Reaching out

By now travel plans for the week have been firmed up, and some have already embarked on Holy Week trips. But the summer break is just starting, and some of you might still be in the process of selecting vacation destinations.

Adventurous types might want to try the less traveled path. At least once in a lifetime, travelers must visit the cradle of civilization, a country with a history dating back 10,000 years, called Mesopotamia in Classical Antiquity, and now Iraq.

I wouldn’t mind visiting the land of the Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians – ancient peoples that I learned about in my World History class. But my passport, like those of other Filipinos, bears a stamp that prohibits me from traveling to modern-day, post-Saddam Iraq.

Wadee al-Batti, Iraq’s first ambassador to Manila in a decade, thinks it’s time for that prohibition to be lifted.

Since arriving in Manila on May 25 last year, one of Al-Batti’s principal goals has been to get the Philippine travel ban lifted, thereby (in his words) lifting bilateral relations to a new and better level.

The situation in Iraq has improved since the US-led invasion in 2003 that ended Saddam Hussein’s stranglehold on one of the world’s largest producers of crude oil. The Iraqis are ready to have full control of their country, taking over security from about 50,000 US forces that are expected to be gone by yearend.

There are reports that Washington is interested in extending the stay of up to 20,000 troops, believing that the Iraqis still lack defense capability in several areas including the protection of its airspace, but so far Baghdad appears unmoved.

Al-Batti, a native of Mosul near Iraq’s northern Kurdish region, is gung-ho about future prospects for his country. He was a nuclear physicist teaching in an Iraqi university before he fled Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2001 to work for Volvo Construction in Sweden. Two years ago, encouraged by developments in Iraq, he joined its foreign ministry as a political appointee.

“Iraq is a rich country,” he told us the other day, pointing out that Baghdad has just approved a national budget of $83 billion – about double the Philippines’ annual general appropriation, he noted – for a population of only 32 million.

The 50-year-old Al-Batti lives with his wife and three children at the Iraq embassy residence in South Forbes Park.

About 50 countries have opened embassies in Baghdad, Al-Batti told us, and he is waiting for the Philippines to do the same.

He is also waiting for the Philippine travel ban to Iraq to be lifted.

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“We are looking to stimulate tourist movement between Iraq and the Philippines. You have a beautiful country,” he told us. “You have democracy here, we have democracy there.”

Asked how Manila has responded to his proposal, he said, “There’s positive reaction.”

The current trend, however, is for Filipinos to leave several Arab states because of security concerns.

On the day that Al-Batti visited The STAR office, the late-breaking news from his country was about the twin suicide car bombings outside Baghdad’s Green Zone, which left at least nine people dead and 23 others wounded.

Perhaps the Philippines prefers to err on the side of caution. This has been true in Japan, where Tokyo was miffed when the evacuation zone for Filipinos in radiation-affected Fukushima prefecture was set by Manila at 50 kilometers – 20 kilometers beyond what was set for the Japanese by their government.

Al-Batti prefers to see a glass half-full. “We are at war,” he conceded. “But there is no country that could give anyone a 100 percent guarantee that no visitor would get hurt.”

He emphasized that peace is holding in southern Iraq and that the Kurdish north is starting to look like Dubai. Citizens of several other countries who have been assigned for several months outside Baghdad confirmed this to me, although the capital itself and several other areas remain besieged.

News reports typically highlight the bad news. I remember my visit to South Korea late last year when the North’s Kim Jong-il shelled a southern island. Western media commentators went on and on about war set to erupt on the peninsula. But everyone I talked to in Seoul – government officials and ordinary people on the street, in shops and restaurants laughed off the reports, saying they didn’t like the shelling but they disliked war even more. The media hyperventilation eventually died down.

Security is still a real and serious problem in Baghdad and certain parts of Iraq. How to emphasize the good amid all the bad news has to be one of the biggest hurdles for members of Iraq’s foreign service.

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If Al-Batti can’t get Filipinos to visit his country as tourists, he wants us to go there to be part of reconstruction efforts.

Iraq needs workers to build highways, about three million houses, thousands of schools, 100 hospitals – and it has all the petrodollars to pay for the labor.

In 2009 Iraqi officials asked the Philippines’ Department of Health for nurses and other medical workers. But the travel ban, imposed in 2004, was in place.

There are currently up to 6,000 Filipinos in Iraq, most of them working for US forces. Some were already in the country before the travel ban was imposed; the rest went around the ban by entering Iraq through third countries.

Al-Batti said the welfare of those Filipinos could be better protected if the Philippines opened an embassy in Baghdad instead of relying on diplomats based in Amman, Jordan.

Armed conflict has kept Iraqis from traveling. Al-Batti estimates that there are only about 150 Iraqi expatriates in the Philippines, a number of them married to Filipinas and operating recruitment agencies.

He is sure that more Iraqis would like to visit this “land of smiles.”

Al-Batti, one of the Christians who make up about three to five percent of Iraq’s population, also sees the ongoing unrest in the Arab world as a plus for his country.

“The wind of democracy is now going to all the neighbors,” he told us. “Democracy needs time… but I am sure we are on the right track.”

He noted that the posting in Manila of an Iraqi ambassador for the first time in 10 years “is a good sign” of improving bilateral relations.

But there is a saying in his country, Al-Batti said, that one hand cannot make the sound of applause.

“You need to have two hands,” he said.