Undesirable alien

 Pet Melliza

Undesirable alien

April 17, 2018

You are a foreigner in this blighted land, you don't have to be a member of a crime ring "Yakuza", "Bamboo Triad", or "Mafia" to be called "undesirable". Under the present dispensation, these denizens of the underworld are de facto desirable, hence welcomed and even freed from detention.

You don't have to be a trafficker of drugs, women and children, to get tagged "undesirable" for arrest and deportation.

You only need to be madly in love with the marginalized Filipinos like landless peasants and Lumads. You only need to be with them, live their dreams and sorrows, and struggle with them for human dignity.

That's the fate befallen Sr. Patricia Fox, NDS, a frail 71-year old Australian nun, who's currently detained at the Bureau of Immigration and Deportation, awaiting summary deportation proceeding for, of all things she'd never been one for over two decades in the Philippines, being "undesirable alien."

I have yet to personally meet Sr. Pat, member of the Notre Dame de Sion. All that I get from friends and rights activists who know her is that, the undesirable traits ascribed on her emaciated frame are actually very, very apt descriptions for her own accusers to include but not limited to, the expletive-happy Asec. Mocha Uson, her (Uson's) second in the mission of spreading fake news Rogando Sassot, and Harry Roque the presidential spokesman who thinks that Malakanyang is the real property of his principal Pres. Rodrigo Duterte, the last the most deserving of the modifier "undesirable", just forget the fact that he is by no means, an alien.

Sr. Pat has gone through the administrations of Fidel V. Ramos, Joseph Estrada, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, Benigno Simeon III Aquino that last ending in 2016. These past presidents have had their shares in reinforcing the social set up that caters to the predatory interests of the ruling elite - the big compradors and landlords and foreign monopoly capital. These heads of state have their contributions to the privation and suffering of Filipinos, particularly, workers and peasants.

In all those years, Sr. Pat was party to the struggle of poor people for land, higher wages, justice; she joined and marched with them in rallies protesting against state abuses and militarization. She also had her share of being harassed and threatened, and being tagged "NPA terrorist" in the past but she was never accused for being undesirable alien, ordered arrested and detained by the new Secretary of Justice, to be subjected to summary deportation hearing.

She was arrested by six immigration agents early afternoon of April 16 at her house in Project 3, Quezon City.

Sr. Pat, committed the crime of being undesirable alien by joining the international fact finding mission (IFFM) that trekked to the hinterlands of Davao to verify reports of military abuses and the  big mining and agri-business interest that resulted to heavy militarization and displacement of Lumads and ethnic-Visayan farmers from their lands.

You murder the poor, grab lands, bomb communities and destroy the crops of these wretched farmers, you don't deserve the stigma; you are even glorified. 

You take the sides of the victims and exploited you get the stigma of a "terrorist" to be extirpated as what the state-inspired death squads have been doing to date, on activists and advocates for human rights. You are a foreigner and do the same, you get tagged "undesirable alien."

The Duterte administration feels no qualm that the innocent get murdered and communities flee their lands due to militarization. It fumes furiously because these tragedies reach the press that in turn spread them world wide. It wants to strike hard with iron fist because the mayhem wrought by his own armed minions are exposed by activists and rights advocates.

Duterte and sycophants and charlatans surrounding him are miffed not because he wears no clothes, but because the child in the like of the 71-year old Sr. Pat has the courage to tell him head-on just like that.#

(I composed these notes while waiting for my flight back home. After reconnecting on line the good news flashed that Sr. Pat was freed by the BID at the same time I was doing this piece....)