Aquino’s tough road ahead in Philippines

Migrant workers, communist rebels and Muslim separatists are all placing their hope that the next president of the Philippines will sit down and talk to them to ease wide-ranging issues that have impacted the Southeast Asian nation for decades.
All three groups which have strong people-to-people links in Canada’s 400,000-strong fast growing Filipino community.
An estimated 15,000 to 20,000 Filipinos also arrive in Canada every year making Philippines the third largest source of immigrants to this country.
“We are all hoping Benigno Aquino III will do something to create jobs and stop the wars that have created chaos in our homeland,” said Benjamin Garcia, a construction worker in Vancouver.
Aquino, the apparent winner in the May 10 Philippine presidential elections has been meeting with envoys of various countries, including the U.S., while waiting to be officially proclaimed and sworn into office.
Based on the unofficial tally of the Commission on Elections, Aquino was ahead of his rivals by over 5 million votes. 
Under Philippine laws it is the Congress which tallies the votes and proclaims the winners in the presidential and the vice presidential race.
In Cagayan De Oro city in the southern Philippines, The Philippine Council for Islam and Democracy (PCID), expressed hopes Filipino Muslims of having a “President for Muslim Mindanao,”
The group hoped that the newly elected officials “will not ignore the issues of our Muslim brothers and sisters that were basically ignored during the campaign.”
“We hope that Noynoy [Aquino] becomes not just a president of the Christian majority, but also a president for Muslim Mindanao,” the PCID said.
The  United Youth for Peace and Development (Unypad), a Muslim NGO pursuing Muslim self-determination through the promotion of justice, equality, freedom and economic prosperity said presidential front-runner Sen. Simeon Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III has “what it takes to make Mindanao peaceful and progressive.”
“[Aquino is] a man of peace [who] will be able to transform Mindanao from its present state of ‘land of war’ into a ‘land of peace and progress,’” said Rahib Kudto, Unypad national president.
These issues will be presented to the next president because while “the voice of the Filipino has been heard, we are not sure if the voice of the Muslims in this country was heard,” the PCID said.
“While some attempted to inject a genuine discourse on the important issues [during the campaign], the issues of Muslim Mindanao were largely relegated to the background,” PCID added.
The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the Philippines’ largest Islamic rebel group, does not recognize the country’s constitution or electoral process.
Aquino for his part said that he will assume direct responsibility for the revival of the peace process with the MILF or the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and that he would involve a wide range of stakeholders, including traditional and local government leaders, Muslim clerics and civil society groups
The long battle for minority Muslim self-rule in the southern Philippines by the Moro rebels, the largest guerrilla group with an estimated 11,000 fighters, is one of the world’s oldest insurgencies. The organization formed as a less radicalized outgrowth of the Moro National Liberation Front, but later splintered into more virulent strains, such as the Abu Sayyaf group, which has been linked to al Qaeda.
Another major test for the incoming administration of Aquino, will be how to end one of the world’s longest-running communist insurgencies.
For 41 years the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), the New People’s Army (NPA), has fought a relentless armed struggle in the countryside that has cost more than 40,000 lives, according to the military .
Negotiations to end the conflict have dragged on for years, without any resolution.
Analysts say the party’s founding chairman, Jose Maria Sison, who has been living in exile in the Netherlands since 1987, is open to talks with the Aquino administration, according to a report in the National newspaper.
Sources within Aquino’s Liberal Party, according to the newspaper, have said moves were already underway to establish a peace panel but could not say who would be on it.
Luis Jalandoni, who an umbrella linking left-wing groups, in particular the CCP and NPA, said recently that the front “is willing and ready to resume formal peace talks with the new administration”.
In a posting on the front’s website, he said: “We aim for peace talks that address the roots of the armed conflict through fundamental economic, social and political reforms.
For a large segment of Filipino-Canadians, Sison, is a revolutionary hero dedicated to liberating the poor masses of the Southeast Asian nation.
“If they can talk peace, this will be the best legacy for Sison and Aquino can leave behind,” said a Sison supporter in Vancouver.
Meanwhile, Filipino migrant workers’ groups are urging Aquino to make local job generation his priority and deviate from the job export policy of the Arroyo government.
John Leonard Monterona of Migrante Middle East said Aquino should thoroughly examine the job export policy of the Arroyo administration and rectify its flaws so his government could come up with a better course of action concerning job migration and labour in general.
Monterona said instead of continuing the policy of exporting labour, the Aquino administration should instead further improve the condition of local labour.
“We are hoping that under the Aquino administration, local jobs creation would be on the top of its working agenda, and would be glad to see positive results after its 100 days in office,” says Monterona.
In addition to this, the migrants’ group is expecting Aquino to further the protection of migrant workers against abuse and to take care of the migrant workers’ families.
“Stranded, abused and maltreated OFWs (overseas Filipino workers) staying in various Filipino Workers Resource Centres are hoping that their deplorable conditions will now be given due attention by the incoming Aquino administration,” said Monterona.
Migrante Canada contends the terrible economic situation forces many Filipinos to leave the country to work abroad in temporary jobs, or to live there as permanent migrants.
Around 3,400 Filipinos leave the country every day, more than half of them are women, Migrante Canada said.
Remittances from overseas Philippine workers rose 5.6 percent to US$1.6 billion in March, the Central Bank reported.
Last year, the money transferred by Filipino migrant workers to relatives in the Philippines went up by 5.4 percent to a record US$17.348 billion from US$16.426 billion.