DFA chief favors deployment of more Filipino peacekeepers

The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) is looking at increasing the deployment of Filipino personnel to the United Nations’ (UN) peacekeeping operations to make the country’s participation in global peacekeeping efforts more effective.

Addressing Filipino peacekeepers in the Golan Heights, DFA Secretary Alberto Romulo said he would like to see an expansion of Philippine participation in UN peacekeeping operations by deploying more personnel to support UN operations in the field and at UN headquarters in New York.

“We hope to be able to see more Filipinos serving not only in existing and emerging missions but in the United Nations Secretariat as well," he said in a statement posted on the department’s Web site.

Romulo added that officers and personnel to be sent to UN operations should be trained for the job and properly equipped to carry out their missions. As such, he said new equipment must be acquired for the Armed Forces of the Philippines and Philippine National Police, whose personnel make up the Philippine peacekeeping contingent deployed across the world.

“In the next few years, we hope to be able to upgrade our peacekeeping capabilities with the acquisition of equipment that would allow us to more effectively respond to UN requests for troop contributions," he said.

The Philippines signed in 2008 with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon the UN Standby Arrangements System, which involves contributing specified resources, such as troops, within an agreed response time for peacekeeping operations.

Romulo added a Philippine peacekeeping roadmap will be drawn up by the Inter-agency Council on United Nations Peacekeeping Operations, which, according to him, will be strengthened and transformed into a superbody that shall provide “the vision and direction for (the Philippines’) participation in UN operations."

The inter-agency council which he chairs has the departments of National Defense, and Interior and Local Government as members.

The council is to be overseen by a secretariat that will be staffed by Filipino diplomats and peacekeepers from the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police.

Romulo said the Policy Framework and Guidelines on Philippine Participation in United Nations Peacekeeping Operations is in the process of being reviewed by an inter-agency technical working group.

“We hope to start making the necessary revisions to make Philippine peacekeeping policies more responsive to present-day realities," he said.

The Philippines is presently the 24th in the UN’s list of top troop contributing countries, with a total of 1,062 Filipino military and police personnel serving in Afghanistan, Cote d’ Ivoire, Darfur, Golan Heights, Haiti, Kashmir, Liberia, Sudan and Timor-Leste.

The figure represents a 40-percent increase in the number of peacekeepers serving overseas compared to the total Philippine peacekeeping deployments in 2009.

Last January 12, three Filipino UN peacekeepers and a Filipino UN staff member died in the magnitude 7-quake that hit Haiti. - Jerrie Abella/KBK, GMANews.TV

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