MANILA, 17 April 2004 — Ambassador Bahnarim Guinomla said he would probably be going back to his post in Riyadh within two weeks.
Guinomla was recalled to Manila in February for reasons the Department of Foreign Affairs has refused to disclose.
News reports, quoting unnamed DFA sources, said he was being punished for openly supporting presidential candidate Senator Panfilo Lacson, who has accused the husband of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of amassing ill-gotten wealth and of having an illicit affair with his secretary.
Another unconfirmed report was that the president was angry at Guinomla for failing to arrange her visit to the Kingdom late last year. Arroyo, who is facing a tight challenge from popular actor Fernando Poe Jr., managed to meet with the Filipino community in Bahrain but not with those in Saudi Arabia, which has the highest number of registered absentee voters at 97,000.
Some say that Guinomla had been charged with negligence in the case of the 16 hunger strikers within the embassy premises last year. Ten of the strikers have been repatriated and the six would soon follow.
Still another reported case was that Guinomla dipped his hands into the donation of Lacson to the Barya Mo, Buhay Ko (BMBK) fund for distressed Filipinos in Riyadh. He denied this.
DFA Undersecretaries Rafael Seguis and Jose Brillantes would only say Guinomla was recalled for consultations on matters not related to the elections.
Guinomla said it was also not clear to him why he was being kept in Manila. “If I don’t go back within the next two weeks, that will mean I have been in the Philippines for three months, too long since absentee voting has already started,” he said.
In an open letter to President Arroyo, Foreign Affairs Secretary Delia Albert, some members of the Filipino community in the Kingdom expressed their support for Guinomla and said it was not his fault that he shared the stage with Lacson during the launching of the BMBK project.
In the letter, the ambassador’s community supporters said Guinomla had been unfairly accused of endorsing the candidacy of Lacson for the presidency just because the host of the program, Cesar Saavedra, introduced Lacson as “the next president of the Republic of the Philippines.”
“Although the event was held on embassy grounds, the embassy holds no responsibility for what transpired during the event,” the letter said, adding that embassy officials emphasized that no associations may be allowed to engage in partisan politics within the grounds.”
Rashid Fabricante, head of the Pusong Mamon Task Force, said the case of the 16 hunger strikers was not negotiable because they were demanding collective repatriation.
He said it is the Kingdom’s law that repatriation and an exit visa is usually obtained with the cooperation of each worker’s sponsor or employer, which means the resolution of such cases “cannot have a definite time frame especially on counter-claims, absconding and those with pending police cases.”
