INTERVIEW-Clan wars, not rebels, threaten peace in Philippines
By Manny Mogato
COTABATO CITY, Philippines, May 11 (Reuters) - Decades old clan wars in the troubled southern Philippines are making security forces more nervous than a potential break in a fragile truce with Muslim rebels, said a senior army general.
Major-General Raymundo Ferrer, the most senior army commander in the Cotabato area on southern Mindanao island, said the scaled down presence of the 60-member Malaysian-led peace monitors might heighten already bitter family feuds.
"When these monitors go away, who will stand as a credible referee to stop these localised conflicts?" Ferrer told Reuters in an interview outside an army base at the heart of a Muslim region in the mainly Roman Catholic state on Saturday.
"These groups do not trust us. They don't see our troops as a neutral player in the conflict. The presence of Muslim rebels on either side of the conflict could complicate things on the ground and we don't want to be blamed for provoking them or breaking the ceasefire."
On Saturday, 28 of 41 Malaysian soldiers and police officers were picked up by two army transport planes at three points on Mindanao and flown to a base in Malaysia's eastern state of Sabah.
Malaysia said it was pulling out its peacekeepers because of the lack of progress in peace talks between Manila and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which have been stalled since December 2007. But it has said it will continue to broker the peace talks.
The 11,000-member MILF has been in stop-start negotiations with the government for more than a decade to end the near 40-year conflict, which has killed more than 120,000 people and stunted growth in Mindanao.
GRUDGES AND TURF WARS
There is a growing worry among local people that fighting will break out once all the peace monitors go home at the end of August.
But, by and large, Muslims in the south appear unwilling to return to a cycle of sustained violence. Some analysts also say that the government has no stomach for a protracted war and, while there may be several isolated cases of fighting, full-blown hostilities were unlikely.
Ferrer shared these views, saying security forces were more concerned over worsening clan feuds in some Muslim areas in the south.
There are dozens of bloody and violent feuds on the poor but resource-rich southern island of Mindanao. Many emanate from clashes over property and political power but even issues like basketball brawls and love triangles can lead to blood-letting.
"In some cases, brothers and cousins are fighting with each other," Ferrer said.
"On some occasions, the fighting involves two rival Muslim rebel groups, rival factions within the same rebel group, rebels against local warlords and among warlords themselves squabbling over political and economic turf. There are endless reasons."
Even the rebels acknowledge that the feuds are more of a source of concern, despite the impending withdrawal of the peacekeepers.
"At this moment, we don't see any trouble, except old family grudges being settled or clan wars over land ownership," Ghadzali Jaafar, one of top three rebel leaders, told Reuters in a separate interview on Friday. (Reporting by Manny Mogato; editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
