MILF asks Americans to help in peace talks

ZAMBOANGA CITY: United States officials have met with top Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) leaders at a tightly guarded rebel base in the southern Philippines. The MILF is the country’s largest Muslim rebel group that is fighting for decades for self-determination in the island of Min-danao, where security forces backed by US military intelligence are fighting terrorism and insurgents.

On Friday, Leslie Bassett, US deputy ambassador to Manila, led senior American officials in a two-hour meeting with Murad Ebrahim, the secluded leader of the MILF, in Maguindanao’s Sultan Kudarat town. Basset assured Ebrahim of US support to the peace process in Mindanao.

The MILF is currently negotiating peace with Manila in an effort to end the bloody fighting in the restive, but mineral-rich region of Mindanao.

Washington is a key aid donor to impoverished Muslim areas of Mindanao, and US Special Forces based on the island provide training and intelligence to Philippine government troops fighting Islamist militants.

The MILF statement said its chief Murad stressed the movement’s commitment to reaching a peace deal with the government of President Gloria Arroyo “through a negotiated political settlement.”

The Arroyo government and the 12,000-member MILF have been taking tentative steps toward resuming formal negotiations in recent months.

Peace talks were halted last year after the MILF attacked Christian communities across the southern Philippines, killing more than 300 people and displacing around 750,000.

The fighting came after the Supreme Court threw out a government proposal to give the rebels control over their so-called ancestral domain, which covers more than 700 towns and villages.
The MILF and the Philippine government signed a new ceasefire in July.

Since the US occupation of the Philippines, the Muslims have sought a separate homeland from Washington. Bangsamoro forefathers officially asked the United Sates as early as 1921 and followed up in 1924 and in 1935 to separate Bangsamoro homeland from the Filipinos of Luzon and Visayas once independence will be granted to the latter. The Moros wanted to remain under US rule rather than being annexed to the Philippine Republic.


The MILF appealed to Washington to help in the resolution of the Mindanao problem by addressing the root cause, which is political, emanating from the grant of the US of independence to the Philippines, which the MILF claimed, had immorally and illegally incorporated the Bangsamoro homeland.