Gov’t, MILF rush annex

NEGOTIATORS for the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) worked into the night on Saturday in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to complete the powersharing annex toward a comprehensive peace agreement to end the decades-old conflict in Mindanao.

“We are trying hard to finish it tonight. We made a lot of progress on a lot of items but we still have several difficult issues to discuss,” government chief negotiator Miriam Coronel-Ferrer told the INQUIRER by phone early last night.

“We’re still working on several items like on government structure, transportation and telecommunications. We’ll be meeting overtime,” she said.

The 41st formal exploratory talks with Malaysia as third-party facilitator began on Oct. 8 and was expected to conclude on Friday.

‘All calm’

The MILF expressed the hope the power-sharing annex would be completed by late Saturday.

In July, the two panels also worked overtime to complete the contentious wealthsharing annex.

But unlike the wealth-sharing annex, “all is calm” with the discussions on the power-sharing annex, a source privy to the talks told the INQUIRER.

Before the wealthsharing annex was completed, the negotiators walked a tightrope and the talkswere put on hold for nearly four months after the government and MILF panels could not agree on whether or not an earlier initialed document constituted this particular annex.

If the power-sharing annex is signed on Saturday night or today, this leaves the panels with only the annex on normalization to finalize.