Gov’t, Moro rebels need to ink peace deal before 2016

From Business World (Jan 15): Gov’t, Moro rebels need to ink peace deal before 2016

Government and Moro negotiators should hammer out a peace agreement that could be fully implemented before President Benigno S. C. Aquino III steps down from office in 2016, a lawmaker said yesterday. “They should move their time frame from 2016 to at the very least 2015,” Senator Alan Peter S. Cayetano told media during a visit.

He said the two sides should identify issues that will make the agreement binding and lead to political stability in Mindanao such as the giving up of arms on the part of the rebels. “My fear is in the end, it will not be about the framework agreement and the principles, but who will be the leaders [of Bangsamoro that will replace the autonomous Muslim region],” he said.

The two sides signed the peace plan, called the Framework Agreement on the Bangsamoro, in October last year which provides, among others, for the creation of a 15-member Transition Commission that will draft the Bangsamoro basic law. Under the proposal, the new law, which would create the new political entity, will take effect by 2016.

The proposed peace deal under the Aquino administration would be the third for Mindanao as the first was signed between the administration of then president Ferdinand E. Marcos and the Moro National Liberation Front of Nur Misuari in Tripoli, Libya in 1975. In 1996, Mr. Misuari’s group and the administration of then president Fidel V. Ramos also inked another peace agreement.

The Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the other group then headed by the late Ustadz Hashim Salamat, parted ways with Mr. Misuari’s group in the 1970s because of their disagreements in principles, with Mr. Salamat’s group banking on religion as basis for governance while Mr. Misuari’s group was more secular in nature.

 http://www.bworldonline.com/content.php?section=Nation&title=Gov’t,-Moro-rebels-need-to-ink-peace-deal-before-2016&id=64332