OWN CORRESPONDENT, Jolo | Wednesday 8.50am.
GOVERNMENT negotiators are expected to arrive on the southern Philippines island of Jolo on Wednesday to resume talks with Moslem rebels holding 21 hostages, including two South Africans.
Journalists who saw the hostages on Tuesday said ailing German housewife Renate Wallert, one of the captives, is very weak and there was an urgent for her to be released.
”The German is very weak. She’s totally losing track of how many hours she has been away… It is very important to get her out very soon,” Kjersti Strommen, Asia bureau chief of Norwegian broadcasting NRK said.
Appeals have mounted for Manila to act decisively to end the saga, which began 25 days ago when the rebels snatched their victims off the nearby Malaysian island of Sipadan.
Chief government negotiator and presidential adviser Roberto Aventajado said in Manila his team hopes to resume negotiations with the fundamentalist Abu Sayyaf rebels either on Thursday or Friday, when the guerrillas are expected to submit a written list of demands.
Farouk Hussein, a member of the team, said the rebels told negotiators last week that they staged the kidnapping to draw attention to the ”miserable conditions” of Moslems in this largely Roman Catholic country.
”’How can we survive in this situation? It’s almost impossible, this suffering, this misery… This is a wake-up call to the world community,’ the Abu Sayyaf told us,” Hussein said in an interview published on Wednesday in the Philippine Daily Inquirer newspaper.
The hostages — nine Malaysians, three Germans, two French, the two South Africans, Carel and Monique Strydom, two Finns, two Filipinos and one Lebanese — were kidnapped by the Abu Sayyaf on April 23.
On Basilan island near Jolo, the Abu Sayyaf is also holding hostage nine Filipinos, mostly schoolchildren, who were abducted nearly two months ago. Fifteen other hostages were rescued last week but the guerrillas killed six, two of whom were beheaded. — Reuters