KUALA LUMPUR: The Philippine government said yesterday a “historical” road map to end a decades-long insurgency that has left more than 150,000 people dead could be signed within days.
The government issued the upbeat forecast as the latest round of peace talks with the 12,000-strong Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) began in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur.
“We are on the brink of layering the written predicates that can frame the process of building trust as we usher in an era of peace, of hope and of recovery,” chief government negotiator Marvic Leonen said at the start of the talks, according to a Philippine government statement.
“We cannot postpone any longer. Now is the time,” he said.
“To state that what we hope to be able to do in the next few days is historical is definitely an understatement.”
Mohagher Iqbal, chief negotiator for the MILF, said in his opening remarks that negotiations were “now on the home stretch”, according to the statement.
However he warned a resolution must be reached soon, after previous false dawns in the peace process had led to more violence.
“If we cannot conclude it soon successfully, now that we are at the brink of the exercise, we will be in trouble,” Iqbal said, warning of “spoilers” who may want to derail the peace efforts for their own interests.
The government and the militants said ahead of the talks there was a strong spirit of cooperation following months of intense diplomacy.
But they also conceded many of the issues that derailed previous peace efforts had still not been agreed upon.
Separately, police said a minibus ferrying students to school has collided with a truck along a northern Philippine highway, killing 10 people.
Police investigator John Lay Apostol says four were killed instantly yesterday’s crash in Ilocos Norte province’s Sarrat township. Six others died in a hospital, while four high school students were being treated for injuries.
He says six of the dead were students aged 6 to 19 who were on board the minibus, known as a jeepney, a popular mode of transportation in the Philippines.
Apostol says the jeepney driver tried to overtake another vehicle and did not immediately notice the oncoming truck.
The truck driver is being detained for questioning by police. The jeepney driver is among the dead.
Mindanao is home to vast untapped reserves of gold, copper and other minerals, as well as being one of the country’s most important farming regions.
There are roughly four million Muslims in Mindanao, which they see as their ancestral homeland dating back to Islamic sultanates established before Spanish Christians arrived in the 1500s.