29 February 2008

017 ~ Small Steps Forward

A good twenty-four hours before Leap Year's Day 1992, the UN Security Council decided to create UNTAC, the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia. Among its many indirect accomplishments was conceiving the PNP Contingent, which –four Leap Years later– became a formidable presence in the international-peacekeeping scene.

The Global Pulisya’s first Leap Year’s Day in-field was actually in 2000; there were no overseas contributions in 1996.

That year, as the millennium turned, the outbound Filipino police officers were stationed either in UNTAET, the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor, or in UNMIK, the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo. They were all rebuilding secessionist lands from the destruction wrought by ethnic or political persecution and scorched-earth policy. Their tangible output would be local police institutions erected to contain future threats to peace and order.

That year in the Lesser Sundas, the Filipino police were laying the groundwork toward developing a territory that would soon gain independence.

They worked with foreign UN CivPol counterparts and kin from the Philippine military, clearing trails and building important roads for humanitarian aid, then fostering good community relations and engaging the population in livelihood projects. They rehabilitated badly damaged government outposts, schools, public centers, even homes. Many of them built their own depots so they could get on with their business of exercising legislative and executive authority.

Above everything, they labored to put the law into place, drafting and enforcing rules to safeguard progressing living conditions: traffic regulations, proper repatriation of the internally displaced, conflict-resolution for factional fighting and ages-old village-versus-village wars. Early into the mission, the PNP Contingent was singularly commended by UNTAET for promoting the “Timorization” of the East Timor Police Service.

Meanwhile, in the Balkans, the Filipino police were driving through slush and windchill to respond to emergency calls. It was the PNP Contingent’s first winter in the field but they investigated homicides and murders, drug trafficking and automobile smuggling, and other crimes, without letup.

Their share in the administration of justice was solving past mysteries –literally unearthing a gruesome history of barbarism as evidenced by mass graves– which led to the setup of a forensics unit. Doing so established the mission’s confidence in Filipino expertise.

The next Leap Year, immediately following the widespread violence that injured a multitude of civilians and international peacekeepers, UNMIK requested the PNP to dispatch an exclusive team of criminal investigators on top of the regular contingent contribution. Afterward, eight out of nearly two dozen multinationals in the special task force "Operation Thor" were drawn from the Global Pulisya.

Above everything, the Filipino police embarked on erasing the dangerous divide between Kosovar Albanians and Kosovar Serbs to shape the multiethnic Kosovo Police Service.

The small steps taken in those days became what the world now sees as great leaps to a safer, more secure, more sober planet.

There will still be inevitable slips, naturally, especially that the young nation of Timor-Leste has not weaned off outsider-nurturing and that the newly independent Kosovo* is into a critical period. But it helps that stakeholders, including the Filipino people represented by the PNP Contingent, do not renege on the promise to continue with their magnanimity.


===
* The Philippines is among the countries that do not oppose the declaration but would prefer a settlement that is acceptable to all parties concerned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 2008_Kosovo_declaration_of_independence
http://www.pr-inside.com/ philippines-prefers-negotiated-settlement-to-r443795.htm


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

NO FUTILE EXERCISE. The PNP Contingent, more than a token force in the restoration of global security, currently serves in seven mission areas across four continents.
[Slide photos and seal by courtesy, Police Deputy Director-General Emmanuel R Carta and Police Superintendent Daniel B Fabia III; and Mr Hakan Ugurlu, Timor Police Service Public Relations Office.]

14 February 2008

016 ~ A World of Hearts

Swift and effectual action is the core of Filipino police endeavors. On the local front, it is the PNP Directorate for Operations that throbs as the nerve center for the beat worker’s activity. Its main concern is the fight versus criminality, insurgency, and terrorism.

Based on the well-entrenched, round-the-clock incident-monitoring and accomplishment-reporting system, it pumps policy on internal security, law enforcement, public safety, and special police operations. It is the umbrella of the Aviation Security Group, Civil Security Group, Maritime Group, Traffic Management Group, and the elite strike unit Special Action Force.

Currently, the directorial staff has dozens of commissioned and non-commissioned officers, several of whom are international-peacekeeping veterans of the missions in Cambodia, Kosovo, the Sudan, and Timor-Leste. These personnel conduct themselves with the bearing and disposition of a UN Blue Beret, enthusiastic to learn or relearn the ropes at national headquarters, of which procedures are noticeably different from those at mission-area offices.

The latest additions make up a brisk and blithe bunch, the willingness to be reimmersed in the local scene not fading from their faces. They join in the tedious policy-forming process with perseverance, especially that they come from a “paperless” culture, brevity being the soul of their global-policing transactions.

Without complaint, they pit themselves in the daily grind, morning till afternoon, of being deputies and aides and workhorses in an institution that is traditionally the hat where the buck stops, the repository of civil society’s flak. They brace up for street-level augmentation when the situation boards signal heightened- or full-alert status.

Humbly and unpretentiously, these police officers are ready to revise memorandum drafts that their superiors think could be better composed, to discuss standing regulations among their peers, and to seek help from juniors whenever needed. Thank Heavens, they do not project an image of having one over the “grounded-to-Motherland” others, and that they are nowhere abrasive and as irritating as pebbles in anyone’s shoe.

If asked, majority of them might not deny their aspiration to soon return to the more convenient multinational peace-support operational theatre. But thank Heavens still, none of them acts with hideous impatience and gross disregard for what they hold in their hands at the moment: matters of great national consequence.

Thank Heavens most of all, they don’t seem to be doing all the good that they are observed to be doing –for nothing but bland compliance and self-serving recognition.

It’s probably because they recognize and honor the duty that they owe their country, the duty to carry out duties at home, before aching to go back to some land yonder.

It’s probably because they recognize and honor the duty to demonstrate to their own people, in their own little directorial-staff-desk-action way, the same compassion they have shown to the citizens of another nation.

It’s probably because they are no ingrates and they embrace the fact that they are morally bound to love their country first and foremost.

It’s any one of these, or all of the above.