A bright blue tent city sits beside the municipal hall here, silent witness to a decades-old civil war that has plagued the Muslim half of the southern Philippines.
Amirah Jaluddin and her three young children spend their days sitting outside a makeshift hut of planks and tarpaulin, 17 months after fighting between government forces and Moro rebels razed their house in nearby Pikit town.
"There is still trouble out there," the young Muslim mother told AFP.
Jaluddin's husband and the other menfolk make day visits of their farms in the sprawling Liguasan marshes in the center of Mindanao island, running through a gauntlet of military checkpoints, and return to the camp by sundown.
Most of the 200,000 people who were displaced in heavy fighting have returned home and local officials have advised the rest it is safe to go, but about a hundred stragglers including the Jaluddin are sitting tight.
Jaluddin said they feared being caught in the crossfire if hostilities renewed.
"They have been asked to return, but to my knowledge the dearth of economic opportunities in the area may also be deterring them," said Colonel Isagani Cachuela, the commander of an Army brigade in the area.
The government launched the offensive in February 2003, leaving about 200 people dead amid allegations the 11,900-member Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) was sheltering kidnappers and terrorists in the village of Buliok near Pikit.
While a cease-fire with the MILF took effect over all of Mindanao a year ago, the majority Roman Catholic Southeast Asian nation's largest Muslim guerrilla group has stayed out of the peace process after the death last year of its leader Salamat Hashim, a former government librarian of Pagalungan.
MILF spokesman Eid Kabalu said his group has asked the military to pull back their troops from Buliok in line with the terms of the July 2003 cease-fire.
But Cachuela told AFP that "as a gesture of confidence" both parties had removed "all units operating in the area".
He said while there had been no clashes in the area in the past year, the security vacuum created by the military pullback might have unnerved some former residents.
Pressure has been building on Manila amid mounting evidence Islamic militants allied to the al Qaeda network gained access to Mindanao training camps run by hard-line MILF commanders opposed to peace talks.
The United States withdrew a 30 million-dollar development aid offer for MILF areas last year due to lack of progress in the negotiations.
Small groups of US Special Forces advisers deployed in Carmen town near here last month to train Filipino troops meet the threat posed by Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) militants accused of waging a deadly bombing campaign across Southeast Asia.
The MILF earlier agreed to hold peace talks in Malaysia in April to discuss security, the rehabilitation of conflict areas and rebel demands for government recognition of the Muslim minority's ancestral domains.
Kuala Lumpur sent a team of military observers to Mindanao to monitor the cease-fire. But the talks were later shelved until after the May presidential election, won by incumbent President Gloria Arroyo.
"The peace talks with the MILF will happen any time this month, probably the second week of August," Defence Secretary Eduardo Ermita said last week.
The MILF has a different timetable, according to its spokesman Kabalu.
"We were advised by our counterparts in the (Philippine government) that by September we will resume the peace talks," he told local radio DXMS.
Some officials and analysts believe the apparent foot-dragging suggests the MILF leadership has yet to rally behind new leader Murad Ebrahim, the former Salamat deputy.
"The MILF is not a homogenous organisation," said President Arroyo's national security adviser Norberto Gonzales. The new leader "will take time to really become a Hashim," he added, referring to the MILF's former leader.
Former president Fidel Ramos, who signed a peace treaty with another Muslim rebel faction in Mindanao in 1996, said it is apparent the peace process has "stalled".
"The important thing now is for the two panels to continue talking at the technical or the preparatory level for the meantime until the main (negotiators) talk again," he said.
This was the only way economic development would arrive in the impoverished Muslim regions of the south and undercut one of the perceived causes of the rebellion, he added.
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