05-May-11, 6:25 PM | Romy Elusfa, special to InterAksyon.com
[Share This]
MANILA, Philippines - "The church should listen to and try to understand the demands" of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), a Catholic nun said Thursday.
Sr. Ma. Arnold Noel, SSPS, said the church can only contribute to the peace process in Mindanao if it listens and “recognize(s) that a historical injustice has been done against them.”
The nun, who traces her roots to Mindanao, was one of some 100 participants to a dialogue with the MILF peace negotiating panel, led by Mohagher Iqbal, in Quezon City Thursday morning.
Representatives of the Association of Major Religious Superiors in the Philippines (AMRPS) and the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches attended the dialogue.
“The church, including the government, should look at the root cause of the Mindanao problem if they want to contribute in solving the problem,” she said in an interview after the first in a series of dialogues the MILF has lined up with non-Moro people in Manila from May 4-7.
Among the sectors the rebels will consult are businessmen, churches, the academe and civil society organizations. They will also meet with members of the diplomatic community.
The MILF will present to the participants the proposals for a negotiated settlement of the four-decade old Mindanao conflict, which they submitted to the government during the formal resumption of the peace talks in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia last April 27-28.
Sr. Noel said Mindanao was “once not just a food basket but a paradise. That was when it was not yet annexed by the Philippine government. Mindanao is the only place in the country which was never conquered by our colonizers.”
Today, she lamented, “Mindanao is one of the poorest regions in the country despite the fact that it has all the resources that make this country survive.”
Sr. Noel, who admits being angered by the aborted signing of the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain when the pact, which would have led to the creation of a Bangsamoro homeland, was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, said they would “double their efforts now to ensure that the MOA-AD debacle will never be repeated.”
The SC decision was almost immediately followed by renewed fighting between the MILF and government forces that displaced up to 700,000 people in central and western Mindanao.
Sr. Noel said she had also asked chief government negotiator Marvic Leonen, to “correct the historical injustice against the Bangsamoro people.
“You do not have the right to talk of justice if you cannot even give to the Bangsamoro what is due to them,” she said, recalling the time when government invited people from Luzon and the Visayas to settle in Mindanao under a law that allowed indigenous people to own only five hectares of land, and Muslims, 10 hectares, but set no ownership limits for the newcomers.
Iqbal, on the other hand, reported that the initial consultations with the religious and businessmen in Mindanao were “very encouraging,”
“For the past several weeks, not counting those dialogues in the past months and years held by the MILF peace panel, we have been very busy in reaching out to the non-Moro non-government organizations, civil society organizations, people’s organizations, religious groups, both Catholic and Protestants, business groups and indigenous communities,” Iqbal told participants at the Thursday dialogue.
“The feedbacks that we receive from the (consultation) participants are very encouraging, especially from the business groups and the Christian religious groups in Mindanao,” he said. “We would have a very effective and powerful base of support for our journey to peace and just settlement of the conflict in Mindanao.”
No comments:
Post a Comment