Government efforts to achieve peace in fast-developing Mindanao region have gained the needed support with the arrival in Manila of the Malaysian members of the International Monitoring Team.
The IMT is a third party monitoring team composed of unarmed police and military personnel from Malaysia, Libya and Brunei Darussalam.
It was first formed in 2004 and acted as monitoring team on the implementation of the 1997 general agreement on the cessation of hostilities of the government and Moro Islamic Liberation Front peace panels.
Expected to arrive here Wednesday is the IMT Reconnaisance Team to conduct an ocular inspection of the proposed IMT sites in preparation for the deployment of a new batch to Mindanao to be known as IMT-5.
In November 2008, the mandate of the IMT lapsed and has never been reviewed until July last year when the GRP and MILF peace panels met in Malaysia to resume peace negotiations following the 2008 hostilities when the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain was nullified the Philippine Supreme Court.
