Evaluate Sending Of RP Peace Keeping Troops To Lebanon

Senator Rodolfo G Biazon today said the proposal recommending the sending by the Philippine government of a peace keeping force to Lebanon should be reviewed for the following reasons:

1. All the manpower and resources that the AFP or the PNP can generate are needed here to address the internal security problem.

If the government is eyeing the defeat of insurgency in the country within two years, we can not afford to deploy our troops and meager material resources to fight other insurgencies in other parts of the world. If we are serious in ending our insurgency problem, we need to generate more manpower and resources.

2. The Lebanon Israel conflict is such a complicated issue that we may not know what we are trying to get into.

We could end up in the same situation as the Angelo de la Cruz affair where the Filipinos in the Middle East were targeted to force us to change our policy in our deploying of troops to Iraq.

This happened once. We should avoid putting ourselves in the same situation for this could only endanger the lives of our OFWs in the Middle East.

3. The United Nations Security Council has yet to come up with a Resolution asking its member countries to support, organize and put together such a force.

We should wait instead for further developments before we even consider such a move on the part of our government, Biazon concluded.