Work promised to returned maids
Work promised to returned maids
MANILA (AFP): President Fidel Ramos promised employment yesterday to 84 Filipina maids who returned from Singapore in a diplomatic row over the hanging of their compatriot Flor Contemplacion, and said he was ready to send a second plane there if needed.
He also acknowledged Singaporean cooperation in an ongoing Philippine investigation into the hanging, which has caused an outcry here.
The maids returned at dawn yesterday aboard a C-130 troop transport plane sent to Singapore by Ramos.
Government agencies and the private sector intended to give the maids "opportunities to have a fair chance of earning a decent living in the Philippines," Ramos told a news briefing.
He thanked Singapore for giving court documents to Manila in the case of Contemplacion, who was hanged in Singapore March 17 after her conviction on charges of strangling another maid, Delia Maga, and killing Maga's four-year old Singaporean ward in 1991.
"This substantiates the Singapore government's willingness to cooperate with the Philippines," Ramos said, adding the documents would be used by a presidential fact-finding body investigating the circumstances surrounding Contemplacion's death.
Ramos has vowed to break ties with Singapore if the commission finds that Contemplacion, whom many Filipinos believe was innocent, had been unjustly hanged.
Among the documents were records of preliminary inquiries, the courts' grounds of decision, and Contemplacion's petition for clemency, Ramos said.
Ramos said he was "ready to send" another plane to fetch any of the 60,000 Filipina maids still in the city-state.
The homecomers join a large army of 2.4 million unemployed in the Philippines, which collects up to US$8 billion a year in salary remittances from its estimated five million contract workers abroad.
Meanwhile, police investigators will bring the results of their autopsy on Maga's remains to the fact-finding commission today.
The findings "may help the commission determine the circumstances surrounding Maga's death," said Alberto Reyes, chief of the National Bureau of Investigation's (NBI) medico- legal division.
NBI pathologists exhumed the four year-old corpse at a public cemetery south of Manila on Tuesday in an attempt to establish whether a woman like Contemplacion could have killed her.
The two countries have downgraded diplomatic ties following a strong public backlash in the Philippines on the hanging. Ramos had banned new deployments of Filipina domestics to Singapore.