RP execs to OFWs: Don't defy travel ban vs Iraq

MANILA, Philippines - Philippine authorities in Iraq are verifying reports that seven Filipino workers in Dubai left their work site two months ago and slipped into Iraq.

Online news site Khaleej Times reported Thursday that the news prompted the Philippine consulate general to caution Filipinos against going to Iraq.

Consul Vicente Bandillo has warned Filipinos in the United Arab Emirates about violating the travel ban to the troubled country.

Bandillo cited reports Wednesday that seven Filipino workers in Dubai left their work site slipped into Iraq using their old passports.

He said that the Philippine government's travel ban to Iraq has been in force since 2004.

But since Philippine passports are good for two years, some Filipinos whose passports are due to expire next year without the notice "Not Valid For Travel To Iraq" are taking the risk by using their expiring passports to slip into the war-torn country, he said.

Back to Iraq?

Following the US State Department’s renewal of its contract with Blackwater, a US-based private contractor providing securities to American diplomats and personnel in Iraq, John Leonard Monterona, regional coordinator of Migrante-Middle East earlier feared that more Filipinos would soon be deployed there.

Monterona said his group has received reports that several OFWs deployed in Iraq are serving in construction and security in US facilities in Iraq and US military camps such as Camp Anaconda and Camp Victory, using Kuwait as a point of entry.

This was validated by Roy Cimatu, presidential special envoy to the Middle East, when he went to Iraq in August last year to investigate the alleged trafficking of 51 Filipinos into Baghdad to work in the construction of the huge US embassy compound there.

“We believe that there are still a considerable number of OFWs in Iraq right now, whose very lives are at stake given that the war waged by the Iraqi revolutionary movements against the US military invaders are escalating, especially in Basra and inside Baghdad City as well," Monterona said.

Last year, two former employees of First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting Co. confessed in a US congressional proceeding that Filipino workers promised jobs in Dubai hotels were deceptively recruited and trafficked to Iraq for a massive US embassy construction project in Baghdad.

John Owens and Roy Mayberry, both Americans, testified before a US congressional oversight investigation that 51 Filipino laborers at the US embassy construction site, were living in substandard conditions and paid minimally. - GMANews.TV

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