Terrorists want to have their own country

The MILF made it clear that they don't intend to lay down their arms or surrender, but they say they don't want to continue fighting either. All Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has to do is to negotiate a "peaceful transfer" of Mindanao to the Bangsamoro people.

Will GMA do it? Who knows? After the way she bowed down to terrorist demands in Iraq, she might just do what was 5 years ago unthinkable and give up Mindanao.

Personally, I think the MILF knows it is making an impossible demand, yet they insist on this hardline stance. I guess they are not serious in making peace after all, huh?

From the Daily Tribune:

The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) has just given the Australian government one good reason to deliver on Canberra's threat to launch “preemptive strikes” against terrorists of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) kind in the Philippines, specifically in the war-torn southern Mindanao region.

A military intelligence official, understandably declining to be identified, Friday last week confirmed that, indeed, JI militants enter the country's southern backdoor at will, making their way through General Santos City in South Cotabato province, Palembang town in Sultan Kudarat province and Liguasan Marsh in Maguindanao province.

These three provinces are undeniably MILF country and the foreign gunmen cannot possibly just passing through them en route to some exotic hideaway for their R & R.

Malacañang is adamant in neither confirming nor denying the JI presence in the Philippines — already an established fact, according to the Howard government — and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front is equally firm in saying it cannot possibly harbor the Islamic radicals precisely because they have not even seen them at all.

Ironically, when peace talks between the Arroyo government and the MILF resume in Malaysia next month, the two sides are expected to cooperate on flushing out foreign militants (read: JI terrorists) from Moslem rebel strongholds.

The conclusion from all this hemming and hawing by Malacañang and the MILF's outright denial is that both of them are lying on the JI presence in the country, and that Australia, after all, is the more believable party, at least for putting its money where its mouth is in its push for the preemptive strikes, citing perils to Canberra's interests.

The other revelation by the anonymous military intelligence official is that, in the run-up to the resumed peace negotiations brokered by Kuala Lumpur, the MILF is engaging in an arms build-up, with weapons landing, according to the oficial, taking place in Palembang and Liguasan Marsh “undetected by military authorities,” but he did not say where the deadly imports come from.

Therefore, the MILF will march to the peace table with guns blazing, figuratively, as the AFP can easily be told by President Arroyo to shut up on the disclosure of the intelligence official on the unhampered comings and goings of the JI radicals and the arms stacking by the MILF.

The Moslem guerrilla front, its deputy chief Ghazali Jaafar indicated over the weekend, has no plans of discussing the JI presence or absence in MILF lairs, but instead will drive the harder bargain of self-rule for the Bangsamoro (Moslem people) in Mindanao.

Where this item came from, the Arroyo government must have the slightest idea, focused as it has been on carrying out its anti-terror agenda despite its expulsion from the “coalition of the willing.”

Worse, Jaafar warned, they will not lay down their arms until a “just and acceptable solution is found” to their decades-old insurgency.

Given the MILF leader's hardline stance, and considering the cluelessness of Malacañang on what the other side wants, the peace talks are bound to fail, dragging with them the already shattered “credibility” of Mrs. Arroyo as the nemesis of terrorists in these parts.

She cannot be one.

Didn't she say the JI presence in the Philippines as alleged by Australia, is an “old story.”

So, no terrorists, no nemesis.