AKBAYAN party – list Mindanao chair Tomas Villarin on Thursday said that he is pessimistic that a peace agreement between the government of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) will be signed before Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo hands over the presidency on June 30 her successor.
Villarin said that as long as Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is in charge in Malacanang, “The peace talks will just go through the motions of talking.”
“GMA has no moral ascendancy and political will to bring it to a conclusion much less get public consent,” added Villarin who is the party’s third nominee in the party-list election derby this 10th of May.
Villarin made the statement after news that Tomas Cabili resigned his post in the peace panel more than two months after another member Adel Antonino quit.
Cabili, who seats in the panel as non-government organizations and Christian representative, reportedly resigned in the panel because of lack of transparency in the way RP panel chair and Foreign Undersecretary Rafael Sequis is managing the peace talks.
Villarin said that the people of Mindanao have no confidence that GMA will pursue a genuine peace accord that could end the 40-year conflict between the MILF and the government especially following the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD) debacle and the Ampatuan massacre.
GMA used warlords in Mindanao as government proxy in its war against the MILF with the Ampatuan’s as the most lamentable example. This kind of low-intensity conflict program came to fore after the Ampatuan massacre last Nov. 23.
Search and recovery efforts done by the military and covered by the media after the massacre revealed the Ampatuan’s very large cache of high-powered arms, a large quantity of which were issued by the government.
GMA’s agreement with the MILF under the MOA-AD was deemed illegal by the Supreme Court, putting to naught months of effort to come up with a peace agreement the people of Mindanao will be comfortable to agree with.
Many criticized the lack of transparency in the negotiations process of the MOA-AD which led to the people in Mindanao junking the agreement.
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Contacts:
TomVillarin @ 0918-9358408
Perry Legaspi @ 0920-5056321
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