MANILA – Over a thousand Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) combatants are set to surrender their weapons to President Rodrigo Duterte next month, according to Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process Carlito Galvez Jr.
Galvez on Tuesday said Duterte will lead the decommissioning of 920 weapons from 1,096 MILF combatants in a ceremony on Sep. 7 as part of the government’s target to decommission 12,000 out of 40,000 MILF fighters and 3,000 arms until March 2020.
“We are convincing the MILF na iyong mga privately owned firearms will also be transferred. It’s really a challenge,” Galvez added.
“You can see the decommissioning of the MILF combatant is really a challenge like what we did in the decommissioning also of the Moro National Liberation Front,” he said.
Galvez added Duterte is set to create a joint peace and security teams composed of 3,000 former MILF fighters, 1,600 policemen, and 1,400 soldiers.
The President signed Executive Order 79 last April, which will create an inter-Cabinet cluster mechanism to ensure the timely and proper implementation of the normalization program under the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro.
The inter-Cabinet cluster mechanism on normalization was tasked to work for the transition, the decommissioning of MILF forces and weapons, disbandment of private armed groups, management of small arms and light weapons, and redeployment of military units from or within the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao./PN
We have seen that before, then a few months down the road the fighting will start again, because a commander got slighted by the government.