The Philippine Government is to sign a ceasefire with the 12,500-member Muslim separatist group the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in Libya, President Gloria Arroyo's spokesman Rigoberto Tiglao told reporters in Manila yesterday. He added that the truce will last until a complete political settlement with the MILF is reached. The two sides began peace talks in Tripoli on Wednesday to end a 23-year rebellion. Vice President Teofisto Guingona, now acting as Foreign Secretary, heads the Philippine delegation. The MILF team is led by number two leader and military chief Mohamad Murad. MILF is a 1978 splinter of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), which signed a peace treaty with Manila in 1996 that gave Muslims a measure of self-rule in four southern provinces. It was brokered by the Organization of Islamic Conference states, which includes Libya and Indonesia.

For the past 30 years, Moro rebels have been waging a mostly low-level guerrilla war to set up a separate state on Mindanao and some other southern islands of the mainly Roman Catholic Philippine archipelago. A smaller Muslim guerrilla group, the Abu Sayyaf, holds more than two dozen hostages in the southern island of Basilan, including at least two Americans. The military said it believes a third American is dead, as the rebels claim to have beheaded him.

Tiglao said the truce accord would allow MILF forces to occupy a number of small camps in central Mindanao, and there would be "no military offensives on our part and on their part." Last year, MILF forces were driven from their major training bases including their main base of Camp Abubakar in a bloody military campaign conducted by Arroyo's predecessor Joseph Estrada. Estrada was deposed last January. "We have occupied these camps, so we are maintaining our forces there," Tiglao said. But the ceasefire would allow for the return of several hundred thousand mainly Muslim non-combatants who were displaced by last year's fighting.