Alma Bulawan, President of Buklod-Olongapo, a survivors’ group in the Philippines, has been awarded yesterday by Soroptimist International as one of its 12 Unsung Women Heroes Awardees.

Bulawan is a survivor who changed her life and now helps women in prostitution in the Olongapo-Subic area change theirs. Alma advocates for a different future for these women through education, social and livelihood alternatives that do not lock them in lives of sexual and economic exploitation.

Another awardee is a staff of another CATW-AP member organization, DAWN. Her name is Mary Joy E. Barcelona: a survivor of sexual trafficking who was hounded by the “Japayuki” stigma. Learning of her rights as a woman, Mary Joy endeavored to get a college education; now, she coordinates an Alternative Livelihood Program and helps women with similar experiences, inspiring them to be triumphant survivors of life.

Related news : Extraordinary achievements of ordinary women honored

With two female presidents in the past two decades, the Philippines seems to have granted women respect and equal footing with men in politics. But on the Internet, type in the word “Filipina”, meaning Filipino women, in search engines more than often yields something less respectful.

On either Google or Yahoo search engine, the top 10 search results under “Filipina” are dominated by fishy dating sites promoting “sexy” Filipino women as ideal girlfriends, wives or partners.

Photos of Filipina beauties abound on these sites, enticing mostly foreign visitors to become a member. With the monthly cost of around 30 US dollars, the members can have the direct contact numbers of the ladies.

The word “Filipina” is so popular among the Internet populace that it even has a special spot in those nasty porn websites.

If a similar search is done using key words like “Indian”, ” Malaysian”, “Russian” or more Latin-sounding “Italiana” and ” Mexicana”, there is no reference to women of these nationalities or even women-related entries in the first 10 results.

It was precisely this that prompted Noemi Dado, 51, a professional blogger and new media publisher, to start blogging about the need to re-shape and re-define the “sexy” Filipina image.

Last June, Dado and her friends founded the Filipina Images blog portal www.filipinaimages.com to write about the positive and inspiring entries about Philippine women and encourage all other bloggers in cyberspace to do the same.

By simply including “Filipina” somewhere in the title of their positive entries, these women warriors hope to reshape the Philippine woman’s image by capitalizing on their wholesomeness aspect of the same word used to malign it.

“Dignity is every person’s human right,” Dado said. “We seek to balance the Filipina images that are available online. We share our reflections about what the Filipina of the future could be like, too.”

Dado said whether the Filipina is a mother, a nanny, a decision maker in the corporate arena, a domestic service professional, or a mail order bride, they have the right to empower themselves through education, and to gain equal rights in the household and the workplace.

But Dado’s crusade meets challenges from inside the very group it intends to help.

Considered shy, modest and loyal in general, while maintaining the traditional virtue of a woman to run all family chores, Filipino women are a natural attraction to some Westerners, not to mention the notable high English literacy here compared with other Asian countries.

And it is also regarded as a pro for Filipinas, especially in provinces, if they are able to marry outside and help lift the family out of poverty with greenbacks of their husbands or boyfriends.

Dado said she got anonymous feedbacks posted on the Filipina Images blog that reads “There is no such thing as this campaign would shape the Filipina images. WE ARE ALREADY KNOWN TO BE THE GOLD DIGGER” of this era. There is no way you can stop our fellow Filipinas to go online and search for their financial fortune or even a soul mate.”

The anonymous post said Dado should not crush the sites “that are helping most of our fellow Filipinas to look for their greener pasture by getting online.”

Jean Enriquez, Executive Director of the network of global feminist groups, The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women — Asia (CATW), said that this is a view point such as this is another manifestation of colonial mentality where these dating sites represent hope.

“I wouldn’t blame the women (who may have voluntarily put themselves on the website), but it is a situation of hopelessness, where there is no other way out of poverty except through marriage to a foreigner,” Enriquez said.

Emmi de Jesus, Secretary General of Gabriela National Alliance of Women in the Philippines, another non-governmental group advocating women’s rights, said the activities can go beyond ‘ dating’ and may be just another way of earn money, especially in the middle of a financial crisis when people are losing their jobs and become more desperate.

Facing these challenges, it may be a long time still before the on-line image of the Filipina is shaped, but Dado and her co- founders of Filipina Images, remain hopeful and are encouraged by the little things that show that they are starting to make a dent in cyberspace.

“One of our successes is that when you Google the word ‘ Filipina’, you will find us in the first five pages of the search engine results,” Dado said.

Dado’s group is also joining hands with wikipilipinas.org, a special portal called the Encyclopedia of Philippine Women, which compiled the achievements and triumphs of Filipinas worldwide.

By having an online platform to showcase Filipina intelligence and talent, the goal of developing more empowered Filipinas at least becomes achievable, Dado said.

- Philstar

PHILIPPINES — With drums and bugles, about 90 activists under the Free Burma Coalition-Philippines today held a rally in front of the Thai Royal Embassy in Makati City in time for the 14th Asean Summit.

Organizations present during the rally were: Alliance of Progressive Labour (APL), Sanlakas, Partido ng Manggagawa (PM), Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP), Coalition Against Trafficking in Women-Asia Pacific (CATW-AP), KPML, Bagong Kamalayan, ZOTO and the Initiatives for International Dialogue (IID).

Activists urged ASEAN member states to put on the summit’s agenda the human rights issue in Burma saying that the summit should serve as a “hot seat” for the Myanmar delegate.

“The military regime of Burma has a lot to answer. Its human rights record is not showing any degree of significant improvement and the ASEAN Summit ministers and delegates should not take a blind eye into this issue,“ Rasti Delizo FBC-Phils Convenor said during the rally.

AS IMPORTANT AS THE ISSUE OF FINANCIAL CRISIS

The group said ASEAN should come up with mechanism to “monitor human rights record” of Burma as the country’s ruling regime remain secretive and intransigent to the international clamor for political reforms in the said territory.

Delizo stressed, “The issue of continued human rights violations in Burma is as important as the issue of global financial meltdown. In the face of this financial crisis, you have here one member in the ASEAN that treats Burma’s coffers as its personal purse. The peoples of Burma are suffering politically and economically because their government doesn’t care even if millions will die in extreme hunger.”

ASEAN slogan brags about achieving a caring and sharing ASEAN community and one of the ASEAN Charter’s key pledges is to set up a regional human rights body.
“If this is true,” Delizo continued, “we challenge the ASEAN to begin monitoring the human rights situation in Burma; schedule a visit to Burma’s labour camps, detention centers, and try to see and feel the atmosphere of dictatorship there. Right now, ASEAN should go beyond its usual rhetoric and act concretely.”

RELEASE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS!

From the Thai Royal Embassy, the group proceeded to the Burma Embassy. With a replica of a “prison cell” with “prisoners” tied in shackles, the group dramatized the plight of political prisoners in Burma.

Unimpressed over the release of prisoners in Burma last week, FBC-Phils dubbed the move as an “old trick” by the military regime to deodorize the awful smell of its dismal human rights record.”

The group said that all political prisoners including Daw Aung San Suu Kyi must be released unconditionally.

“Torture, rape and murder are normal occurrences inside Burmese prisons. The junta cannot hide the fact that political prisoners suffer torture day and night and their families are even prohibited from visiting them. The entire country is like a huge garrison—there is no rule of law,” FBC-Phils explained.

Recently, prominent leaders of the popular Saffron revolution including their lawyers were sentenced by the military court to serve 65 years in prison.

“Burma is a dangerous place not just for activists but also for lawyers. Protection and promotion of human rights which is a very basic duty of the state is not happening. It is in this case that the international community has the obligation to act,” Delizo concluded.

- Free Burma Coalition-Philippines

Prompted by the worst economic meltdown in our generation, we come together to collectively discuss the implications of the current crisis in the Philippines.

Our analysis begins with a consensus that the multiple crises we experience today – characterized by persistent underdevelopment and stagnation, massive unemployment, food insecurity, strife and conflict, widespread poverty and hunger, ecological destruction – result from a development thrust that promotes profits over people.

In the face of this worsening crisis, we oppose any measures that will make the poor and the marginalized bear its burden. The poor were not responsible nor did they benefit from the policies that led to the crisis. We demand not only that those responsible for the crisis be held accountable but that the economic paradigm they pursued be abandoned.

The economic crisis underscores the need for a more decisive role of society over the market, for more democratic access to resources, as well as for greater public participation in economic decision-making.

At the same time, the climate crisis compels us to move away from the single-minded focus on growth that for so long has disregarded the environmental and social costs that come with increasing extraction and consumption for the benefit of a few.
The enduring conflicts in our country demand that development must be accompanied by respect for basic human rights, including the right to self-determination.

It is imperative that we put in place a strategic and coherent national framework of development, not only to respond to the crises, but to ensure an economic thrust that will revive our local economy, invigorate our domestic market, and create jobs and livelihoods in the country, in accordance with the principles of equity, sustainability and justice.

With these in mind, we demand the following (followed by concrete recommendations):
- Make the market meet society’s needs, not the other way around
- Prioritize social services over debt payment and eliminate corruption
- Provide quality education, health care, housing and other social services for all
- Pursue social and environmental pump-priming
- Restructure the economy to build the domestic market
- Share the country’s resources more democratically
- Share the benefits and burden of taxation fairly
- Ensure that no one goes hungry
- Give everyone decent work in the country
- Give everyone a say in the national budget and in other economic decisions
- Address the climate crisis
- Devote resources for peace, not for bombs

Make the market meet society’s needs, not the other way around

• Recover public ownership in and strengthen public accountability over strategic industries and economic activities (such as oil, utility, and energy companies, among others) with a view to assuring universal provision of basic goods and services, ending oligopolistic price control, impunity in price-fixing, and profiteering
• Bring down the prices of basic commodities through government action (i.e., greater government participation in buying and selling of basic goods, regulating prices, etc)
• Enact anti-inflationary measures that would ensure that real wages increase and that workers’ share in output relative to that of business owners increases
• Open banks’ financial books and strengthen bank oversight
• Strengthen regulation of speculative investments, hedge funds, private equity funds, and the like
• Impose cross-border capital controls so as to regain autonomy over exchange rates and interest rates and set these as guided by a coherent developmental, environmental and social criteria
• Impose short-term capital flows-tax as a form of regulation and spend the revenues on social services
• Ban derivatives trading and short-selling in the country and work with other countries to have it banned at the global level
• Require strict regulatory approval and compliance for any new financial products
• Establish public banking and other financial institutions that operate based on mutuality and solidarity, that lend according to what will maximize social welfare and not merely profits
• Include social criteria (labor standards, environmental compliance, gender parity, etc) on all lending

Prioritize social services over debt payment and eliminate corruption

• Repeal the Automatic Appropriations Act
• Repudiate onerous loans and re-channel government expenditure away from corruption, debt payment, and military spending
• Eliminate the President’s and Congress’ pork barrel and all forms of discretionary funds
• Limit the perks and benefits of high-ranking public officials while raising those of rank-and-file employees; there should be no exemptions from the Salary Standardization Law
• Reject any new loans from the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank.
• Contribute to the global efforts to create more democratic international financial institutions that promote the interests of peoples over bankers (i.e. Fund for the South initiatives, etc)
• Undertake an unprecedented reallocation of public funds to social services beginning in 2009
• Allocate more funds for emergency relief for the poor, for the unemployed, for repatriated overseas workers, and for displaced local workers – subject to democratic decision-making and oversight
• Increase allocation for climate change adaptation

Provide quality education, health care, housing and other social services for all

• Reverse the privatization of all social services; implement a moratorium on any further privatization projects
• Embark on large-scale socialized housing projects that will employ the unemployed and use local resources
• Overhaul Philhealth and provide it with more resources to ensure universal and quality health care coverage; implement universal access to affordable and quality medicines
• Increasing the budget of education to meet the 6% of GNP ideal so as to build more classrooms, increase teachers’ pay, upgrade facilities and lower the teacher-student ratio
• Reorient the educational system away from its single-minded goal of providing employment for multinational corporations or for overseas work, in favor of employment towards national social development
• Increase the salaries and benefits of public doctors, nurses, teachers, and other civil servants; fully implement the Magna Carta on Teachers and Public Health Workers

Pursue social and environmental pump-priming

• Prioritize spending on improving agricultural infrastructure (irrigation, farm to market roads, etc.) and direct subsidies for farm inputs to support small farmers
• Undertake massive public work projects that support community needs, provide mass employment, benefit larger numbers of people, do not displace the poor, and do not harm the environment (i.e. prioritize irrigation over prestige airports, public transport over expensive highways)
• Increase investments and employment in socially-owned and controlled renewable energy projects and energy efficiency measures
• Create and institutionalize mechanism for social monitoring of all pump-priming projects; adopt benchmarks for infrastructure standards and costs; institutionalize democratic control over Overseas Development Assistance (ODA-funded) projects

Restructure the economy to build the domestic market

• Create a national industrialization plan that fosters socially owned and accountable domestic industry without sacrificing agriculture and without harming the environment
• Implement a moratorium on proposals for new free trade agreements (FTA) and undertake an independent review of all existing agreements
• Nullify the ratification of the JPEPA and suspend the EU-ASEAN FTA negotiations
• Suspend lowering of tariffs and duties
• Provide incentives for those producing closest to the local market
• Pursue people-centered bilateral and regional trading and other economic arrangements with other countries that promote people’s welfare and not those of transnational corporations, that is based on solidarity and not profit-seeking; pursue model offered by UNASUR, Bolivarian Alternatives for the Americas (ALBA), the Trade Treaty of the Peoples, BancoSur, etc

Share the country’s resources more democratically

• Implement agrarian reform to accelerate the redistribution of lands to the landless and to farm workers
• Promote rural development that will provide decent jobs and adequate income for the rural poor
• Repeal the Mining Act and enact a just and equitable mineral development policy
• Implement an immediate moratorium on socially and environmentally deleterious resource-extraction businesses
• Ensure effective protection of indigenous peoples’ (IP) rights; strengthen IP’s security of tenure and uphold their ancestral domain claims and entitlements under the IP Rights Act (IPRA)
• In urban areas, implement an immediate moratorium on demolitions and evictions; accelerate urban land reform; prioritize livable mass housing projects over shopping malls and condominium projects for the rich
• Fast-track impementation of the Fisheries Code and delineate all municipal water

Share the benefits and burden of taxation fairly

• Repeal the Expanded Value Added Tax and replace it with specific tax
• Provide tax exemption for those earning below the current “living wage” while increasing taxes on higher-income earners
• Value reproductive work; apply tax cuts and provide social benefits for non-income-earning but working spouses
• Increase taxes on luxury goods and other imported goods already produced locally; reduce taxes on goods produced by communities and small producers
• Remove tax holidays and other fiscal incentives for large investors while providing support for socially owned enterprises
• Reject any moves to bail-out private companies using taxpayers’ money; government should not assume responsibility for private debts.
• Work with other governments in closing tax havens, prosecute those involved in transfer pricing, and jail tax evaders

Ensure that no one goes hungry

• Ban future trading of and speculation in grains and other basic food commodities in the international markets
• Move towards food self-sufficiency, away from export-driven agricultural production
• Overhaul and empower the Department of Agriculture, the National Food Authority, and related agencies so as to more effectively intervene in the market in support of local producers and small farmers
• Augment the resources for credit and support services for farmers and fisherfolks and support them through marketing mechanisms, cooperatives and farmers associations
• Ban genetically engineered food
• Provide more incentives for local and small producers instead of transnational corporations in food production
• Enact disincentives for socially and environmentally destructive mono-culture enterprises

Give everyone decent work in the country

• Pursue full employment as the overarching goal of economic policy, taking it as the priority consideration when controlling inflation, reducing deficits, or setting exchange rates
• Embark on a strategic long-term plan through which workers can contribute to national development – and not be at the mercy of transnational or outsourcing corporations ready to relocate whenever they wish to
• Ensure retrenched migrant workers’ safe return to and reintegration into the country; no forcible repatriation
• Secure national treatement for employed migrant workers in terms of labor rights, social security, and access to justice through agreements with receiving countries
• Immediately rescind the government’s Rationalization Plan, while trimming the bloated Presidential bureaucracy (i.e. terminating advisers and other patronage posts)
• Implement a “minimum guaranteed work scheme”
• Provide universal access to unemployment benefits, social security, and insurance
• Reject attempts to make workers work longer and easier to retrench; outlaw precarious work arrangements
• Ensure equal pay for equal work for women
• Punish union-busters, jail employers that don’t provide legally mandated wages and benefits, and penalize businesses that violate workers rights

Give everyone a say in the national budget and in other economic decisions

• Democratize decision-making and management over public resources by requiring congress to conduct participatory national budget hearings in their districts.
• Democratize the central bank, wrest its control from unaccountable technocrats, and realign its goal towards full employment and democratic distribution of resources
• Enhance the efficiency of public enterprises by empowering workers, staff, union, and consumers’ organizations in management
• Democratize workers’ control over the Social Security System, Government Service Insurance System and other public enterprises by ensuring meaningful workers’ representation in these institutions.
• After recovering democratic control over strategic industries such as power or water companies, ensure peoples’ and workers’ participation in their boards and management

Address the climate crisis

• Formulate a coherent national plan on climate change that puts the interests of people over those of mining and logging companies, oil and energy corporations, etc
• In international negotiations, push for agreements that mandate reduced consumption on the part of the world’s rich – both in developed countries and in developing countries; those who are most responsible for climate change should be the ones who pay the most for solving it; the burden of adjustment should not be on the poor
• Work with other governments in demanding compensation for historical ecological debts owed to the world’s poor and use this to provide adequate resources for climate change adaptation and mitigation
• Suspend oil and gas exploration projects, keep oil underground, and – in exchange for limiting fossil fuel emitted to the atmosphere, demand compensation from the developed countries most responsible for climate change, as Ecuador is proposing
• Protect critical watersheds used as water source and for agriculture through proper land use policy and management and by banning mining and other extractive industries in these watersheds
• Repeal the Biofuels Law, ban land conversion for agrofuel plantations, and abandon agrofuels which divert land away from food to feed cars
• Create a national program for organic agriculture by increasing budget for technology development and training
• Reject false solutions to climate change such as nuclear power, ocean fertilization, “clean coal”, carbon trading, etc
• Suspend all destructive “Clean Development Mechanism” projects in the country

Devote resources for peace, not for bombs

• Pursue justice for victims of extra-judicial killings, torture, and disappearances
• Return to the peace process, stop all military offensives, and pursue a peace policy
• Respect the ceasefire agreement between the MILF and the government
• Immediately address the current humanitarian crisis in Mindanao and use what would have otherwise been spent for military spending for relief and rehabilitation
• Uphold human rights and international humanitarian law by creating a monitoring mechanism for violations and breaking the impunity of violators;
• Respect the Comprehensive Agreement for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL)
• Restore the Joint Assurance Immunity Guarantee (JASIG) and work towards the resumption of the peace process with the New People’s Army
• End small arms and light weapons proliferation, stop the arming of civilians and disband paramilitary groups; stop recruitment of child soldiers
• End the Philippines’ military alliance with the US and Australia by withdrawing all foreign troops from Mindanao and the rest of the country, and abrogating the Mutual Defense Treaty, the Visiting Forces Agreement, the Mutual Logistics Support Agreement, and other similar treaties
• Recognize the right to self-determination of the Bangsamoro and indigenous peoples, while ensuring the welfare of the landless and marginalized migrants
• Recognize the national historical debt to Mindanao and to its peoples by compensating them for the resources which have previously been exploited by the national government, landlords, and corporations; put in a place a preferential policy mechanism that would ensure that reallocated funds would benefit and be controlled by Moros and indigenous peoples

These demands are not just a grocer’s list of discrete ideals. Taken together, they constitute a coherent set of concrete policy recommendations that, when implemented, will enable us not just to survive the financial crisis but to emerge from it with an economy and society that is more equitable, more just, and more sustainable. Pursued together with people from other countries, they will move us away from beggar-thy-neighbor policies and towards a global economy built on sharing and solidarity.
» Continue reading “People Over Profits, Society Over The Market: People’s Agenda to Respond to the Economic Crisis”

Daisy (left) and Lina trying to contact their families back home on a handphone. — NST picture by Datu Ruslan Sulai

KOTA KINABALU: As she wipes her tears away, Lina expresses her one wish — to hug her children once again.

Pressed by poverty, Lina (not her real name) left her 9-year-old daughter and baby boy in the Philippines to work at a karaoke lounge in Sabah, excited at the prospect of earning 20,000 pesos (RM1,490) a month.

But when she arrived in the city from her home in Manila, the 26-year-old was sold to the highest bidder and made to work as a prostitute.

Lina is just one of many Filipinas duped into the flesh trade in Sabah and in other parts of the country, Singapore and the Middle East.

“I was forced to work as a prostitute for a month,” Lina told the New Straits Times. “Each time a customer complained, my salary would be deducted. We were told that we owed our boss so we never received our pay.”

Daisy (not her real name) wanted to study tourism after finishing high school but couldn’t afford to because she had been abandoned by her mother.

“A friend said I should work in a karaoke lounge in Sabah and I could earn up to 25,000 pesos (RM1,800), so I agreed. Several men came to view me and I was bought from the lady who met us when we arrived here. One man gave her a thick bundle of cash.

“I worked for two weeks and contracted a sexually transmitted disease. I paid for expenses to come here but was told I owed the pimp money.

“We never had enough to eat. It’s been a nightmare. I was told I could do the same thing in Dubai, Kuwait and Singapore. I’m not interested. I just want to go home,” said Daisy, who is from Manila, too.

Both women are expected to return home when their travel documents are sorted out. They are now staying at a privately-run charity home.

Philippines-based Coalition Against Trafficking in Women — Asia Pacific executive director Jean Enriquez said in an email that it was difficult to give an exact number of Filipinas who had been forced into the flesh trade overseas.

“But we can say from the calls we are getting and our work around the Philippines that (human) trafficking has become critical in Malaysia and, more recently, in Singapore and Dubai. These three countries often come up in our research, education and rescue work.

“While the proximity of Mindanao (southern Philippines) to Sabah is a factor, poverty is another reason. Desperate for income, mothers allow their daughters to leave. Then they hear stories from people returning from Sabah that numerous Filipinas end up as prostitutes,” Enriquez said.

Sabah-based social activist Anne Keyworth said there were hundreds of Filipinas in Lina’s and Daisy’s situation.

“The authorities need to do something about massage parlours or reflexology centres which are fronts for prostitution. Why are they allowed to operate in the middle of the city and the outskirts?”

She hoped those behind the rings that hire Filipinas would be charged under the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act 2007, which came into effect 18 months ago.

On Tuesday, four men and a woman were acquitted by the Sessions Court on a charge of wrongfully confining eight Filipinas for prostitution.

Judge Ummu Kalthom Abdul Samad said the prosecution had failed to prove the element of prostitution as clients were not called as witnesses and the investigating officer did not check the place said to be used for prostitution.

- Jaswinder Kaur – nstonline