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.