Survivor

We rejoice with the Tarongoy family. After eight tortured months, the life of Bobby was saved.

Through that long period of captivity in the hands of Iraqi bandits, Bobby was blindfolded and bound. He was fed only scarcely and beaten up more regularly.

His survival was a feat of human endurance. His recovery was a feat of incredible patience on the part of the high-level team organized by government to secure his safety.

Let’s not count the cost of public funds expended to recover this man. The life of a Filipino is priceless.

Team Iraq stuck to their jobs heroically. They stayed on hostile ground until the man was rescued – at great personal sacrifice and public cost. The Team was led by an undersecretary of our foreign service, a senior bureaucrat whose time and talent might have been alternatively deployed for other things similarly important to the interests of the nation.

But we will also have to try and imagine how much it might cost to rescue a hundred Tarongoys – Filipino overseas workers who might find themselves in the same dire straits and whose only thread of hope lies in government’s capacity to provide the logistics for a diplomatic team working full-time on a rescue mission.

The cost is unimaginable, and probably unaffordable. The possibility is, on the other hand, completely imaginable. We have 8 million migrant workers deployed. Many of them either deployed in high risk areas or, in especially the case of domestic workers, in highly vulnerable work conditions.

The likelihood, therefore, is that there will be other Tarongoys. From time to time, we will have to organize teams of diplomatic and labor personnel tasked with seeing to the rescue of Filipinos abroad.

That is not the traditional mission of our foreign service. But it is the sort of mission that will preoccupy our diplomatic service because of the astounding fact that millions of our countrymen work abroad on temporary contracts.

Many of our consulates and embassies have begun to resemble half-way houses for Filipino workers who have fallen victim to bum contracts or have been abused. Most of the time, in areas with large concentrations of Filipino workers, our consular officers spend most of their time looking after Filipinos in jail and providing legal support for those facing trial.

Other countries have merged their trade departments and their foreign services to better advance their economic interests abroad. In our case, although no formal merger has happened, the practice has been for closer cooperation between the foreign affairs and labor departments. This seems to be more a response to the urgent reality of a large and vulnerable migrant population rather than an adjustment with a long view into our strategic national interests.

We do hope that no other rescue case will be as tortured and dramatic as the Robert Tarongoy case. It will help if the ban on our workers going to Iraq will be enforced to the best possible.

Tarongoy, we will recall, worked for a Saudi company and found himself on work mission in Iraq despite the ban. That is understandable. Since then, I get the impression from news reports, we have stationed diplomatic personnel on entry points to Iraq to intercept Filipino workers based in neighboring countries sent by the companies they work for into the violence-stricken country.

We know as well that, the ban notwithstanding, Filipino workers have intentionally and willingly entered Iraq seduced by the higher wage rates. A whole lot of them are working in the so-called Green Zone where they serve as cooks, beauticians and other assorted jobs.

It is impossible for us to provide any security for our workers already in Iraq especially after we have so dishonorably withdrawn our miniscule contingent under pressure from terrorists. Given that there does not seem an end in sight for the terrorism, insurgency and banditry in this country, we might put a bit more serious effort in encouraging our remaining workers there to leave.

But in the end, democratic governments can only issue advisories to their citizens. They cannot forcefully curtail freedom of movement and work.

Which means we are doomed to intermittently sending rescue missions to dangerous places abroad. We might as well institutionalize such a mission, train them in hostage negotiations and build their stamina for long waits.

Our Team Iraq led by Undersecretary Seguis and Roy Cimatu deserves to be commended at the very least for having iron butts. They sat down each day in Baghdad, away from their own families during the important holidays that passed, and patiently looked for leads and possibilities to rescue their man.

This was a high-profile case. Government was under pressure to rescue Tarongoy, even if that might have seemed, at many points, to be such an impossible mission. The political cost of losing the hostage when there was the slightest chance that he could be rescued kept government focused on the case.

We will not be able to rescue possible future captives, however. We had an unusually long streak of luck so far, saving one hostage at the expense of breaking our international commitments and recovering a Filipino UN employee in Kabul. That streak will not be permanent.

We have lost a number of lower profile cases: Filipino workers tried and convicted abroad. A few have been, according to the laws of other lands, executed. The case of Flor Contemplacion is most memorable.

Whenever a high-profile hostage taking incident happens, there are extremely opportunist groups here that are quick to politicize the issue. They would challenge government to rescue Filipino workers and, when that fails, indulge in agitprop about how insensitive our government is to the plight of our countrymen abroad.

Let’s enjoy the moment and celebrate the rescue of Roberto Tarongoy. After that, let us begin to reconcile ourselves with the prospect that this could become a recurrent nightmare – one that does not always have such a happy ending.