InterAksyon.com
The online news portal of TV5
MANILA - (UPDATE - 1:27 p.m.) No Filipino in Syria wants to be repatriated but alert level 4 remains for them, Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario said Wednesday.
The alert level means mandatory repatriation for the estimated 10,000 overseas Filipino workers in Syria, said Del Rosario, who left for Damascus on New Year’s Eve and returned to the Philippines Tuesday afternoon.
Del Rosario said all 25 Filipino community leaders he talked to during his short visit did not want to return home.
Some 95 percent of the OFWs in Syria are household service workers who earn an average of $150 a month, he said. And most of them are "not documented from the Philippine side."
Many of them entered Syria as tourists, through a circuitous route through Zamboanga and Kota Kinabalu, and may have been trafficked.
“Not a single one of them wanted to be repatriated. They all gave the same reason: no economic opportunities in the Philippines, like in Libya (during the repatriation there),” Del Rosario said.
In contrast to Filipino professionals in Libya, household service workers in Syria tie their “security fortune” to those of their employers who will take them along when the situation worsens. So, “despite possible harm,” they see “no urgency” and “do not want to leave,” he added.
Those who have signed for repatriation (an initial 200 are scheduled to be brought home this week, with a total of 1,000 targeted within the month) are those who are not being treated well by employers, Del Rosario said.
“That is my sense of it,” he said.
Nevertheless, he said the Filipino community leaders promised to disseminate the mandatory repatriation alert level among compatriots in Syria, and to enhance the registration list, which contains the names and addresses of some 5,000 OFWs.
Four critical areas
Although most of the Filipinos are in the Syrian capital, Damascus, there are an estimated 1,500 others in the four critical areas of Hama, Homs, Dara'a, and Idlib, where protests against leader Bashir al-Assad have been met with violence by security forces.
Del Rosario said his two-day visit was confined to Damascus because he was not allowed to go the "conflict-stricken" places.
He said he has asked the Syrian government to ask local officials in these four areas to contact OFWs there and tell them of the Philippine government's call for mandatory repatriation.
"We were not allowed to leave Damascus without permission. We asked instead to find our people in these four areas, tell them there's way to get out if they want, able to contact us, find out their condition ... The Syrian government has granted the Philippine request," he said.
Difficulties
The Philippines will need to spend some $4,000 for every OFW it repatriates. This would cover the deployment cost, exit visa, immigration penalties, and plane fare.
Negotiations include paying employers the amount it cost them to employ the OFWs. The employers also need to apply for their workers’ exit visas.
But Del Rosario assured that "there will be available money."
To systematize the repatriation, the DFA is updating its 2008 database of OFWs in Syria. The database -- which contains 17,000 names collected from Beirut when the Philippines did not have an embassy in Damascus yet -- has been cut down to 5,000, but the database rebuilding is ongoing.
Del Rosario said the only request the Syrian government did not grant was to stop the backdoor entry of OFWs into the country.
Syria said arms trafficking, not human trafficking, is its priority at the moment.
"It's a little bit of a problem for them because their borders are porous," the DFA chief said.
