Seventeen years of stop-start negotiations over a bloody 45-year conflict which has cost more than 120,000 lives last Thursday culminated in a historic reconciliation ceremony in Manila's presidential palace. The signing of the peace agreement between the Philippines government and the country's largest Muslim rebel group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), was marked in the country's embattled southern island of Mindanao with joyful celebrations.
The agreement will see the rebels disband their guerilla forces and disarm in return for a new enhanced degree of autonomy for the Bangsamoro, the name used for Muslim and non-Christian natives of Mindanao. The deal, brokered by President Benigno Aquino with the assistance of Malaysia, sets out provisions on power and wealth-sharing and on the creation of a police force for the political entity that will replace the failed five-province autonomous region set up in Mindanao province in 1989, home to most of the predomiantly Catholic country's five million Muslims.
A plebiscite in Muslim-dominated areas in the south will determine the shape and size of the new region. Mindanao’s relations with Manila have been difficult since it was incorporated into the Philippines state by Sapnish and American colonisers in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The hope is that the agreement will bring sufficient stability to lift the cloud on economic development of the island where one in two live below the poverty line of $1.20 a day. Mineral companies are eager to come in to develop what are believed to be up to $312 billion in mineral deposits.
But there is no certainty that peace will be sustained. Breakaway nationalists, feuding clans, and Islamists, including one group, Abu Sayyaf, affiliated to Al Qaeda, reject the deal and have pledged to go on fighting for complete independence.