Leaning back in air-conditioned comfort in the steamy jungle of the southern Philippines, the leader of 12,000 Muslim rebels said he wants to sign a peace deal but that seized land must be returned.
Ebrahim "al haj" Murad, 58, the battle-hardened chairman of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), laughed off rumours of a revolt against him as he talked of tending his vegetable patch.
Outside the bungalow, dozens of rebels in camouflage uniforms stood with rifles and grenade launchers, some as young as 15. The fighters and their 5,000 relatives at this MILF camp, one of 60 on Mindanao island, live in shacks at the end of a rough track.
Murad, wearing his usual bush jacket, said the rebels were ready to abandon their demand for independence from the heavily Roman Catholic country, but wanted Muslims to determine how they would be governed in a proposed homeland.
"The autonomy structure was unilaterally created by the government," he told Reuters late on Tuesday. "Our idea was like building a house. We have to build it together with the people."
Manila and the MILF have been talking since 1997 about ending a conflict of nearly 40 years that has killed more than 120,000 people, displaced 1 million others and stunted development of oil, minerals, agriculture and other resources in the south.
After a fresh burst of momentum and hope, the talks stalled in May over the size and wealth of the proposed homeland, with the rebels demanding a larger area to cover more villages outside a Muslim autonomous region set up in the late 1980s.
Murad said the MILF would also demand the return of land seized by Christian settlers from the Bangsamoro people, as the Muslims of Mindanao call themselves. "We have to be able to cover the areas where the Bangsamoro people were predominant because we don't want another problem in the future," he said.
Murad said the peace panels from both sides were due to meet within a month in Malaysia, the broker of the talks, to compare notes on initial surveys to validate claims on Muslim territory.
"We expect the government to make a new offer," he said. Murad, an engineering student at a Catholic university when he took up arms in the late 1960s, rose through the MILF ranks to military commander before becoming chairman in 2003 when founder Salamat Hashim, an Islamic cleric, died of a heart attack.
When Murad took over as leader, analysts expected a softening of the MILF's traditionally hard-line position because he was seen as more of a moderate than Hashim.
Murad said he met Osama bin Laden in the 1980s when he fought with a group of Filipino Muslim rebels in Afghanistan, but denied the MILF had links to al Qaeda or its Southeast Asian franchise, Jemaah Islamiah.
He also denied reports by US and Philippine intelligence agencies that Dulmatin, one of two principal suspects in the 2002 bombings on the Indonesian resort island of Bali, had been in hiding on Mindanao since April 2003.
"We have volunteered to flush out people who are identified as having links with terrorist organisations," Murad said. "The solution to the problem in Mindanao will be a very big step in solving the problem of terrorism in the region."