MANILA, 24 March 2003 — Community leaders in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia sought to dispel reports here that Filipinos there were “panicking” because of the war in Iraq.

Ronnie Abeto and Tony Ranque, convenors of the International Coalition for Overseas Filipino Voting Rights (ICOFVR) and leaders of the Pusong Mamon Task Force (PMTF) in the Kingdom, said while the Eastern Province is near Kuwait, it does not mean that the place is in trouble.

They were reacting to a claim by fellow Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) during a telephone conversation with President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo on Friday night that OFWs in Saudi Arabia were panicking about the war. The president subsequently repeated the information on TV.

“Does the war‚ in (the Southern Philippine island of) Mindanao have an effect in (the Northern Philippine island of) Luzon?,” Ranque bristled in an e-mail.

He warned that such irresponsible statements should be denounced because they only cause unnecessary worries to dependents of OFWs at home.

“I do not know who that leader was and where in Saudi Arabia he came from but as a community leader who is always talking to the other OFWs here, I can say the situation in the Eastern Region of Saudi Arabia Dammam, Al Khobar and Jubail is normal,” Abeto said in his own e-mail posted in the Internet.

Abeto urged the president to ask other OFWs in the Kingdom before repeating such information so as not to cause alarm.

In fact, Ranque said, the All-Filipino Community and Sports Commission or AFSCOM, an umbrella organization of more than 50 groups located in the Eastern Province, has put in place Kilos-Kalinga 2003 (KK2003) designed to aid Kuwait-based OFWs. He said even Ambassador Roy Cimatu, head of the Middle East Preparedness Team (MEPT) was impressed by KK2003 which was being implemented with zero budget from the government.

Cimatu was briefed by the program’s overall commissioner Andy Reyes on KK2003 last Thursday, March 20 and he said the primary aim of KK2003 is to receive or assist any OFW evacuees from Kuwait.

Reyes said they would also relocate these evacuees to a holding center in the Eastern Province (in Alkhobar or Dhahran) and assist any OFWs relocating from north areas like Khafji and Hafar Al Batin if necessary.

“At present, we are safe in the KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), while in Kuwait only some 150 stranded workers were moved to the holding center at Nuwaisib near the KSA, Khafji border,” Reyes said.

Two years ago, there were already about a million Filipinos in the Middle East, plying different trades from Libya in the west to Iran in the east, from Turkey in the north to Oman in the south.

The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) said the figure grows each year so that the number has probably doubled.

Filipinos in Saudi Arabia alone have grown to over 900,000 from 893,000 at the turn of the century. Deployment of workers to the Middle East rose 2.9 percent in 2002, a figure that has been growing every year.