October 7, 2012 News: The peace negotiators of the Philippine Government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) have reached a preliminary peace agreement during their 32nd Exploratory Talks today in Kuala Lumpur hoping to end the 40-year of fighting in Mindanao.

The agreement is expected to be signed in a few days in a venue not yet officially disclosed. Called “Framework Agreement on the Bangsamoro”, the agreement spells out the general principles on major issues, including the extent of power, revenues and territory of the Muslim region.

Member of the MILF peace panel, who requested anonymity, told Luwaran that until the 11th hour of the meeting, the parties was unable to find an acceptable compromised formulation on internal security and policing in the Bangsamoro.

He described the dying minutes of the engagement as very intense and nerve-wracking, especially after the Malaysian facilitator described the differences of the two parties’ positions as “irresolvable even for the whole night, days, months, and years”.

However, at 10:40 in the evening, GPH peace panel chair Dean Marvic Leonen and MILF peace panel chair declared, “we have a deal’.

Few minutes after President Benigno Aquino III made a statement in a nationally-televised announcement about the breakthrough in the six-day talks in Kuala Lumpur, MILF Chairman Al Haj Murad Ebrahim also made an official press statement.

He described the Framework Agreement as the fruit of the 16-year long peace negotiation between the MILF and the GPH that now lays down the firm foundations of a just and enduring peace formula designed to address the root cause of the Bangsamoro Question.

He said that the Framework Agreement paves the way for the replacement of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) by a new institution of self-governance defined by the asymmetrical relationship between the Central Government and the Bangsamoro people through shared-sovereignty modes and concomitant transitional mechanisms that provide character, form and shape to the Bangsamoro Government envisaged by the Framework Agreement.

He, however, made this caution that the forging of the Framework Agreement does not mean the end of the struggle for it ushers in a new and more challenging stage.

“The peace ahead that the negotiation has made possible requires collective effort to build on the gains of the negotiation and to nurture them until finally justice and development reign in our homeland,” he continued.

The deal marks the most significant progress in 16 years of negotiations with the 12,000-strong Moro group on ending an uprising that has left more than 150,000 people dead and held back development in Mindanao.

The accord calls for the establishment of a 15-member “Transition Commission” that would thresh out the details of the preliminary agreement and draft a law creating the new Muslim autonomous region in about two years.

The MILF would undertake a “graduated program” to decommission their armed guerrilla units “so that they (sic) are put beyond use,” the agreement said, without specifying a timetable.