Philippine: Government-Moro peace talks from August 22 to 24

The Philippine government and a formerly separatist Filipino-Muslim group will hold formal peace talks in Malaysia from August 22 to 24, a local paper said. Negotiators of the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) want to fasttrack talks, and hope to forge a political settlement before the end of 2016, government negotiator Marivic Leonen told the Star. President Benigno Aquino and MILF chairman Al Haj Murad held a secret meeting in a hotel in Tokyo last Thursday. During the talks, the MILF said their agenda is not secession, but to have a place for Filipino-Muslims, classified as a sub-state, said Leonen, adding this has made the government negotiators believe the MILF agenda is "no longer to separate". Explaining the meaning of its proposed sub-state for Filipino-Muslims in the south, the MILF said in Luwaran, its website, "There is nothing to fear in this proposal because the sub-state, as the name connotes, is still part of the Philippines." "It has no army, except police and internal security forces tasked to do policing within the sub-state," Luwaran said. "This entity is not an independent state. The sub-state has jurisdiction only over other matters, except those jointly exercised by the sub-state and the central government." The national government will still run the regional offices of the national defence, foreign relations, currency and postal services in the southern Philippines, said Luwaran. 'Let Moros run their affairs' Meanwhile, Luwaran also quoted the MILF as saying, "Let the Moros run their affairs (in the south); let them decide their own destiny. Let them succeed or self-destruct. Gone were the days when the government in Manila designed everything for them (in the south)." The Philippine government and the MILF have been holding on and off peace talks since 1997. The have initially agreed to hold ceasefire, flush terrorists out in the south, create an international monitoring team to observe ceasefire implementation, and an international group to observe their negotiations, so that they will be implemented properly. The proposed sub-state was a replacement of the proposed land deal to expand an existing Autonomous Region for Muslims in Mindanao (ARMM) in the south, with the inclusion of 700 Muslim-dominated villages near ARMM. When the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the proposed political settlement was unconstitutional, several MILF commanders attacked civilian communities, killed hundreds, and displaced 750,000 residents in the south. Peace talks were held informally through back channels, and formal peace talks were resumed only during the start of the Aquino administration. In 1978, the MILF began armed struggle to establish an independent Islamic state in the south. It gave up its secessionist stance since it responded to the government's peace initiative in 1997.