No need to evacuate 117 Pinoys in Iraq - Ople

Foreign Affairs Secretary Blas Ople assured the nation yesterday that there is no need to evacuate the 117 Filipinos in Iraq since there is really no emergency in that Persian Gulf nation.

Labor Secretary Patricia Sto. Tomas echoed Ople’s assurance and said the government has already prepared contingency plans that can be easily activated if the need arises.

"In the first place, it is not true that the President of Iraq has declared a state of war, that was a wrong report. What he said is that the people of Iraq should brace for contingency from an armed attack from one power," he said.

"Let us not be alarmists," Ople said as he clarified that there were only 147 Filipino in Iraq and not 117,000 as reported by media.

"There is minimal presence in Iraq, as you know, 117 in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad and 30 in the north," he said.

Of the 117 Filipinos in Iraq, 23 are embassy personnel while most of the others work for United Nations agencies and other international organizations.

The foreign secretary stressed that at the outbreak of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, there were about 40,000 Filipinos in Iraq and about 29,000 Filipinos in Iraq and Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf War.

But on both occasions, Ople said, the government was able to evacuate the Filipino community amid serious constraints without any loss of life and evacuating the much smaller number of Filipinos would be more manageable.

Ople said Filipinos are perfectly happy with their work in Iraq and stressed that there is no need to evacuate them at the moment.

"In general, we give a lot of latitude to our overseas workers to decide if they want to stay or not in the absence of a verified report of an emergency breaking out. I don’t think we should take directly the quote of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein at face value," he added.

Sto. Tomas, for her part, said the political situation in the Middle East is not serious enough to affect the country’s deployment of Filipinos workers to countries like Iraq or Israel.

She noted that the country is still deploying workers to Israel even after the death of Filipina caregivers Rebecca Ruga and Adelina Cunanan in suicide bombing incident in northern Israel on Aug. 4. The remains of the two Filipinas arrived last night.

"The problem in Israel is isolated and our workers there would not like to return home so I don’t think it would affect our deployment this year," Sto. Tomas said.