DFA CHIEF DEL ROSARIO LEADS OFWs EVACUATION FROM TRIPOLI
[PHOTO - Tunisian friends. Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario and his undersecretary Esteban Conejos Jr. meet Tunisian Deputy Chief of Protocol Mohamed Ben Salah and Tunisian business leader Noureddine Ayed to discuss the evacuation program.]
MANILA, MARCH 2, 2011 (STANDARD) NEW Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario defied warnings to lead an evacuation of hundreds of Filipino workers out of troubled Libya's capital, an official said Monday.
Del Rosario, who was appointed in an acting capacity last week, traveled by land from neighboring Tunisia with two other diplomats to Tripoli on Sunday, and then took about 400 Filipino workers back to Tunisia in a 55-vehicle convoy, the Foreign Affairs Department said.
[PHOTO - Escape route. Map shows the road trip that Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario took to evacuate a batch of Filipino workers out of Libya to Tunisia, some of whom are shown arriving in Manila Monday. JULIE FABROA]
In other developments:
• A ship chartered by the Philippines was due to arrive in the port of Benghazi on March 1 to take the stranded Filipinos there to Crete, from where they could fly home, officials said
• Vice President Jejomar Binay said Monday he regretted the cancellation of his visit to Riyadh, where he was supposed to meet with groups of Filipino workers. He is now in Kuwait to appeal for the pardon of 13 Filipinos in jail there and to bring home 92 more
• The situation in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi was calm on Sunday. Some shops were open, food was available, and people were out on the streets, the International Committee of the Red Cross said.
Libya has been rocked by unrest for almost two weeks, and the country's leader Moammar Gadhafi has launched by far the bloodiest crackdown in a wave of anti-government uprisings sweeping the Arab world. Human rights groups and European officials have put the death toll at hundreds, or perhaps thousands, though it has been virtually impossible to verify the numbers.
Del Rosario's two-and-a-half-hour trip back to the Tunisian border region of Jerba with the Filipino workers aboard buses and vans passed off without any security problems, Foreign Affairs spokesman Ed Malaya said.
From Jerba, Del Rosario was arranging the evacuation of another 150 Filipinos out of Tripoli, Malaya said, adding that the diplomat did not plan to meet Gadhafi or any of his officials.
"It's a heroic act," Malaya said of Del Rosario's mission.
"At severe risks to his personal safety and against the advice of some of his colleagues, he went to evacuate our workers as quickly as humanly possible."
A prominent group of Filipino workers, Migrante International, however, said Philippine government officials acted too late in launching efforts to evacuate Filipinos when widespread violence had led to the closure of airports and a breakdown in communications in Libya.
"Filipinos now are facing confusion, fear and hunger there," said Gary Martinez, who heads Migrante, adding his group had helped reach out to stranded Filipinos through emergency telephone hotlines and e-mail, then passing on the details to officials.
Nearly 1,900 Filipinos have fled from Libya, where about 26,000 to 30,000 Filipinos work. About 400 have returned to Manila on evacuation flights arranged by their employers, officials say.
About 13,000 Filipinos in Libya work with multinational companies that signed contracts committing them to evacuate these workers out of the country in times of emergencies, Malaya said.
Nearly 10 percent of the Philippines' 94 million people work abroad, and the money they send back to their families fuels domestic spending and economic growth. Their remittances last year rose 8.2 percent to $18.76 billion, according to the central bank.
Many Filipino workers, however, have run afoul of other country's laws or got caught in violence and conflicts such as the turmoil gripping the Middle East, sparking problems for the Philippine government.
China recently postponed the executions of three Filipino drug convicts after President Benigno Aquino III appealed and sent his vice president, Jejomar Binay, to Beijing to make a last-ditch plea for clemency. The Filipino drug convicts' cases have drawn glaring media coverage in the Philippines. AP, with Eric B. Apolonio
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