Syndrome

One might call this the Flor Contemplacion syndrome.

Twelve years ago, a Filipina domestic worker was sentenced to die in Singapore for causing the death of her ward. The Ramos government then tried every conventional means to appeal the verdict, to no avail. When the schedule for the hanging came, Flor Contemplacion was brought to the gallows with typical Singaporean punctuality.

What happened next was unexpected.

Across the archipelago, spontaneous public outrage erupted. The Singaporean flag was burned. The Ramos administration was blamed for not saving the condemned Filipina. The streets were afire.

Something explosive was latent in the popular culture. The hanging of Contemplacion set it off. Reeling from the explosion, the Ramos administration tried to appease the mob by recalling our ambassador to Singapore and by sacking both the Secretary of Foreign Affairs as well as the Secretary of Labor.

Whatever there was in the popular culture kept all subsequent administrations wary. Since the Contemplacion incident, every administration tried to pander to the OCW constituency. Our legislators allowed overseas voting, regardless of the cost of this exercise and the demonstrated disinterest of Filipinos abroad in participating in this.

Whenever a Filipino OCW was jailed, the nearest Philippine consulate is now compelled to offer legal and moral assistance. Given the size of our migrant worker population, many of our consulates are devoting nearly all their time looking after jailed Filipinos abroad or those who have run into trouble either because of differences with their employers or flawed employment documentation.

In some major cities abroad, the Philippine embassy often resembles a halfway house for traumatized Filipinos. I visited the Philippine embassy in Tehran last year and found a couple of Filipinas living there, pending the sorting out of their papers. They tried to be helpful by cleaning the premises and being hospitable to the embassy guests. Each always had a tragic story to tell.

When Angelo de la Cruz was kidnapped in Iraq a few years ago, he was not even supposed to be there. Government had banned OCW deployment to that war-torn country.

But the kidnapped Filipino captured the public imagination. The terrorists who held him put out videos of the hostage, as if they knew there was a powerful syndrome in the Filipino popular culture they could exploit. The hostage wept and found the temerity to ask his own government to yield to the demands of his ruthless captors.

Fearing a repeat of the riots that followed the hanging of Contemplacion, the Philippine government sent a large team to Baghdad to figure out a way to save the hostage. In the end, we accepted international humiliation by bowing to the demands of terrorists. The minuscule Philippine contingent to the Coalition of the Willing was withdrawn dishonorably. Our credibility as an international ally was shattered.

But Angelo was freed. Upon his return to Pampanga, he was given housing and offered a job.

If this man was a Korean, we would have accepted his fate and apologized to his nation for the bother he caused. Remember the Korean students kidnapped in Afghanistan? They apologized to their people upon their return to Seoul.

But Koreans are Koreans and Filipinos are Filipinos.

Here, we expect our government to fold in our foreign policy if that is necessary to save every stray hostage abroad. We expect our highest officials to grovel before their foreign counterparts, begging for clemency for Filipinos found guilty by foreign courts and under foreign law. We expect our big businessmen to dig into their pockets and pay blood money to enable convicted Filipinos abroad to escape penalty.

Sensing our political leaders’ fear of the sort of backlash that followed Contemplacion’s hanging, militant groups hold vigils, march in the streets and bamboozle our leaders whenever a Filipino convicted abroad faces capital punishment. We think that the laws of other countries are as elastic as they are here, vulnerable to political pleadings.

The militant groups have made a cottage industry of protesting government “inaction” whenever a condemned OCW faces the penalty demanded by what is due process in the host country. By demonstrating every case in the streets of Manila, they help their recruitment among Filipinos abroad.

In addition, they use every case abroad as an opportunity to smear our own government and score useless political points. This is such a destructive and self-serving cottage industry the militants indulge in, one that magnifies what is flawed in our popular culture.

Once more this cottage industry of self-serving militants are in the streets again. This time, militants from Gabriela and Migrante are condemning “government inaction” in the case of one Marilou Ranario who is in prison in Kuwait facing execution for the murder of her employer.

Our government has deployed five lawyers on the case. The Vice President is overseeing our government’s response. The President has written the Emir for clemency in this case.

What else do these self-serving militant demagogues want our government to do?

Do they want our own President to fly over and weep at the Emir’s feet?