Philippines ends MILF peace talks
Updated
In a dramatic policy shift, the Philippine President Gloria Arroyo has abandoned more than a decade of peace talks with the country's largest Muslim rebel group - the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. The government has abolished its own negotiating team with the MILF, while the defence minister has described the separatists as now "irrelevant." The move threatens to collapse a five-year-old ceasefire between the two sides, and to escalate the fighting that's already occurring in the southern island of Mindanao.
Presenter: Tom Fayle
Speaker: Irene Santiago, government advisor on the peace process and a former member of the government peace panel that has just been abolished
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FAYLE: Irene Santiago you've been closely involved with the peace process for many years, what's your immediate reaction to the President's move?
SANTIAGO: Well I'm really very sad and disappointed because this is the only way to a peaceful settlement with the MILF and basically what the President is saying is that we're leaving the peace table and we are going to, in a sense it's forcing the MILF to take the violent option.
FAYLE: So were you surprised or had you seen it coming for some time?
SANTIAGO: Well they had been talking, they talked about this about Friday last week and this 'new paradigm shift' they're saying. But it was so bizarre that I said this can't be true that they're not going to talk to this group anymore after 11 years of talking with them. And how difficult it is for the government now to say, let's have a ceasefire and let's just go after the two rogue commanders and they keep saying it's a criminal activity. So I said so let the police look after that, let's preserve what we have, worked on for the past 11 years. And so I can't understand where this is coming from and so it is very difficult for us, especially now that I've been working with civil society groups. It's very difficult for us to bring this kind of thinking into any kind of a way to solve these problems.
FAYLE: Well, the government says it can't negotiate with a gun to its head. You don't have any sympathy with that position?
SANTIAGO: And that's true too. But I think that the way they're saying is that we are not going to negotiate with a gun being pointed at us, and precisely that's what I say, I said you don't negotiate with anybody who doesn't have a gun pointed at you, you negotiate precisely so that they will take the peaceful way. And so this to me is just, I don't know, it's all wrong, it's not going to get us to peace. It's going to escalate the violence and what I'm going to tell her if I ever get to see the President, I've got to tell her that this is going to escalate to the rest of the country. It's not going to be contained in Mindanao. For right now the most important thing is really to contain the conflict and therefore a ceasefire must be declared, and it must be the government because I know that if the government declares a ceasefire first, the MILF will also declare a ceasefire. And that's where we should begin again from and all this talk going back and forth is just not helping anyone.
FAYLE: It's always been a great fear hasn't it in the Philippines that the struggle in the south will escalate and spread to the major urban centres further north?
SANTIAGO: But you know with this new paradigm they're talking about they're forcing a rebel group to do just that. I mean they were patiently going through the whole process of discussing with government, and that's why I'm saying you close that avenue and the only other option is violence. And I think we in Mindanao who understand what the root causes of the conflict are understand that it's not about dismembering the republic, it's not about going against the constitution, it's saying we have to right some historical wrongs. And therefore this is the only way, you cannot use, I often say you cannot use the constitution as your main framework for solving a social conflict, because precisely the elements of the social conflict are in that constitution. We are not saying we're not going to be constitutional because the processes will have to be constitutional. But necessarily the proposals are for the amendment of the constitution, and that's not unconstitutional at all because it is in our constitution that it can be amended. So I think those of us who understand the root causes of the conflict are really dismayed at the recent events.
