Multinational firms rap PH for ban on sending workers to Libya

This frame grab shows an airplane on the tarmac of the airport belching black smoke into the air during fighting between the Islamist Misarata brigade and a powerful rival militia, in Tripoli, Libya. AP FILE PHOTO

MANILA—Multinational companies in Libya have launched a “shame the Philippines” campaign as a result of a ban on new deployments of Filipino workers in Libya, where 13,000 Filipinos are now trapped in upheavals involving militias.

At a hearing by the House committee on foreign affairs on Wednesday, Assistant Secretary Julius Torres and Special Assistant Renato Villa of the Department of Foreign Affairs told congressmen that the government has been under a lot of pressure from multinationals not to impose a ban as they needed a steady flow of workers.

“There was even a ‘shame Philippines’ campaign on the part of the multinationals because of the deployment ban,” Akbayan Rep. Walden Bello said, quoting the officials. The DFA representatives did not name the multinationals.

DFA officials told lawmakers the government imposed the ban in June, but the signal from the Philippine embassy in Tripoli to repatriate Filipinos might have come too late, with other countries having evacuated their citizens months before.

But Bello laid the blame on the DFA’s doorstep, saying it was the latter’s slow action that led to the precarious situation of Filipinos in the North African country, where a Filipino construction worker has been beheaded and a Filipino nurse gang-raped.

He described Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario’s trip to Tunisia to lead the mass evacuation of Filipinos as a case of “mock heroics,” considering that he and Labor Secretary Rosalinda Baldoz could have prevented the situation by ordering the repatriation of Filipino workers more promptly and imposing the deployment ban earlier.

In 2011, when the government of Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown, a deployment ban was imposed on Libya, and some 10,000 Filipinos were repatriated to the Philippines. But the DFA lifted the ban “as early as October 2011,” even when the hostilities had not ceased, Bello said.

“From 2012 to 2013, most of the 10,000 Filipinos who were repatriated went back to Libya, and there were even more workers deployed there, which is why we now have 13,000 Filipinos in Libya,” the congressman said.

He said it was quite disturbing that the DFA had not stopped deployment when it became clear that the central government in Libya had basically “collapsed,” and that the Filipinos would be trapped.

Bello said a source told him a special exemption to the deployment ban was allegedly made for an Italian oil company.

He expressed doubt that Del Rosario would be able to get many Filipinos out of the country via the Tunisian border considering the presence of many checkpoints manned by the militias.

Bello said it would be a grievous injustice if blame was heaped on the Filipino workers for being caught in the dangerous situation when it was the DFA and the Department of Labor and Emploment that ought to shoulder the responsibility for not acting sooner.