AJLPP Express Deep Concern Over MILF-GRP Talks:Gov’t chief peace negotiator for MILF quits (tags)
The Alliance for Just and Lasting Peace (AJLPP) today expressed apprehensions over the sudden and unexplained resignation of Silvestre Afable Jr. , government negotiator for peace process for the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) MILF equally expressed fears that negotiations for a peace agreement with the government would have to start from scratch again as a result of the resignation of the chief of the government’s peace panel, Silvestre Afable. AJLPP is deeply concerned that Afable’s resignation came at a time when the government and the MILF were close to restarting talks on a proposed ancestral homeland for 3 million Muslims in Mindanao. AJLPP knows that Afable who was a former staffer of DND Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile,has served since the two sides agreed to return to negotiations after hostilities erupted in February 2003.
MILF: WE ARE FOR NEW WAR (tags)
Media sources reported that the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) said yesterday that it was prepared to return to war should negotiations on territory, the thorniest of issues in ongoing peace talks with the government, lead to results not to its liking. Negotiations on territory, which documents on the peace talks describe as issues of ancestral domain, bogged down in Kuala Lumpur. More than 50,000 people died at the height of the Mindanao War just after Marcos declared martial law in 1972. In 2000, more than a million people were displaced when then President Joseph Estrada declared an “all-out war” policy aimed at dismantling MILF camps in Mindanao.