Playing god in a foreign land

15 June 2007

I’ve been home three weeks already but sometimes I can’t shake off images from Berlin that pop into my mind once in a while.

One such impression is how forbidding the German police look. Of course, history may have done its share to color my perception. But they do look mean—big men and women in green-and-gray suits who do not seem to know how to smile. When they look at you they don’t just look—they stare at you and seem to size you down. In fact, they are so intimidating that you get worried upon seeing them even if you didn’t do anything wrong.

One morning as I was alighting from the train, I heard a commotion. I saw an African man being dragged out of the subway by three members of the polizei. A dog—who must have sniffed something, I don’t know, I’m just speculating—was barking in the background. The guy was trying to explain. He was pleading, but the police were pulling him by the arm. Pretty soon the guy was crying.

I imagined what it must be like to break the law and deal with authorities, mean-looking as they were, in a foreign country. It would be worse if the accusations were false. Especially if the authorities looked as severe as the German police. And spoke a language you didn’t understand.

How can you explain your side? How can you ask for help in a place where you don’t know or trust a soul? How can you not go mad when you can’t even get in touch with those you love? That must be real isolation.

The other day, a 41-year old Filipino who used to work as a car shop welder was beheaded in Saudi Arabia. Reynaldo Cortez stabbed a Pakistani taxi driver who tried to rape him in 2001. After a prolonged legal battle, the victim’s family still pressed for Cortez’s execution.

He left behind a wife and six children. I heard the wife on the radio yesterday afternoon, where she said a certain official of the Department of Foreign Affairs called her to inform her that her husband had in fact been executed already. She lamented that for the last several days, she had been frantically ringing up and sending text messages to this official, inquiring about developments in the negotiations for her husband’s pardon. The official never bothered to pick up or respond to her messages. He only surfaced to inform her he was dead already. When she tried to call him back a little later, he had turned off his phone.

Migrante, an organization of Filipino workers overseas, condemns the government’s anemic efforts in saving Cortez’s life. Senator Jinggoy Estrada hardly says anything new when he claimed the foreign affairs department’s efforts were not enough and urged it to “try a little bit harder” in saving embattled workers overseas.

For its part, the government insists it has done everything it could to save Cortez from death, even until the last minutes leading to his execution. Government representatives even went as far as talking to the Pakistani’s uncles to plead with them to accept the blood money offer instead. But the matter was not up for compromise for the murdered man’s family. They did not want blood money. They wanted blood. In this case, they were god.

So how far, really, can one exert what is called best effort to avert supreme punishment on our citizens in foreign lands, when “best effort” is a relative phrase?

For the doer, it is a measure of how much has been accomplished already, how much disappointment has been tolerated and how much persistence has been practiced. Regardless of results.

For the beholder, however, results are the only things that matter. There is no such thing as best effort. Either you get the job done or you don’t.

But even assuming that the foreign affairs department has not been successful in stopping Cortez’s execution, it would have been a great consolation to the family if officials had been accessible all the time.

It would have been reassuring for Cortez’s loved ones had they been apprised of government’s efforts—and their status—every step of the way. Certainly, sporadic press releases or calculated phone calls did not qualify.

The ordeal was harrowing. The family needed to know developments as often as possible. Sans the guarantee of desired results, compassion is always a good partner for “best effort.”