CHIBA, Japan (MindaNews/04 May) – Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate in 1976 for her role in the peace process in Northern Ireland endorsed Saturday Mindanao civil society’s appeal for the Malaysian-led International Monitoring Team (IMT) to stay on. She also called on the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) to actively and sincerely pursue peace talks whatever it takes.
CHIBA, Japan (MindaNews/04 May) – Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate in 1976 for her role in the peace process in Northern Ireland endorsed Saturday Mindanao civil society’s appeal for the Malaysian-led International Monitoring Team (IMT) to stay on. She also called on the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) to actively and sincerely pursue peace talks whatever it takes.
Maguire knows from whereof she speaks as she led citizens efforts in Northern Ireland to get the Irish Republican Army, the British government and the divided population of Catholic and Protestant Northern Ireland to seek the path of non-violence and peace in resolving their animosities and conflicts. Her efforts along with others eventually paid of with both the IRA and its political wing Sein Fein striking a deal to co-govern Northern Ireland with their Protestant political rivals.
Maguire is known in the Philippines for being deported in May 1994 by the Ramos government when she arrived to keynote the launch of the Asia-Pacific Conference on East Timor (APCET) which eventually galvanized regional solidarity efforts for the eventual independence of the world’s newest nation.
Maguire has promised to assist continuing efforts for peace in Mindanao by asking her co-women laureates to likewise endorse her own appeal. She is also willing to come to Mindanao to share her experiences in peacebuilding in Northern Ireland.
Maguire is among the guests of an ongoing global conference in Japan that seeks to retain that country’s Article 9 of the constitution that abolishes war as a policy.
(Gus Miclat, Executive Director of the Davao-based Initiatives for International Dialogue is attending the same conference. IID is the Southeast Asia initiator of the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict. IID convened APCET and has likewise initiated peace and dialogue efforts in Mindanao).
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