FOLLOWING the expulsion of Ambassador Renato Villa, President Rodrigo Duterte has declared a permanent ban on the deployment of Filipino workers to Kuwait. Duterte, who returned to the Philippines from Singapore early Sunday morning, urged some 250,000 Filipinos working in Kuwait to leave to find better opportunities in places that will treat them well.
“The ban stays permanently,” Duterte told reporters upon arriving at the Davao airport. “There will be no more recruitment for especially domestic workers.”
Duterte earlier declared a deployment ban following the discovery of the body of Joanna Demafelis, a Filipino domestic, inside the freezer of an apartment in Kuwait. The case became emblematic of the abuse that Filipino workers suffer at the hands of their employers in Kuwait.
Even as both sides negotiated an agreement that would provide Filipino workers in the Gulf state better protection, a diplomatic row broke out over rescue missions conducted by Philippine embassy staff to retrieve abused Filipino workers from their Kuwaiti employers. The operations became widely publicized when embassy staff uploaded videos onto social media networks, triggering an angry response from the Kuwaiti government, which expelled the Philippine ambassador after declaring him persona non grata.
In the confusion that followed, Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano both apologized to the Kuwaiti government for the rescue operations, then defended them as being consistent the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.
“We remain convinced that the actions we took in Kuwait are a rightful exercise of our duty under international law to protect our nationals abroad,” Cayetano said.
This begs the question: if we were so convinced we were right, why did Cayetano and Villa apologize so profusely for what the Kuwaitis viewed as a clear violation of their sovereignty?
Why did embassy staff publicize the “covert” rescue operations by posting the videos on the internet and social media without regard for the diplomatic consequences?
President Duterte, by his Labor secretary’s own admission, was taken by surprise by Kuwait’s reaction and Villa’s expulsion. This suggests a failure on the part of the Department of Foreign Affairs to precisely anticipate such surprises and prepare for them. Apologizing for, then defending our behavior merely emphasizes this failure.
In light of the many abuses that Filipinos suffer at the hands of their employers in Kuwait, the President’s decision Sunday to maintain the deployment ban is most likely the correct one. It can never be a mistake to protect Filipinos here and abroad. With the benefit of hindsight, however, it would have been better if the President’s hand were not forced, and that he came to this decision from a position of strength, rather than from a defensive posture that the DFA put him in with its ineptitude.