Closed doors

For a nation that prides itself in its hospitality, it says a lot that there’s spirited opposition to hosting 50,000 Afghans who helped the US and its allies in evicting the Taliban from Afghanistan.

And among the most vocal opponents is the Vice President and frustrated defense secretary, Sara Duterte, whose mother Elizabeth Zimmerman’s father was reportedly among the Jews who fled Nazi Germany.

Israel installed the Open Doors Memorial in the city of Rishon LeZion in recognition of the Philippines’ grant of asylum in 1939 to 1,200 of those persecuted Jews.

That seems to be a kinder, gentler, more humane era in the Philippines. If it’s lost forever, it will be a misfortune for the younger generations.

The Philippines also accepted Vietnamese “boat people” who fled their country following the communist takeover. But unlike the Jews who were allowed to settle anywhere in the Philippines and assimilate, the Vietnamese refugees were confined to a village in Palawan while they waited for their papers to be completed for permanent resettlement in the United States.

I visited that Vietnamese village a few times. The residents rivaled Pinoys in hospitality. And they had wood-fired clay ovens where they baked the same wonderful mini baguettes that are sold all over Vietnam – a positive takeaway from their French colonial era. The bread at the banh mi kiosks at the malls can’t compare with those baguettes in the Vietnamese village.

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Bread also comes to my mind when I recall my visit to Afghanistan in 2005. Breakfast was wonderful unleavened flatbread that I slathered with cream cheese.

This was shortly after the fall of the Taliban; I covered preparations for the country’s parliamentary and local council elections, wherein women were allowed for the first time to seek office.

And how eager the Afghan women were to participate in the electoral exercise, to be able to work again and resume their studies.

Under the Taliban, women were largely kept under home lockdown and girls were not allowed to go to school.

I visited a grade school where girls listened raptly to the teacher. They were so happy to receive ball pens from me and some heavily armed members of the International Security Assistance Force who allowed me to embed with them while they patrolled the area in an armored vehicle.

Kabul at the time was dotted with cemeteries, with the graves marked with flags: green for those who died of natural causes; red for casualties of armed conflict.

Most of the buildings were bullet-riddled. A guide pointed out the sprawling sports complex open ground where the Taliban carried out mass executions, many of them by public stoning. Every Afghan I met, it seemed, had a story of close family members being shot dead by the Taliban, or of women they knew who were stoned to death.

Amid all that misery, it was touching to see the Afghans picking up the pieces, getting their lives back, preparing kebabs paired with the delectable Afghan rice dish kabuli pulao, and cramming to learn English.

Many of the women still wore confining burqas and avoided walking alone. Gender biases don’t disappear overnight in that society; I was told that only female sex workers and foreign devils like me walked alone in the streets.

Some elderly men looked daggers at me, probably resenting my foreign ways, and it was difficult to order food in restaurants where the male waiters refused to talk to women. But I also met many kind locals – men and women alike – while roaming the streets alone.

In August 2021, I remembered them, especially the women and girls, when I learned that the Taliban had returned to power shortly after the American forces left. Women and girls were soon barred again from nearly all types of work and from getting formal education.

It was another American failure – not as bad as the fall of Saigon, but clearly not a victory for Uncle Sam.

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Opponents of the temporary hosting of Afghans in the Philippines resent having the country being used as a dumping ground for US problems. The opponents ask: why do the Americans have to park their allies temporarily in another country for processing before permanent resettlement in the US?

Although the comparison is extreme, some critics have likened it to extraordinary rendition – the US practice (officially prohibited) of outsourcing to another country the detention and interrogation of terror suspects using extrajudicial methods such as waterboarding.

The number of the Afghans appears to be fueling much of the concern: 50,000 is far from 1,200. Considering the reach of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the risk that some of the 50,000 could be sleeper terrorists is suspected to be a major reason for the US proposal for the Philippines to temporarily host the Afghans.

And considering the Philippines’ problems with Islamist terrorism, the security concerns raised also cannot be easily brushed aside.

Some quarters, on the other hand, smell plain political intrigue in the controversy.

This is because the most prominent critics of the proposal are VP Sara and her ally the President’s elder sister, while the proponent happens to be another presidential cousin with the same unmentionable surname as the House Speaker.

In this country, even compassion is held hostage by politics.

At least the Philippines is not lacking in kind souls who say it is better to err on the side of humanity. It may be an un-PC thing to say in this age of woke excesses, but welcoming and helping anyone in dire straits is the Christian thing to do. And with the Taliban back in power, there are so many Afghans who clearly need help.

If the Philippines decides to accept the Afghans, it shouldn’t be simply to please its treaty ally the US, but out of genuine humanitarian compassion.