Doormat

A certain Mr. Peter Pan from the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) in Manila yesterday emailed our paper a map showing the 200-mile exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of Taiwan and the Philippines.

Calculated from Batanes, our northernmost island grouping, our 200-mile EEZ covers waters surrounding more than the entire lower half of Taiwan. Their EEZ, meanwhile, almost reaches the tip of the largest main island in Batanes.

Our northernmost province, where I was stranded many years ago by dense clouds that prevented our plane from taking off, is a quaintly lovely travel destination. Local culture has been preserved. The small native Batanes garlic is superb in taste and aroma. I don’t think much has changed since my visit.

The road from the airport at the time was lined with wild cherry tomato shrubs. The island is dotted with gnarled trees that look like oversized bonsai, their tops regularly flattened by powerful winds so they are of similar height and growth is forced horizontally through the branches and trunks. Cattle and goats have to be tethered firmly while grazing or they could be blown away by powerful winds, and then you might see a cow jumping over the moon.

At the biggest retail store in the capital, the only towels we could buy were those small, flimsy white ones with red and blue Chinese markings – what we call “good morning” towels.

From the main Batanes island, you pick up radio Taiwan, not Philippine frequencies. That’s how near the island group is to Taiwan. But the locals of Batanes are Ivatans, bearing no resemblance to the people who left the Chinese mainland over half a century ago to carve out a new home in what we now know as Taiwan, beyond the reach of Mao Zedong’s communist forces.

Looking at the map emailed by Peter Pan (said to be an aide of an aide to TECO Manila Representative Raymond Wang), it’s clear that the Philippines shares common waters with Taiwan.

“Common” is just as accurate a description of those shared waters as “disputed.” Under present circumstances, however, with emotions running high over the fatal shooting of a Taiwanese fisherman by our Coast Guard within those shared waters, both sides are dwelling on the negative description.

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Considering the way we conduct investigations in this country, the apprehension voiced by Taiwan over the Philippine probe of the shooting incident is understandable. But there are diplomatic ways of sending a message of concern.

Instead Taipei has fired away a staccato of demands that look like orders by an overlord to the farmhand.

It also looks too much like the unpopular government in Taipei has latched on to the issue to boost its political stock. In the process it is pushing Manila to draw a clearer line between the country’s one-China policy and official recognition of Taiwan, which Beijing sees as its renegade province.

Under the one-China policy, the president of Taiwan has the same rank as a provincial governor in the Philippines. This point has been emphasized by Manila in various ways in recent days as a result of the shooting incident, further provoking more incensed rudeness from the Taiwanese.

Taipei has not lifted a finger to prevent its people from venting their ire on Filipinos. The hooligans pick soft targets: household helpers, dormitories for blue-collar workers.  

Considering the abuse heaped on our vulnerable workers in Taiwan, our country is looking like a doormat in our response. This is one of the perils of being one of the world’s largest exporters of labor, with most of our workforce in the lower rungs of the employment hierarchy in the host countries.

Compounding this situation is our inability to physically extract our people when they find themselves in harm’s way overseas.

In certain cases, our foreign policy had to be bent in an effort to protect Filipinos working in almost every country and nearly all commercial ships around the world, and even to save the necks of criminals from execution.

Consider the Philippines’ deliberate snub of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony when Manila was trying to save Filipino drug mules from China’s firing squad. In 2011, the P-Noy administration also repatriated to China 14 Taiwanese wanted by Beijing for fraud, in the process ruffling Taipei’s feathers.

Now the Aquino administration is walking a tightrope between tough talk, which we heard yesterday at the Philippine Navy anniversary, and the need to protect our more than 80,000 people working in Taiwan from further abuse.

Our workers could be encouraged to leave Taiwan, but if they behave like the typical OFW, they will just grin and bear it, hoping and waiting for the typhoon to blow over.

We’ve seen OFWs sit out worse storms – the Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq, piracy in Somalia, economic hardships in the Eurozone. Their overriding concern was always hanging on to their jobs, or finding new employment overseas even with lower pay.

In those conflicts, however, the OFWs weren’t targeted specifically for harm. In Taiwan, they are now the principal targets of violence and discrimination.

To a lesser degree, OFWs in Hong Kong faced a similar problem at the height of the controversy over the 2010 hostage disaster in Rizal Park. But we didn’t see an exodus of OFWs from the Chinese administrative region.

That’s the bottom line in this conflict with Taiwan: decent employment for those 80,000 Filipinos. Unless we can offer them better alternatives and bring them home, our nation will keep finding itself in a similar predicament.

The world will keep walking all over us.