Peace Agreement, meaning the good parts of that agreement, (to) form part of the (Bangsamoro) Basic Law that we are going to write. We are not going to abandon that,” Iqbal said on Thursday over dinner with Inquirer editors and reporters.

Iqbal added: “If you look at the 1996 Peace Agreement there are good points but it is not a perfect agreement. No agreement in the world is perfect not even the agreement between the government and MILF is perfect. So whatever it is that the MNLF through the 1996 Peace Agreement has achieved, then the MILF is building on those gains.”

The government’s chief negotiator Miriam Coronel-Ferrer said it was an MILF initiative to include the 1996 Peace Agreement with the MNLF in the negotiations for the power-sharing annex.

“That was a very good initiative coming from the MILF precisely as a means of telling the MNLF, their brothers and sisters in the MNLF, that this is not a completely distinct process,” Ferrer said, adding:

“It is after all for all the Bangsamoro. It does not abrogate what has already been achieved by the MNLF in the past but it provides that kind of continuity.”

Iqbal said that the MILF decided to have separate peace negotiations with the government after the government-MNLF peace agreement was signed under then President Fidel Ramos because his group found “so many flaws” in that peace deal.

Two of the flaws, he said, were the “abandonment of the right of self-determination of the people” and the “totality clause” which states that “when there is a conflict in the interpretation of the agreement, existing government laws would apply.”