led peace monitors from three Islamic states were beginning a mission to oversee a ceasefire agreement in the southern Philippines on Monday, paving the way for the resumption of stop-start peace talks this week. Since 2001, Malaysia has been brokering negotiations between Manila and the country's largest rebel group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), to end 40 years of conflict that has killed more than 120,000 people. “With the deployment of the International Monitoring Team, peace talks are back on track,” Ambassador Rafael Seguis, head of the government's peace panel, told reporters shortly after the Malaysian troops arrived on Mindanao island late on Sunday. He added the presence of unarmed foreign troops in the south would “strengthen the security, civilian protection and ceasefire monitoring in the conflict areas”. A Malaysian army transport plane carrying 17 soldiers and police officers landed at the Cotabato airport on the southern island of Mindanao late on Sunday. Two Japanese aid workers also arrived to join the monitoring team. The Malaysian troops will join 20 soldiers from Brunei and Libya who had stayed on in Mindanao despite the breakdown in peace talks last year. Norway and Indonesia also offered to send soldiers to join the monitoring team but both have yet to send their troops. Peace panels from Manila and the MILF are meeting on Thursday in Kuala Lumpur to discuss how to harmonise proposed drafts on a political settlement of the Muslim secessionist conflict in the south of the mainly Roman Catholic state in Southeast Asia. “This will be a one-day meeting to give both sides a chance to clarify each other's position, then we can move forward to the more substantive agenda,” said a member of the government's peace panel, who declined to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the media, told Reuters. “We're not rushing things because this may only create more trouble on the ground if we agree on a half-baked peace formula. We also realise that this government will end its term in June.” Mohaqher Iqbal, the rebels' chief negotiator, told Reuters his panel would attend the meeting to find out if the government would make an attractive political offer. “We're not seeking to separate and create a new state,” Iqbal said by phone from his hideout on Mindanao. “We're only asking the government to recognise our right for self-determination and we're not even trying to reclaim areas where Muslims have become a minority.”
