Peace conference wants UN fact-finding mission in Central Mindanao

[Minstrel Boy]

Peace conference wants UN fact-finding mission in Central Mindanao

Jowel F. Canuday / Mindanews / 4 December 2004

DAVAO CITY -- Multi-national and religious delegates to an international peace conference here are lobbying the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Religious Intolerence to hold a fact finding mission on alleged rights violations and other forms of attacks against Muslim and indigenous people’s communities in Central Mindanao.

The five-day “First People’s Forum on Peace for Life” conference ended at noon with a call for an international “solidarity and action” against the government’s policy of “all-out-war,” sustained armed conflicts, partnership with the United States government in the war on terror, the conduct of joint RP-US military war exercises, and the influx of US aid and corporate investments that tend to “deepen” the exploitation of the island’s patrimony and resources.

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The conference, organized by the World Council of Churches, the National Council of Churches in the Philippines and the Interfaith Movement for Peace in Mindanao, opened at the CAP Building on November 29 and closed at the Waterfront Insular Hotel Davao today with dances, songs and commitment to expand “faith-based” social movements in “resistance” to the wars, alleged rights violations, repression and transnational corporate
exploitation of Mindanao.

“We are gravely concerned about the affliction that we have heard and seen. The Mindanao situation reflects a resurgence of a new colonization by the forces of the empire,” said the conference’s two-page “A Call to Solidarity and Action” statement. The statement noted that in saying “empire” they meant “the combined, military, political, and cultural domination” by powerful countries, in particular the United States, “to advance their own interests on a global scale.”

http://www.mindanews.com/2004/12/04nws-peace.html

Speaking of Davao City, ever heard of Michael Meiring? The American national, who said he was CIA (though he said it stood for "Christ in Action") accidentally blew himself up in his hotel room, during a wave of bombing in Mindanao attributed to "Islamic terrorists," and was wisked out of the country just three days later by an FBI team before he could answer charges of the Davao City prosecutor.

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004/10/michael-meiring-blast-from-past.html