Philippines, Muslim rebels reach deal on homeland

The beginnings of yet another nation-state arise from an unnatural, ahistorical political consolidation of distinct peoples:

The Philippine government and the largest Muslim separatist group reached a deal on Wednesday to create an ancestral homeland for 3 million Muslims in the south of the mainly Roman Catholic state, officials said.

The agreement, while crucial for the resumption of formal peace talks, does not guarantee the end of a near 40-year conflict that has killed 120,000 people and displaced 2 million on the resource-rich southern island of Mindanao.

Manila and the 11,000-member MILF have been talking for more than a decade on how to give Muslims in the south a greater degree of self-rule and it took the two sides nearly four years to reach this agreement on expanding the coverage of an existing autonomous region for the minority group.

The Philippines is actually a grouping of more than a dozen peoples. The Moros, the Muslims of the South, began agitating for self-rule in the 1970's in response to centralization of political power caused by the imposition of martial law.

Here are a few bits of interesting trivia about the Philippines:

- an indigenous independence movement organized to resist Spanish rule was known by its initials: KKK.

- The Moros people constitute only about 5% of the Filipino population.

- Estimates of the number of Filipinos killed during the islands' resistance to US occupation run from 300,000 to over a million.

- A Howling Wilderness, a successful courtroom drama about US atrocities during the Philippine-American War, was written by League of the South member John Chodes.