MANILA - Foreign Affairs Secretary Alberto Romulo wants more Filipinos participating in the United Nations peace operations, as he outlined his plan to strengthen the country’s peacekeeping body and acquire equipment for the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police.
“We hope to be able to see more Filipinos serving not only in existing and emerging missions (in the field) but in the United Nations Secretariat (in New York) as well,” Romulo said in a statement from Camp Faouar, Syria.
“But as we strive to do this, we also need to make sure that we are sending officers and personnel who are not only trained for the job but who are also properly equipped and motivated to carry out their mission,” he told Filipino peacekeepers in the Golan Heights on Friday.
Romulo outlined his plan on how to go about this—with a peacekeeping roadmap to be drawn up by the Interagency Council on United Nations Peacekeeping Operations, which will then be strengthened and transformed into a super body that shall provide “the vision and direction for our participation in UN operations.”
“Three years from now, the Philippines will commemorate the 50th year of its participation in UN peacekeeping. Before we mark this occasion, we would like to have put in place a stronger mechanism—a peacekeeping roadmap—that would allow us to more effectively take part in global peace efforts,” he said.
The interagency council, which Romulo chairs, is based at the Department of Foreign Affairs, and has as members the Department of National Defense and the Department of the Interior and Local Government. A secretariat staffed by Filipino diplomats and peacekeepers from the AFP and the PNP will oversee the council.
“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, adding that this is consistent with Manila’s commitment to the UN Standby Arrangement System, which he signed with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in Malacanang in 2008.
Romulo said the Policy Framework and Guidelines on Philippine Participation in United Nations Peacekeeping Operations, which he approved two years ago and is in the process of being reviewed by an interagency 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 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.
This figure represents a 40-percent jump in the number of peacekeepers serving overseas compared to the total Philippine peacekeeping deployments during the previous year.
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