Negotiations to end a decades-old separatist rebellion in the southern Philippines resume today in Malaysia, but real peace will remain elusive until Manila reins in various rebel factions and allows self determination among Muslims, according to analysts.

Malaysian foreign minister Syed Hamid Albar has said he believes that the time is ripe for the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) to silence its guns and sign a peace treaty with Manila.

The 12,000-strong MILF has been waging a rebellion since 1978, demanding that Manila give it control over its "ancestral domain" and the people living in it.

Albar noted a "serious desire" from both parties to maintain peace in the mineral-rich Mindanao island, the country's southern third and home to the country's minority Muslims.

But Julkipli Wadi, a professor in Islamic studies at the University of the Philippines, said Muslim dissatisfaction ran deep and it would take more than a mere paper agreement to solve the insurgency.

A lack of a strong leadership among the Muslims who could unite the MILF and other armed factions, including the al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf and remnants of the former rebel group Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) also is seen to remain a problem in the long-term, Wadi said.

The MNLF was formerly the country's main Muslim insurgent group from which the MILF split in 1978. It signed a peace deal with Manila in 1996 and settled for a limited Muslim autonomous region. The MILF was left out of the accord.

Trouble shooter needed

A "push factor" from the regional militant group Jemaah Islamiah, which intelligence reports said was forging links with Mindanao armed groups, could also add to the problem, Wadi said.

"There needs to be a trouble shooter in the Mindanao peace process," Wadi told AFP in an interview.

"There is an inability in the part of all parties to talk in a more coherent manner. The peace process is currently muddled and one area of the bottleneck is that no one knows for sure what had happened to the MNLF-government peace agreement," he said.

While various MNLF leaders became politicians in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) and their fighters integrated into the military and police, the region remains mired in poverty and sectarian violence.

"Nobody knows for sure what happened to that agreement and the question now is what can the government offer to the MILF that would be unique from the MNLF," Wadi said.

Randy David, a political science professor also at the University of the Philippines, noted that the war in Mindanao has forced the Muslims to disperse, becoming traders in urban centers.

"Their assimilation into the mainstream is skin-deep; they remain a separate people, steeled by their faith and bound together by a shared dream to regain their homeland," David said in a recently published article.

"Land is what the Moros lost, and a homeland is what they hope to recover," he said.

Continued isolation

Wadi said a peace pact with the MILF at a time when the MNLF founder Nur Misuari was in jail could be viewed by Muslim radicals as a way of "politically and militarily easing out" the MNLF, Wadi said.

This could force certain MNLF factions to launch fresh attacks, like those in the southern island of Jolo in February that left nearly 100 dead on both sides.

"That war was in preparation for the continued isolation of the MNLF by their own doing so that by the time the government offers the possibility of the ARMM to the MILF, they would already be standing on a position of strength," Wadi said.

A likely scenario would be that the MNLF factions could renew alliances with the Abu Sayyaf, a small, but brutal group of Islamic militants behind the country's worst militant attacks. The Abu Sayyaf is on the US government's terrorist watchlist and is believed to be slowly forging links with Jemaah Islamiah.

Wadi said a stumbling block to the peace agreement is the MILF's demand over its "ancestral domain", which traditionally means the whole of Mindanao, once ruled by a succession of Islamic sultanates until they were subdued by western powers who conquered the country.