Legarda Urges Protection, Revival Of Displaced Pinoys

DATU PIANG, Maguindanao (ARMM) – Senator Loren B. Legarda has once again called on the national government, various NGOs and the private sector to extend assistance to hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the country. Legarda sought educational, medical and livelihood development assistance for IDPs, particularly those caught between the recent tensions in Mindanao.

Legarda also urged the national government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) to “faithfully observe their truce and to facilitate their peace talks in order to establish permanent peace in Mindanao. We must stop this fighting among brothers and sisters,” she pleaded.

More than 2.5 million people have been displaced by armed conflict in the Philippines since 2000, the vast majority in Mindanao, where 62,000 families (or 370,000 persons) are displaced; most of them in Maguindanao Province. Another 3,800 families are reported to be still displaced in Cotabato and Sultan Kudarat Provinces; and 260 families in Lanao del Norte Province.

The Philippines ranked first in the number of IDPs worldwide by registering 600,000 evacuees in 2008, according to Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), a Geneva-based body monitoring conflict-induced internal displacement. Tension between the MILF and government forces has caused the displacement of more than 950,000 persons since early August 2008.

Legarda stressed that the Philippines is a signatory to both the 1949 Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War and the 1977 Additional Protocol to the [1949] Geneva Conventions on the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts. As such, she added, “we must continually

IDPs are persons or groups who have been forced to leave their homes to avoid the effects of armed conflict, violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters. Vulnerable groups like children, the elderly or women experience profound psychosocial distress related to displacement, and the removal from sources of income and livelihood may add to physical and psychosocial vulnerability for displaced people. Schooling for children and adolescents may be disrupted.

Conditions of internal displacement may raise suspicions of or lead to abuse by armed combatants, or other parties to conflict. At worse IDPs may lack identity documents essential to receiving benefits or legal recognition; in some cases, fearing persecution, displaced persons have sometimes got rid of such documents.

“Although these IDPs would simply want to receive humanitarian aid to recover from the trauma of the experience, we as a nation are morally obliged to extend assistance that would institute stable rules that protect them from violence, end any ensuing conflict in their area and rehabilitate them back to their normal.

Source: http://www.lorenlegarda.com.ph/article-1257924176.html