11 years after Gulf War, Filipino victims still fighting for benefits

(Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism) (First of two parts)

Eleven years ago this month, the life of Martha de la Cruz, a Filipina nurse at a government-run hospital in the Gulf state of Kuwait, changed forever when Iraqi troops invaded the oil-rich country.

That invasion and occupation triggered a US-led high tech military campaign known as "Operation Desert Storm."

"Smart bombs" unleashed during the air bombardment by Allied Coalition Forces hit the hospital where De la Cruz worked. Shards of glass hit her eyes, leaving her with a damaged left retina and a permanently dilated right pupil.

Despite corrective surgery, she now has to use special tinted lenses for her right eye which cannot stand even normal lighting conditions, while her left eye suffers from blurred, "cobweb" vision. Fine glass particles remain embedded in her face.

Today De la Cruz (who asked that her real name not be used for this report) is jobless, with a teenage son to support. Like thousands of other Filipino victims of the Gulf War, she is fighting another battle: To get the Philippine government to release compensation claims filed with the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC).

Over 100,000 Filipinos were working in Kuwait when the war broke out. A decade after Iraq accepted the terms of a formal ceasefire and acknowledged legal responsibility for damages during the Gulf War, most of the compensation claims due Filipino victims have yet to be paid.

Claimants and migrant workers organizations blame the foot-dragging of, and anomalies in, the Philippine Compensation Claims Committee (PCCC) chaired by the foreign affairs secretary.

Fund from Iraqi oil

Created in 1991, the PCCC is the operating arm of the UNCC, the UN body that approves and processes the claims of Gulf War victims around the world. The money for the claims, an estimated $12 billion worldwide, comes from a special fund that receives 25 percent of the proceeds from sales of Iraqi oil.

Claimants say the PCCC has not been transparent in its transactions, shrouding its work in confidentiality by citing UNCC provisions regarding the non-public nature of claim documents.

This lack of information has made it easier for fixers to take advantage of the claimants. It has also made it difficult for victims to determine and demand the amounts to which they are entitled.

Fixers, sometimes PCCC employees themselves, have been known to get a cut of 20 to 50 percent to help process claims. PCCC secretary general Bayani Mangibin admits that at least one member of the committee’s staff has been found out and dismissed. Most victims are Muslim Filipinos unfamiliar with the bureaucracy.

Many claimants interviewed for this report say they were not informed of the various categories of claims and that they can demand compensation for unpaid back salaries and lost or stolen belongings.

Those who did make such demands, like Nenita Solis, a domestic helper who lost jewelry and appliances during the war, have not been informed about the status of their claims.

Nurse De la Cruz came to know of the total amount due her only because she had befriended a PCCC employee in the course of following up on her claims.

The situation is even more complicated for workers who did not return to the Philippines after the war and filed their applications for claims at the Philippine embassy in Kuwait or with the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA).

Susana Nolasco, who was working in Kuwait as a domestic helper a year before the invasion, found that her application was denied due to the use of unofficial forms.

This is because those who filed their application abroad were required to re-file them when they returned to the Philippines. Nolasco came back only in 1995. By then, the UNCC had said it would not entertain any more claims, but Nolasco was never informed.

Baisara Guindal, a domestic worker seeking compensation for unpaid salaries, filed her claims in Kuwait but never received notice from PCCC that she should re-file her application when she returned to the Philippines in 1993. That is why there is no official record of her claim.

Domestic helper Sukyna Adil died soon after returning to the Philippines after the invasion and her family still does not know whether her claim will be approved. The same is true for the families of Angelo Tattao and Pacita To-ong who died in recent years with their claims still pending.

Victims categorized

According to the PCCC, the claims from the Philippines that had been approved by the UN body total nearly 40,000. Of these, 34,225 are for the "A" category victims, meaning those who were forced to evacuate Kuwait and Iraq during the war.

These claimants are entitled to $4,000 each in damages. According to the UNCC, full payment for category A victims was completed in October 2000.

The payments were made in the first two phases of the UNCC releases. The UN body is now on its third phase of payments.

But as of June 2001, the PCCC reported having distributed only the first payment of $2,500 each to just 25,074 category "A" claimants. Only 7,155 – just 21 percent of the total – had been fully paid.

The record is as dismal for category "B" victims, those who were killed or suffered serious injuries. There are only 45 such claimants in the Philippines, de la Cruz among them.

Citing humanitarian reasons, the UNCC mandated that all B claims be paid immediately and in full in 1995. But it took a year – and a great deal of frustration while following up her papers – before de la Cruz received the peso equivalent of the minimum $2,500 (about P60,000) as full payment for her B claim in February 1996.

De la Cruz also qualifies for payment in category "C" for those individuals who suffered losses of $100,000 or less. While 4,740 of the 5,709 claimants in this category had received partial payment, only 786 victims – just 14 percent — had been fully compensated as of June.

De la Cruz herself received $2,500 in April 2000. She is still awaiting the release of the balance still amounting to $28,000, which was supposed to have been paid in full in September 2000.

Because of the enormous hospital expenses incurred to treat her eyes, de la Cruz also applied for compensation under category "D" claims, which are for individual losses above $100,000. She is one of only seven such claimants in the Philippines. Altogether, individual claims for the Philippines total $167.3 million.

All governments are given six months from the time they receive payments from the UNCC to distribute funds. But the process should ideally take shorter as UN procedures are quite simple.

As a UNCC secretariat officer explains, the money is deposited in the bank account of a government institution on the same day that a payment is announced. Governments, particularly of countries like the Philippines with permanent missions to the UN in Geneva, are given three working days to pick up the list of claims with approved payments.

If the victims cannot be located, they will not immediately receive notices informing them of the approval of their claims. Often, the case is that either claimants have returned to the provinces or are still working abroad. If this is the case, the PCCC requests for a grace period of 30 to 60 days.

But Sinforiano Mendiola, the PCCC secretariat’s deputy secretary-general, acknowledged that most claimants do appear once they receive their notices. From there, it is just a matter of presenting the required documents to authenticate the claims.

"Basta kumpleto ang papel, mabilis kami (If the papers are complete, we work fast)," Mendiola says, adding that the PCCC’s sending of notices remains on schedule and it is doing its best to process payments. On the average, he says, the committee processes 150 claims a day.

But claimants interviewed for this report say otherwise. De la Cruz, for instance, received notice of the approval of her category "D" payment only in October 2000, eight months after the UNCC released payments for these claims in February that year.

According to the UNCC timetable, she should by now have received $100,000 since initial awards for claims in categories "D", "E" and "F" were done in two rounds: $25,000 and $75,000 beginning October 1999 until September 2000. So far, she has been paid only $25,000.

With partially paid claims in three categories, De la Cruz can still consider herself fortunate. Many of those with approved claims in either category "A" or "C" who were interviewed for this report have not received the balance of their compensation at all.

Most were paid the first $2,500 only in January 2000. The few who acknowledge receiving full payment were given the remainder only this year, almost a year after the funds were released to the Philippine government.

Others like Evelita Tablac, a salesclerk, and Siegfredo Vergano, a warehouse hand, had to wait until March 2001 to claim their initial payments. Forklift operators Nelson Nolluda and Gerardo Borilla received theirs in February, ten-and-a-half years after the Gulf War ended.

Sarkiya Salim and Aniza Omar share the same strange fate. They have been denied partial payments to their "A" claims because the PCCC says they have namesakes, with exactly the same middle initials, also contending for their claims. Aniza’s case is much worse as the poseur already got away with the first installment of $2,500.

Such slowness opens the Philippine to disciplinary action by the UNCC, whose Governing Council has decided that fund releases may be suspended should governments fail to pay claims within six months or to report to the UNCC the amounts of payments distributed within three months.

PCCC officials, however, would not admit that payments to the Philippines have been suspended because of the delays. When queried about this, PCCC’s Mangibin, said: "I have to double-check the information. But so far, sa pagkakaalam ko, hindi naman ganoon katagal ang pagsuspinde ng pondo. (As far as I know, the suspension period didn’t last very long)."

Stalled payments?

Freda Contreras, a Filipina nurse who continued working in Kuwait, has been monitoring the payments. She finds it strange that there have been no claim payments made by the UNCC to the Philippines since last year. She herself received the balance of her full payment for a category "C" claim in April this year, seven months after the UNCC had released the last installment of funds for such claims.

Since February 2000, the UNCC has made six payments releases amounting to $5.3 billion for various countries. Two of the releases covered "A" and "C" claims, but no money was released for the Philippines.

In contrast, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Sudan with almost the same numbers of claimants and amounts of claims in the same categories as the Philippines have been regularly receiving payments.

Contreras suspects that what the PCCC has been paying out so far is money from the $15.6 million it received in February 2000. But even if the PCCC did not get fresh funds, it sent out payment notices in October 2000, coinciding with the release by the UN body of the third phase of payments.

Recently the PCCC announced that it received new remittances amounting to $34 million for 18,000 claimants. But the UNCC’s July 19, 2001 press statement says it released new funds only for payments in categories "D", "E" and "F." There were no allocations listed for the Philippines.

These delays have led to accusations that the money is deliberately being withheld so it would earn interest. Last year, news reports alleged that interest earned from the compensation funds were being deposited in the personal accounts of DFA officials. Erstwhile Undersecretary for Migrant Affairs Benjamin Domingo was accused of depositing $683,000 of the interest money in a Philippine National Bank (PNB) account under his name.

The UNCC procedures authorize governments to deduct 1.5 percent from each claim for processing costs. But during the term of Ambassador to Indonesia Leonides Caday, Domingo’s predecessor, the PCCC opted to use interest earnings instead to finance its operating expenses.

Placing the interest in a separate account, Domingo explained then, makes it easier to monitor at any time the status of the funds and the amounts used for administrative expenses. This arrangement, the PCCC insists, was approved by the UNCC in a note verbale.

Last year, the PCCC claims to have used P1 million in interest earnings for equipment needed to upgrade its claim payment processing capacity. As of May 2000, accumulated earnings from interest stood at $768,405.

Gulf War claimants led by the Kalipunan ng mga Manggagawang Pilipino at Pamilya (KMPP) and Migrante have complained at what they perceive as misuse of the compensation funds. In response, the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee held one hearing on the issue in September 2000.

In that hearing, Domingo denied allegations he opened a personal account from interest earned from the UNCC funds. The account, he testified, is in the name of the PCCC, although he acts as its sole signatory, following Caday’s lead, a fact affirmed by the PNB.

Former DFA Secretary Domingo Siazon Jr., now ambassador to Japan, also downplayed the matter of the opening of the account, referring to it merely as a "procedural lapse."

Mangibin likewise defends the arrangement, calling it a "unique" one since what they are handling is UNCC money with not a single government centavo.

But government accounting rules ban the placement of interest earnings in a separate account, even if these are donations or grants from foreign agencies. Moreover, having a single signatory contradicts existing purposes of internal control and checks and balances.