News Release - April 12, 2005
References: Connie Bragas-Regalado, Chairperson
Contact Numbers: 259-1145 and 0927-2157392
Vince Borneo, Information Officer, 0927-7968198

Pres. Macapagal-Arroyo must stop branding Muslims & OFWs as terrorists!

"The Macapagal-Arroyo government has only tried to stave off further anger from both the overseas Filipino community in the Middle East and our Muslim brothers and sisters in the homeland."

Thus declared MIGRANTE Sectoral Party chairperson Connie Bragas-Regalado on the "sudden dearth of information" on the Department of Justice (DOJ) memorandum issued on March 30 ordering the Bureau of Immigration (BI) and the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) officials to monitor the entry of overseas Filipino workers coming from the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez specifically directed the agencies to look for students from Pakistan who had studied in various Islamic schools and to watch overseas Filipino workers who converted to Islam saying that they are "contaminated by the terrorist mentality."

"Clearly, this baseless, highly irrational, racist and definitely anti-OFW memo from the Macapagal-Arroyo administration has branded all OFWs who believe in Islam as potential terrorists. Now not a word is heard from the DOJ or Malacanang," Bragas-Regalado said.

But a Department of Foreign Affairs an April 8 diplomatic note to the Royal Saudi embassy in Manila said "that there are no documented cases of Filipinos being recruited in Saudi Arabia to commit terrorist activities in the Philippines."

"But this same diplomatic note reveals the current administration's deceitful stand towards Muslim OFWs. Foreign Affairs secretary Alberto Romulo formally conveyed to the Saudi embassy that this issue was not on the agenda of the March 29 meeting of the National Security Council; that this matter was raised by a participant as a personal opinion; that no concrete evidence was raised in the context of a broad discussion on security issues; and there was no mention of any country. But this statement did not deny the existence of the DOJ directive issued on the next day," Bragas-Regalado said.

The DOJ has defended its memo as "necessary because intelligence reports show that some of the so-called Balik-Islams (Muslim converts) became Muslim extremists and terrorists when they returned to the Philippines."

"The said order has is a demented witchhunt on the very people who government always claims as the country's 'new economic heroes.' This is the Macapagal-Arroyo administration's local imitation of the illogical and baseless strides of the United States government towards Muslims and other nationalities. President Macapagal-Arroyo must speak up and immediately scrap the DOJ order," Bragas-Regalado ended. #