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Raissa Robles

Foreign Secretary Blas Ople falls ill on board a plane which is diverted to Taipei

The Philippines' hard-drinking and chain-smoking Foreign Secretary Blas Ople, died yesterday in Taiwan after falling  ill on board an aircraft.

The 76-year-old, who was the architect of Manila's policy of shoring up its shaky economy through the mass export of its workers, had just accompanied President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to Tokyo for the Japan-Asean summit.

He began suffering chest pains on  Saturday evening while aboard a Japan Asia Airways flight from Tokyo to Bahrain via Bangkok. The plane was diverted for an emergency landing in Taipei where he was rushed to hospital. He died there yesterday morning.

Ople is survived by his wife, Susana, seven children and 18 grandchildren.

Last year, before accepting the  post of foreign minister, he vowed never to retire because, anyway, he was living on borrowed time. He  said that at 17, he had asked God to extend his life by 25 years - he did not want to fight the Japanese during the second world war.

He was also an inveterate chain-smoker. When a ban on smoking in public buildings was passed, he ignored it and continued to light up inside the building of the foreign ministry, telling reporters: 'I have diplomatic immunity.'

He considered the enactment of the Labour Code to be his biggest achievement. 'I launched [in 1974] the overseas employment programme  which created jobs for seven million Filipinos and transformed the lives of millions of families by giving them disposable income over and above subsistence,' he said last year.

The programme helped prop up the dictatorship of president Ferdinand Marcos.  Labour migration was the stopgap answer to the oil embargo the Middle East had imposed to pressure  Marcos into ending the war against Muslim rebels.

Ople, the labour minister then, managed to get the newly affluent Middle East countries to agree to a 'labour-for-oil' swap.

As one of the oldest and longest serving politicians who had worked for five presidents, he was an outspoken but pragmatic politician.

Marcos kept him as labour minister for 18 years, partly because he served as the dictator's sounding board. Marcos was ousted in a popular uprising in 1986.

After he and his family fled the Philippines, Ople found a job helping draft a new constitution under the  administration of Corazon Aquino.

He inserted a provision granting overseas workers the right to vote in absentia.

He successfully pushed for the Senate's ratification of the Philippine-US Visiting Forces Agreement in 1999. He  said the pact stood for a 'new partnership with the US based on sovereign equality and mutual respect'.

When he thought US ambassador Francis Ricciardone had displayed a lack of respect by calling Philippine judges corrupt, Mr Ople demanded a public apology from this 'two-cent radio commentator' who, he said, 'must not act like an American pro-consul'.

His final political act was to quit the opposition Laban ng Demokratikong Pilipino last week and join Mrs Arroyo's ruling party.



Architect of Philippine labour migration dies