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Philippines
Thursday, March 28, 2024

Speaking our mind

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Staking out your country’s position on a given issue is never an easy task, as President Duterte is finding out again and again.

It may explain why he’s assured critics he has no intentions to become a dictator, because he’s “too old for that.” Speaking as a fellow senior, I can attest that at our age, we’d much rather just speak our mind and take our stand, plain and clear, instead of having to dance endlessly around diplomatic niceties.

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Unfortunately, Duterte’s present job won’t let him do that. For example, in our relationship with China, he’s opted to walk a tightwire between the world’s two big powers, instead of taking the easy way out and continuing to cozy up to the United States despite the unreliability of its security promises.

Speaking before soldiers in Marawi the other day, the President warned that he would wage war against any country that conducted fishing or research in the Philippine (Benham) Rise without authorization. This followed his earlier order to the Philippine Navy to fire upon any foreign poachers inside our exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

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Then, at presumably another event in the same city—the inauguration of a new housing project—Duterte waved an olive branch by claiming that the Chinese recognized Philippine “co-ownership” of the South China Sea when they offered to conduct joint exploration and other collaborative activities with us in those waters.

It’s quite likely that China’s maritime security stakes are much higher in the South China Sea than the Pacific waters around the Philippine Rise. If so, they may well agree to go along with the somewhat nebulous concept of “co-ownership” in the latter region, adding another feather to the President’s diplomatic cap.

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Some support in this regard may be found in an unlikely source, the latest SWS quarterly survey last December.

The SWS survey found that the three countries most trusted by Filipinos are (still?) the United States, Canada and Japan. They received “very good” net trust ratings of +68, +55 and +54, respectively.

Hopefully this will ease American concerns about Duterte’s stinging anti-American rhetoric, which his Fil-Am critics keep trying to exploit for destabilization purposes. What it should not do is embolden the US to move further against him, because—even purely in terms of survey results—his net trust ratings hovering in the mid-eighties easily overwhelm whatever the US can come up with.

At the same time, SWS found that net trust in China had improved by a whopping 20 points, from a “poor” -13 in September to a “neutral” +7 in December. This, from a country that has scored positive net ratings in only nine out of the 45 quarterly surveys that SWS has conducted since 1994.

We think that the reason for this is again Duterte-related: people trust in him so much that they’re also willing to give the Chinese the benefit of the doubt purely on the President’s say-so.

It’s another feather in his diplomatic cap. But it should also be taken as an encouragement to China to keep trying harder to woo us, because—as with the proverbial dalagang Filipina—persistence and sincerity pay off in the end.

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Farther away, numerous complaints have been reaching the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration about employers in Saudi Arabia trading their maids with each other. These young women are not covered by new contracts and are thus more vulnerable to abuse and sexual advances by their new employers.

We won’t discount the possibility that some of these maids themselves are consenting to, and even initiating, these informal trades in their search for better employment terms. But that is neither here nor there when what we want is to avoid the killing of yet another Joanna Demafelis.

Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III has responded, properly, that he is willing to extend the current suspension on OFW deployment to Kuwait, to other host countries in the Middle East who can’t assure us about the rights and welfare of our OFWs there, especially household helpers who are the most vulnerable.

Secretary Bello must know that he should be more careful in talking up a deployment ban to Saudi Arabia, which hosts over a million of our overseas workers. We also offer the following suggestions to put more teeth into his threat:

DFA should produce a centralized and widely publicized database of local resources in every host country that our OFWs can tap whenever their rights are violated or their lives are in danger. How cooperative a host country will be with this initiative should be closely monitored.

DFA and DoLE should go ahead to finalize OFW protection agreements with every country that hosts substantial numbers of our workers, especially in the Middle East. The pending agreement with Kuwait shouldn’t be a sole example.

Under these agreements, let’s try to secure the authority for our embassy or consulate staff to take custody of OFW passports and visas for the duration of their employment.

It’s time to seriously consider suggestions to create through legislation a new Department of Overseas Filipino Affairs, considering that a full 10 percent of our population resides overseas, whether temporarily or permanently.

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Well, it seems to be final, at least for the moment: The new form of government we’re likely to have in place by middle of next year will remain presidential in form (not parliamentary) but transitioning to a Federal system (no longer unitary).

This is what was recommended by the President’s consultative commission (con-com) on charter change, after a close vote that included a run-off to achieve simple majority. It is also among the key new provisions that the House has accepted as it begins a regular consultation process with the Con-com and (hopefully) the Senate as well.

The sense of the senior Con-com members, led by former Senate President Nene Pimentel and former Chief Justice Reynato Puno, was that a combination of parliamentary AND federal change at the same time might be too much, too soon for our people.

In an ideal world, we would have preferred to go for broke. But as we’ve been finding out from speaking to groups all over the country over the past year and a half, the inertia of the status quo—not to mention the political grip enjoyed by entrenched interests—remain to be formidable obstacles to change.

So we’re quite happy to defer to the wisdom of our elder statesmen. There will be time enough later—obviously beyond our lifetime—for our people to reconsider a parliamentary changeover, once our political culture and institutions have sufficiently matured.

Readers can write me at gbolivar1952@yahoo.com.

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