Migrante International organized a sit-in demonstration for the 16 stranded Filipino workers in Riyadh on Tuesday outside the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) headquarters in Pasay City. Families of the stranded workers participated in the peaceful event, along with Migrante Secretary General Maita Santiago.
The sit-in was meant to highlight the failure of the Philippine government in protecting the rights of Filipino workers around the globe, and specifically the plight of 16 stranded workers in Riyadh who haven’t been paid their salaries for many months and who don’t have proper identification papers. The 16 workers in question staged a hunger strike at the Philippine Embassy in Riyadh last December for eight days before being removed from the premises just days before Christmas.
In a telephone interview yesterday, Santiago told me that OWWA Administrator Virgilio Angelo repeatedly called the police throughout the day to come and disperse the protestors, even though they were not blocking entrances to the building.
At 8pm on Tuesday night a group of alcohol-fueled policemen descended upon the demonstrators and started to violently disperse them. “There were two wives (of the stranded workers) and their babies with us. One of them was punched in the head, and one policeman used his rifle butt to hit others,” Santiago told me. “Five of us were detained at a police station for three hours and then released.”
Instead of coming down from his office and having a dialogue with the protestors, Angelo sent a security guard to inform the sit-in participants that Director for Overseas Operations Marianito Roque would speak to them in his office.
“We thought it better that he come down and talk with us, so we turned down the offer,” Santiago explained.
The next day, Wednesday, Migrante organized an indignation rally outside OWWA from 11 a.m. until 5 p.m. A representative from the OWWA employees group LAPIAN addressed the rally, and a delegation from Migrante went and spoke with Director Roque. The director told them that the 16 stranded workers were back to square one in Riyadh, but Philippine Ambassador to the Kingdom Bahnarim Guinomla was more optimistic. He told me by phone on Thursday, “None of the 16 are in deportation. They are staying with friends, and we already have their tickets to go home. We are just waiting for individual employers to give them permission to leave,” explained the ambassador.
I just hope that the embassy in Riyadh is exerting its utmost efforts to send these workers home as soon as possible. As I’ve said many times before, some irresponsible Saudi employers are largely at fault for creating the phenomenon of runaway workers by not paying their salaries on time and not giving them their iqamas (ID cards). Justice delayed is justice denied.
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Arroyo’s Photo-Ops Too Much
A photograph is worth a thousand words, and in the case of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo this has never been truer. This past week she has posed smiling both next to Filipino-Chinese kidnap victim Dominga Chou and while crossing out the wanted poster of a “neutralized” kidnapper.
In the first picture, she’s smiling and looks relaxed and tanned, as if she has just come back from a soothing vacation in Boracay. Her left arm is wrapped around Chou, who looks shy and uncomfortable in the media spotlight, and clutches a windbreaker while meekly trying to smile.
In the second picture, the president is shown laughing heartily, her head artfully thrown back, as she crosses out the wanted poster of a kidnapper with a large Pentel pen. Arroyo here doesn’t look like the president of the republic, but rather like a fashion model for say a new lipstick or shampoo, laughing at how good these fabulous products make her feel!
All of this smiling and laughing contrasts vividly with her usual frowns and snappy dressing downs she usually doles out to public officials who have failed her, and on television no less. Some public relations whiz must have pointed out to her how bad her public frowning made her look, and told her to smile and laugh more at photo-opportunities, especially now with elections just months away.
Perhaps because she is a woman, Arroyo has been acutely more aware of how public appearances affect her image, and she has probably been more than willing to go along with her image consultants’ suggestions that she smile and laugh more in public in order to soften and endear her image.
Except in this case, the president has taken it too far. There is a fine line between real happiness and staged phoniness, and the public can always spot the fake hilarity a mile away. Arroyo would do better to stop acting so coquettish and behave like the 54-year-old president that she is.
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