Camp Darapanan, Philippines  - The head of the largest Muslim separatist rebel group in the Philippines warned Saturday that anarchy would engulf the country's south if a negotiated peace settlement could not be reached under the current rebel leadership.

Murad Ebrahim, chairman of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), said he feared there would be no chance for new peace talks if current negotiations fail because the separatist organization's next generation was more radical.

"The people will already be disgusted," he told a group of reporters at the MILF's Camp Darapanan in Maguindanao province, 960 kilometres south of Manila, "so if this peace process will not succeed, I don't see any possibility for another peace process to come."

"It would be a situation where [there will be] no more control," the rebel leader said. "We fear that there will be anarchy - no government, no group, nobody can control the situation."

Murad spoke after MILF and government peace negotiators agreed earlier in the week to form an international contact group that would monitor the peace talks and implementation of any agreements.

The MILF chief said the group's next generation of leaders were being trained both for peace and war as negotiations for a settlement to the nearly 40-year conflict in the southern region of Mindanao have dragged on for more than a decade.

"Their upbringing is during the war, so you could expect the next generation of the Bangsamoro [Muslim nation] people to be more emboldened, more radical," Murad said. "Unless this problem is given a genuine solution, this will go on for generations and generations."

The MILF has been fighting for a separate Islamic state in Mindanao since 1978. It entered into peace negotiations with the Philippine government in 1997.

In August 2008, the two sides were supposed to sign a key territorial agreement that would have expanded the coverage and control of an autonomous Muslim region in Mindanao.

But the treaty on ancestral domain was junked on strong opposition by critics who accused the government of giving up sovereignty over the southern region. Fighting resumed, killing more than 300 people and displacing at least 500,000 at the height of the hostilities last year. (dpa)