Before Angela Merkel and Angelina Jolie, the Philippines helped 250,000 refugees

SHANGHAI CITY — One need not be super rich or powerful to be a Good Samaritan or to express compassion, which I believe is our moral duty as decent and civilized human beings.

As global headlines keep reporting on the refugee crisis in Europe caused mainly by wars in the Middle East and Africa and the disturbing accounts of some Western and Persian Gulf nations refusing to help, I want to remind the world and even many of us here in the Philippines of the two times in the 20th century when our humble Third World nation did our share to aid refugees long before Germany’s outstanding leader Angela Merkel or Hollywood’s idealistic Angelina Jolie did in our time now.

We in the Philippines helped resettle 250,000 Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian refugees from wars and chaos in Indo-China in the late 1970s to the 1980s, according to activist businessman and GNN TV host Herman Tiu Laurel, the late President Cory C. Aquino’s appointee as administrator of the 300-hectare Philippine Refugee Processing Center (PRPC) in Morong, Bataan after the 1986 EDSA uprising. I learned this interesting fact from Laurel, since both of us are part of the Philippine media delegation invited to visit the restored mausoleum of the 15th century Sulu Sultan in Dezhou City, Shandong province after his successful state visit to China’s Ming Dynasty Emperor Zhu Di.

It fascinated me to hear from Laurel, who told me he empathized with the Indo-Chinese refugees because his own father and mother fled war-torn Fujian province in south China during the Japanese invasions, that the Philippine Refugee Processing Center in Bataan was “the biggest of its kind in the ASEAN region and it is run well like a little country within a country.”

With support from the United Nations, this 300-hectare center has language schools, its own power plant, fire trucks, its own motor pool, food supply logistics, religious temples for the mostly Buddhist refugees, hospital, psychological services to help the victims of war trauma, etc., according to Laurel who was in his 30s when he volunteered to help the PRPC.

Herman Tiu Laurel said the PRPC was created by former President Ferdinand E. Marcos partly to showcase the Philippines’ humanitarian compassion as a nation and also to boost employment in Bataan province, an area then often besieged by Communist rebels of the New People’s Army (NPA). The PRPC was continued by President Cory C. Aquino, who appointed Laurel since he was active in the1986 EDSA uprising. 

Another instance of the Philippines giving succor and welcoming refugees was in the 1930s under the Commonwealth Republic of the late President Manuel L. Quezon. In fact, the Philippines as well as this bustling metropolis of Shanghai and embattled China in World War II were among the few good societies on earth that welcomed Jewish refugees escaping Nazi racist persecutions and the Holocaust, when even democracies in North America refused to do so as shown by the 1939 tragedy of the ship S.S. St. Louis with a thousand German Jews turned away by the US and Canada.

I remember all these as I watch news reports of the harrowing and sad tragedies of many Syrian, Libyan, Iraqi and other refugees now seeking safety in Europe, with this situation causing logistical, economic and even political challenges for that region.  

How can our 21st century world, with so much technological progress, material wealth, education and cultural sophistication, witness the barbaric chaos of senseless wars forcing civilians of Syria, Libya, Iraq and other places to flee their homes as refugees? 

To illustrate how unique and generous the Philippines was in helping process, care for and the resettle 250,000 Indo-Chinese refugees to other countries three decades ago, compare it to the numbers of refugees Britain and France said it would welcome within its borders: 24,000 each, across several years.

 Ironically, the United States — still the world’s wealthiest superpower and prime mover behind military efforts to overthrow the secular regimes of Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad of Iraq, Libya — has not yet matched European nations in the number of refugees it is willing to resettle (they’ve accepted 10,000 so far). The US became the world’s richest economy due mainly to its past policy of welcoming refugees and immigrants; hopefully it will reject the anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner demagoguery of the likes of Donald Trump.  

In contrast, Germany and The Vatican were among the countries that opposed wars against Iraq and other countries, controversial conflicts that in part caused this humanitarian crisis, yet German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her nation have displayed guts and compassion, this year welcoming an astounding number of 800,000 refugees and then half a million more refugees yearly afterwards! This generosity of Germany is actually a brilliant gambit and a win-win situation for Germany, which faces the specter of an aging population, low birth rates, a huge need for more labor and human resources to sustain its dynamic industrial economy which is the biggest in Europe.   
     I couldn’t sleep early the other night due to watching television news about Europe’s unprecedented refugee crisis, the world’s biggest since the horrors of World War II. 

How will our world decisively solve this humanitarian crisis at its root causes, which I believe include the need for lasting peace in the Middle East and Africa, socio-economic development and social justice in those regions wracked by violence, sectarian conflicts and chaos? How can we beseech the industrialized powers of the west and other countries to sincerely be peacemakers and not directly or indirectly create war situations that result in refugee problems like these?

What about the plight of many ethnic and religious minorities in conflict areas, most especially Christian minorities, Kurds, Jews and others? How can we work for the protection of minority rights, culture and welfare everywhere, most especially those who have become refugees due to persecutions and wars? 

Apart from being an idealist who dreams of a more just and harmonious world, I empathize with the refugees in Europe because my ancestors also fled Fujian province in south China as refugees due to the immoral Opium Wars and other chaos. We shouldn’t be indifferent to injustice and sufferings, just because they are seemingly so far away. Any suffering or injustice anywhere is a threat to social peace and civilization in our interconnected world.

Let us all work and pray for peace and social justice not only worldwide, but more so in our own society in the Philippines with our own centuries-old Muslim rebellion in Mindanao and other insurgencies in economically neglected rural hinterlands. Let us not only be peacemakers and catalysts of genuine reforms; let us also show the compassion of Good Samaritans to all people, whether refugees or not.   

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