"All necessary measures for their safety are being taken, and there is no reason to contemplate any danger in their deployment at this time," Arroyo

ILOILO CITY, Philippines, November 19 (IslamOnline.net) - As domestic calls for withdrawing troops from Iraq have shown now signs of abating, Philippine President Gloria Arroyo said on Wednesday, November 19, there is no need for such a move.

The Filipino contingent in Iraq are "safe and in no immediate danger," Arroyo said in a statement, backtracking from her vows one day earlier to pull them out due to the daily attacks against American forces and its allies in the war-scarred country.

"All necessary measures for their safety are being taken, and there is no reason to contemplate any danger in their deployment at this time," Arroyo said.

The statement came one day after she announced  Filipino peacekeepers and humanitarian workers in Baghdad “would be immediately evacuated if called by the shifting situation".

"We have to balance our international commitments against the safety of our own peacekeepers and humanitarian workers," said the Filipino leader, the most vocal southeast Asian ally of U.S. President George W. Bush in his alleged war on terror.

Amid worsening violence in Iraq, 19 Italians were killed  in a bombing attack in southern Iraq last week. Shortly afterwards, Japan toned down an earlier pledge to send troops to Iraq by the end of 2003.

Military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Lucero said there were 96 Filipinos serving in Iraq -- 56 soldiers, 26 policemen and 14 health and social workers.

The Philippines pledged to the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council last month to boost its number of troops to 500 early next year.

A Manila-based foreign diplomat said Arroyo's Thursday announcement did not amount to a major policy change, rather that she was merely "keeping her options open" in the wake of escalating casualties in Iraq.

"I don't think you can read it as a shift in stance. It's more of covering your base and giving an assurance to your citizens," he told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

But observers said the Arroyo's new stance could be initiated by the pressures of the U.S., which has been rebuffed by the rejection of other countries to its requests to make similar military commitment to Iraq.

As Tokyo said on Thursday, November 13, it would delay  sending troops to Iraq until next year, South Korea agreed to dispatch no more than 3,000 troops to the war-ravaged country, a number far fewer than Washington has requested.

Other analysts link the Filipino president's decision to its announcement earlier on Wednesday that U.S. anti-terror troops may help local forces fight armed militants on the major southern Philippines island of Mindanao.

But Foreign Affairs Secretary Blas Ople said the Southeast Asian country still monitors the situation in the restive Iraq.

Noting that the safety and security of the Filipinos are the government’s major concern, Ople said: “It is for this reason that we constantly monitor the situation on the ground".

"We have a clearly defined exit strategy, as this is an important element in any deployment, whether to Iraq or to any of our other peacekeeping operations around the world,” he said.

Ople issued the statement after meeting with Ambassador Roy Cimatu and General Pedro Caesar Ramboanga, Jr., who is the commander of the Philippine Humanitarian Contingent to Iraq.

"I have just had an extensive meeting with Ambassador Cimatu and General Ramboanga. Clearly, this is not the time to abandon the people of Iraq," Ople said.

But appeals for pulling out the contingent from Iraq still grow among the uneasy public and some officials.

Lower House of Congress Representative Apolinario Lozada renewed his call for the withdrawal, saying that Iraq has become “a highly dangerous place” not only for the American troops but also its allies.

“The fact that the Philippines was one of the very first countries that openly supported the United States [in it war in Iraq] made the Filipino peacekeepers one of the primary targets by anti-American forces in Iraq," Lozada said in a statement received by IslamOnline.net on Wednesday.

The lawmaker, who heads the House Committee on Foreign Relations, further assailed the plan of the government to dispatch additional troops to Iraq “just to guarantee employment contracts for Filipino contractors and professionals in the future".

The Arroyo government should drop its plan and think of other ways to secure job contracts in Iraq or in any part of the world without endangering the lives of the Filipino people, he said.

In the Upper House of congress, Senator Manuel Villar Jr. said the government should no longer send an additional peacekeeping force to Iraq early next year due to security concerns over the increasingly volatile situation in Iraq.

Villar, chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said there is no need for the government to further prove its sincerity in supporting the alleged war against terrorism by maintaining a peacekeeping mission that it sent voluntarily.

"Should we wait for a Filipino soldier or social worker to die before we decide to send them back to the country?" he said in a statement.

"There was no request from any country for us to send a peacekeeping mission, but our government insisted on deploying a peacekeeping force to Iraq."

Villar, who opposed the sending of the Filipino contingent in September, said the government should also review whether it would be safe to allow more overseas Filipino workers to be deployed to Iraq given the volatile situation.