By Damcelle Cortes

Damcelle Cortes is an Asia Foundation Program Officer in the Philippines. She can be reached at damcellet@asiafound.org.

For almost three years, Erlinda Cadapan has been searching for her daughter, Sherlyn. A student of the University of the Philippines, Sherlyn was abducted in June 2006 with another female student and a farmer in Bulacan, a province a few hours north of Manila. Like any mother longing for her child, Erlinda has been exhausting all means to find her daughter. Camp searches, court petitions, advocacy meetings, and exhumations have become part of her grueling daily routine. She would rather face her daughter’s death than live in complete uncertainty about what happened to her. In 2008, when Erlinda heard that authorities in Pangasinan Province found a corpse of a woman of similar build as Sherlyn, she insisted on recovering the body. The Commission on Human Rights (CHR), along with a human rights organization, conducted an exhumation. But upon investigation, they found the remains were of another young woman, not Sherlyn.

Erlinda is among the hundreds of mothers and relatives of desaparecidos who are in a devastating, never-ending quest to find their loved ones. In their situation, investigations that provide leads, searches, and exhumations that could eventually direct them to their missing kin are paramount. Unfortunately, relatives of the missing cannot confidently rely on the authorities to assist them. Security forces are often implicated in the commission of abuses. Cognizant that the state cannot renege from its primary duty of protecting guaranteed rights and freedoms, the 1987 Constitution aptly created the Commission on Human Rights as an independent body to investigate, report, and monitor human right violations.
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By Wilfredo M. Torres III

Wilfredo M. Torres is The Asia Foundation’s Program Officer in the Philippines. He edited the definitive reference book on clan violence and conflict resolution in the Philippines, “Rido: Clan Feuding and Conflict Management in Mindanao.” He can be reached at willy@asiafound.org.

In February, over 200 people from Muslim and Christian communities gathered in Barangay Bulucaon in Mindanao to celebrate a newly-restored peace between their communities. Peace came after a series of consultations and talks to mitigate internal conflicts and avert a potential massacre of Muslim Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). Only two months before, separatist violence nearly shattered community relationships, as the fighting near the area created animosity between Muslims and Christians.

Consultations with Muslim IDPs families conducted by responding team from UNYPAD and selected barangay officials of Brgy. Bulucaon.

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By Eric Aseo

Eric Aseo is The Asia Foundation’s Program Officer for the Transparent Accountable Governance program in the Philippines. He can be reached at eric@asiafound.org.

How do you solve a problem like corruption? Do you catch the corrupt and pin them down?  Not necessarily, if you ask the cities of Calapan, Iriga, Roxas, Santiago, Sorsogon, and Tacloban in the Philippines. They do it differently. These cities have found a way to counter possible occasions of corruption through the The Asia Foundation’s Localizing Counter-Corruption project, which is supported by the British Embassy in Manila.

These cities do it in three ways. They institute reforms in selected government systems and procedures – streamlining processes and often digitizing them to lessen human intervention. They also open themselves up for partnership with NGOs and the private sector, boosting the confidence of those who demand transparency and accountability. And they implement a 12-month program called Public Service Excellence, Ethics, and Accountability Program (PSEEAP), to complement their reform efforts. PSEEAP promotes transparency in service delivery, strengthens the accountability of local bureaucrats, and encourages a customer-oriented culture in the delivery of basic services.

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By Maria Belen Bonoan

Maria Belen Bonoan is The Asia Foundation’s Director for Local Governance in the Philippines. She can be reached at bbonoan @asiafound.org.

On February 25 - 26, 2009, participants from 11 municipalities in Mindanao gathered to share their different initiatives in making local resources work for effective governance.

One of the basic challenges to good governance in the Philippines is the ability of local governments to mobilize and manage local resources effectively to deliver quality services. Local governments can explore alternative and additional sources of income to finance and basic services for citizens.

In 1991, the Philippines initiated a historic process that resulted in the devolution of significant authority, responsibility, and government personnel to the local level. Under the Local Government Code of 1991, vital government services – health, social welfare, and agriculture – were entrusted to local governments. Local governments have become responsible for stimulating local development by restoring economic livelihoods, and supporting local businesses through more coherent land use and development plans.

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By Vivien Suerte-Cortez

Vivien Suerte-Cortez is a former Assistant Program Officer at The Asia Foundation’s Manila office. This article was originally published in the September-October 2008 issue of Philippine Business, a publication of the Makati Business Club. MBC is a non-stock, non-profit organization composed of almost 800 top-level executives representing over 400 leading corporations in the Philippines.

Tourism remains one of the country’s major growth drivers. In 2007, visitor traffic reached 3.1 million and total international tourist spending reached $4.9 billion. Each tourist spends an average of $1,200 each trip and can support one job for an average Filipino worker for one year.

Boosting foreign tourist arrivals leads to increased creation of direct and indirect jobs in the tourism service industry. Thus, the Department of Tourism is targeting 5 million tourist arrivals to generate $5 billion by 2010. To do this, aviation experts say the country needs 10 million airplane seats, with at least 6 million seats to service Northeast Asian markets with a projected growth rate of 20 percent per year.
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The Asia Foundation, along with the Canadian Embassy and MindaNews, is supporting “Mindanao: The Way Forward,” a one-and-a-half hour special on ANC, the ABS-CBN News Channel in the Philippines. The television forum brings together experts, public officials, business people, and various sectors who are involved in the peace process in Mindanao, and will be aired on February 6, Friday, at 7.30 p.m. Asia Foundation country representative Steven Rood will be one of the distinguished speakers. Learn more about the program and watch a 30-second commercial.

By Ky D. Johnson

Ky Johnson is The Asia Foundation’s Deputy Country Representative in the Philippines. He can be reached at kjohnson@asiafound.org.

In the past few years, high-profile public sector corruption cases have played out in the Philippine media, and some international observers have rated the Philippines as the most corrupt country in Asia. Unfortunately, a recently conducted survey clearly shows that business managers in the Philippines believe that corruption increased in 2008.

Over the past eight years, the Annual Enterprise Survey on Corruption has provided a unique snapshot of the Filipino business sector’s perspectives on corruption and good governance.  Since 2000, The Asia Foundation has partnered with Social Weather Stations, the Philippines’ foremost nonprofit nongovernment data generation organization, to implement surveys that focus attention on corruption. By pointing out critical areas for reform, and encouraging private and public sector participation in the fight against corruption, these surveys have had a powerful impact on the conduct of business and economic growth in the Philippines.  
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By Carolyn Mercado

Carolyn Mercado is a Senior Program Officer at The Asia Foundation in the Philippines. She can be reached at carol@asiafound.org.

Where is Jonas Burgos?  Where is Jaime Balao?  Who killed Rolando Antolihao and Danny Qualbar?

One might better ask, “Who are these four men?” and find an easier answer.

Jonas Burgos was the son of the late Philippine publisher-activist Joe Burgos, who dedicated his life to teaching farmers natural farming techniques. At noon on April 28, 2007, he was abducted by two unidentified men in a mall in Quezon City. The Burgos family has been searching for him since, but his whereabouts remain a mystery.
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By Steven Rood

Steven Rood is The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in the Philippines. He can be reached at tafphil@asiafound.org.

Almost two months ago, at the time of the U.S. Democratic and Republican political conventions, I blogged here in InAsia about being the nonpartisan commentator on the local cable news channel, ABS-CBN News Channel (ANC ” seen in the United States on The Filipino Channel).  I was delighted to be asked back to analyze the presidential election results as they came in yesterday.

Since interest in the election here in Manila  was so high, live coverage began at 5:00 am (4 pm ET).  Election returns only began to flow at 8:00 am (7 pm ET), so that’s when our part began.  Besides the anchor and myself, there was one representative each from Democrats Abroad and Republicans Abroad.  As Americans are accustomed to, as soon as polls closed in each state, the networks would “call” it for one candidate or the other (based on an esoteric combination of exit polls and early vote counts).
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By Harry Harding

Harry Harding is a University Professor of International Affairs at The George Washington University and a Trustee of The Asia Foundation. He wrote “China Policy for the Next U.S. Administration,” a chapter in The Asia Foundation’s newly-released “America’s Role in Asia,” and recently attended a Thai-US Think Tank Summit in Bangkok where he spoke on the U.S.-Southeast Asia relationship.

Now that the U.S. presidential election is over, the incoming Obama administration will begin a reconsideration of American foreign policy.  Numerous urgent issues will compete for attention, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, and the parlous state of the global economy.  But consideration of these urgent matters should not come at the expense of issues that, while perhaps less immediate, are no less important.  One of these is the American relationship with Southeast Asia.

There is a widely shared view, both in Southeast Asia and in the Asian policy community in the U.S., that the United States has been paying insufficient attention to the region. In introducing the Southeast Asia section of the Asia Foundation’s recently-released America’s Role in Asia report at a press conference in Washington last month Tommy Koh, Ambassador-At-Large at Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Chairman of the Institute of Policy Studies, complained that Washington has been treating Southeast Asia with “benign neglect,” perhaps because the region has presented the U.S. with neither significant challenges nor great opportunities.
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