Sr. Lt. Gen. Pham Hong Huong, Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Vietnam People’s Army, and Gen. Robert B. Brown, Commander of the US Army Pacific Command (USARPAC), who are co-chairs of PAMS-42, attended the events.
At the meeting, the participants shared experiences of international and regional cooperation of ground forces in HADR.
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Sr. Lt. Gen. Pham Hong Huong (second from right) at the event |
Brigadier General Jeet Bahabur Gurung, Director of the Nepalese Army’s Disaster Management Authority, held that countries could not respond effectively to some particular situations by their own even though they have much expertise and experience in HADR. He exemplified his point with the April 2015 Nepal earthquake, which killed nearly 9,000 people and left severe damages to the country.
Nepal, which has sent forces for HADR missions in a number of countries, has an emergency mechanism to promptly call for international assistance, and its army is allowed to directly and actively get involved in HADR. However, they still faced a number of difficulties to deal with the earthquake’s aftermath. Thus, it is necessary to have a general scheme to promote multilateral cooperation, coordination structure, and budget allocation to be ready for disaster response, he affirmed.
Sharing the same view with the Nepalese general, delegates attached importance to holding multilateral and regional seminars, command and tabletop exercises, and field drills in order to share good models as well as to seek measures to overcome barriers of languages, operation mechanisms and communications in performing HADR. They also underlined, HADR participants should strictly follow the host country’s requests to ensure successes in either multilateral or regional HADR operations.
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Major General Ngo Quy Duc, Head of the Search and Rescue Department under the General Staff of the Vietnam People's Army, speaking at the reception for PAMS-42 delegates |
With regard to multinational cooperation activities in HADR within ASEAN and between ASEAN and dialogue partners, Colonel Bui Xuan Anh, Deputy Director of the Institute of Defense International Relations under the Vietnamese Ministry of National Defense, held that regional HADR over the past years has still been a new and difficult task for ASEAN countries, especially when the scale of disasters is beyond the reach of the region. For this reason, fostering HADR cooperation is considered a priority in defense and security cooperation among armies of ASEAN member countries and their partners, particularly within the framework of the regional mechanisms of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and the ASEAN Defense Ministers’ Meeting Plus (ADMM+).
In the afternoon, the same day, PAMS-42 delegates visited the National Center for Search and Rescue Management under the Vietnam’s National Committee for Disaster Response, Search and Rescue. The visiting delegates were impressed by experiences and performances in HADR of Vietnamese forces. They highly appreciated the close cooperation and coordination among local armed forces, civilians, and authorities in overcoming consequences and stabilizing victims’ lives.
Translated by Van Hieu