Filipinos in Afghanistan (FIA)

E·N·Q·U·I·R·Y
DEMAREE J.B. RAVAL

Filipinos in Afghanistan (FIA)
Sunday, 01 20, 2008

“All the lonely people - where do they all come from? All the lonely people - where do they all belong?” Thus runs a poignant refrain of a Beatles song, which could very well be the anthem of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs). They come from all places in the Philippines, and they belong to places all over the world wherever manpower is needed.

They have bravely conquered the loneliness of being far away from home by being able to bear solitude, happy in the thought that “when all this is over” they’d be reunited with their families in the Philippines. But a number of them do not make it to that reunion - they come home in a box. And some of them, like Zinnia Aguilan of Mt. Province, stay in that box and take a long time coming home.

Aguilan was one of the casualties in a recent suicide bombing in Kabul, Afghanistan. Seven days after the attack, our government has yet to respond to the necessity of bringing Aguilan back home. The repatriation of Aguilan’s remains stays entangled in the bureaucratic maze and total lack of government machinery responsive to such a situation in a country where the Philippines does not have a consular presence. Meanwhile, it is the Filipino community in Afghanistan, long ignored by the government, that is doing its level best to arrange for Aguilan’s repatriation.

The fate of Aguilan is reflective of the government’s neglect of its “modern-day heroes” who continue to shore up the economy with their hard-earned foreign currency. Unable to explain how Aguilan ended up in Kabul, the government speculates that she could have been an illegal entrant to a country where it banned the deployment of OFWs. So, up to now, Aguilan’s remains remain in wait for government action.

At the same time, the fate of Aguilan shows the best in the Filipinos who are left to fend for themselves in a foreign country. In Afghanistan, where there are thousands of OFWs, spread throughout that vast, post-conflict country, no more than 1,500 of them in the capital Kabul, they have banded themselves into what they call “Filipinos in Afghanistan,” or FIA, connected by the internet and cellular phone and regularly meeting to address their common concerns. The FIA is being coordinated by Catherine Sobrevega, the country manager of a non-governmental organization servicing the many programs of the Canada International Development Agency. The quick response of the FIA to the death of one of their own, as they did to the kidnapping of a Filipino UN volunteer in Kabul three years ago, is commendable. Where the government is utterly lacking in its response, the FIA has come in to fill in the breach.

The deployment ban to Afghanistan is one issue that bedevils the OFWs. To a man, these OFWs are documented, professionals (engineers and medical practitioners, mostly) working to rebuild Afghanistan. Yet the government responded without prior notice by imposing the ban last year when a Filipina was reported to have been the victim of robbery in one of the provinces outside Kabul, stranding many in Manila who were then on vacation leave.

It is about time Manila lift the deployment ban and establish its consular presence in Kabul. For many months now, long before the death of Aguilan, the FIA has been working for these, but the government has not responded.

Having been to Afghanistan for quite a time to work there with the United Nations, I have seen for myself that Afghanistan is no different from other countries where violence occurs occasionally. The level of violence in Afghanistan as reported in media is not as life-threatening as, say, in the case of Mindanao where the Abu Sayyaf remains a constant threat. The ban should be lifted, to allow OFWs in that country to work unhampered. What the Department of Labor and Employment and the Department of Foreign Relations instead should do is to field personnel in Kabul to look after the welfare of the OFWs as required by law. And that includes the putting up of a consular presence in Kabul . The Philippine embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan - which services only about 300 Filipinos in that similarly violence-prone country - attends to the consular requirements of Filipinos desiring to work in Afghanistan, but is too far off and cannot be relied on for immediate response. There is nothing better than implanting diplomatic personnel in Kabul.

Aguilan’s death is a wake-up call to the government. It cannot close its eyes to the fact that thousands of Filipinos work legitimately in Afghanistan. Yet, by imposing the deployment ban, it has effectively stopped OFWs in that country to come home to the country for a much-needed break and prevented those on vacation here in Manila from returning to their place of lucrative work. [Reports of mishandling of the ban abound, including the usual whispers about under-the-table arrangements just so an OFW bound for Kabul would get his permit to return to his employer.] And absent a consulate in Kabul, the government has left the OFWs to fend for themselves.

The death of one OFW, or any mishap to any one of them, should not prompt a knee-jerk government response in the form of a deployment ban. As pointed out by Sobrevega, “The ban should be lifted, but deployment of Filipinos to Afghanistan should be controlled and strictly monitored.”

One needs only to look at the incident last month in Algiers for precedence, where a Filipina died in a terrorist bombing. That same Filipina had worked in Afghanistan - without incident - for five years prior to transferring to Algiers where she met her sad fate only one week after her posting there. Has the government banned deployment to Algieria?

Meanwhile, FIA and Sobrevega should be commended for their efforts to fire up the Filipinos’ spirits in Afghanistan. They are doing a good job.

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