My FB friend Emil Pablo has just written on my Facebook page that the Department of Foreign Affairs website now contains a photo of the new President Benigno Aquino III.

However, Pablo noted that it is a photo of Romulo taking his oath before Aquino. Romulo is flanked by his wife and children.

Also, notice the headline – there’s no mention of Aquino, only Rmulo.

I’m still waiting for a write-up on President Noy on the DFA website. And a photograph of him solo. How hard is that?

Thanks, Pablo.

Exclusive

By Raissa Robles

At least four politically-appointed  ambassadors abroad don’t mention Noynoy Aquino is the new Philippine president on the official embassy websites.

They cared enough to have their activities on Independence Day posted on the embassy websites by late June, but did not care enough to post the fact that the Philippines has a newly-elected President.

In fact, at the Philippine embassy websites in Athens, Madrid and Canberra, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who appointed them, is still the Philippine president.

Look at the Philippine embassy in Athens website. There is no mention at all of Noynoy Aquino. In fact on its front page this is what you see -

Recall that Noynoy Aquino was proclaimed by Congress as the winning president on June 9, 2010. June 12, the annual  celebration of our Independence Day, is a pretty big affair for all our embassies abroad.

It would have been the right occasion to announce the historic moment of electing a new Philippine President – an event that was covered  by all major international news networks, agencies and dailies like CNN, BBC, The New York Times, Washington Post, Xinhjua, China Daily,The Times of London, Le Monde, Berliner Morgenpost, Der Spiegel, Bangkok Post, Associated Press, Agence France Presse, Reuters news service – you get the drift.

But to our precious politically-appointed ambassadors and our equally valuable foreign secretary, Noynoy Aquino’s election was not something to gad about abroad, or write about on the official embassy websites and in their Independence Day speeches.  Except, that is, for two such envoys – Domingo Siazon and Delia Albert.

Recall that long before Aquino’s June 9 proclamation, foreign ambassadors in Manila representing key foreign states had gone out of their way to congratulate Aquino on his victory and issued official embassy statements on that theme.

Our envoy in Greece, Rigoberto Tiglao, is a former journalist. [Full disclosure: actually, we were together in Business Day newspaper and I had looked up to him.] It would therefore be reasonable for me to assume he knows what’s placed on his  embassy website. A June 28 story on the Independence Day celebration he and his wife Getsy hosted makes no mention at all of Benigno Aquino III as the new Philippine president.

This is very strange indeed. Especially because Tiglao’s appointment was among those extended by President Noy for three more months. Ellen Tordesillas wrote on her blog and column that Foreign Secretary Alberto Romulo had sent an assignment order to Ambassador to Greece, Rigoberto Tiglao dated July 2 about the “President’s approval of your extension as AEP to Greece in a holdover capacity for a period of three months effective noon of 30 June 2010.”(AEP stands for Ambassador Estraordinary, Plenipotentiary.)

I find this extension of Tiglao’s tenure quite funny because Tiglao has not even acknowledged President Noy as the new Philippine President on the embassy website, TO THIS DAY, AS I WRITE THIS BLOG ENTRY.

President Noy has also recently defended his own retention of Alberto Romulo as the foreign secretary. It was Romulo who recommended that most Arroyo political ambassador-appointees be retained to ease the transition.

What transition? Imagine my surprise when I clicked on some of the websites maintained by the embassies where Romulo recommended the political appointees be retained and extended for three more months. Didn’t Romulo at least give them marching orders to trumpet on the World Wide Web that we just held elections, that we have a new president and they have a new boss?

Apparently not, if you judge by these websites.

Philippine Embasy in Madrid website

You’d think this website is a homage to a noble señora, not to a sovereign country. That imperious looking lady is Gloria Arroyo’s political appointee, Ana Ines de Sequera-Ugarte, whom Romulo backed for extension. The Philippine Star newspaper named her as one of those who had resisted the recall to her home country.

And no wonder, because in Spain, she gets her hand kissed by no less than the King.

You know what the latest Philippine news is on the Madrid website? Look below:

So you wonder, why would  the presence of Ana Ines de Sequera-Ugarte be greatly missed as our envoy in Madrid if she does not seem to be doing much anyway to tell Spain we have a new President?

Philippine Embassy in Riyadh website

In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, His Excellency Antonio P. Villamor made mention in the embassy website of an impending overseas absentee voting, but remains  appallingly silent on its results. He has not acknowledged the winner of the elections and yet he wants to stay on.

When the Riyadh Embassy celebrated June 12 Independence Day – remember that Noynoy was proclaimed June 9 – there was absolutely no mention of P-Noy as the new President.

The Embassy posted this news release dated June 20:

I mean, is it too much to ask an ambassador to at least  announce to the host country the election of a new President who happens to be his boss?

Philippine Embassy in Australia

Our Canberra embassy headed by political appointee Hernandez De Leon did the same snub.  Its top story dated July 5 is – ta daaa – the ASEM meeting, not the election of President Noy:

Maybe, I thought, its Independence Day celebration made mention of Noynoy Aquino.

Nope. It didn’t.

Worse, the last two paragraphs seem to rub it in and wish for ex-President Arroyo.

For the near-sighted like me, here’s a close-up of the last two paragraphs of that press release from Canberra:

Reading this, I can only conclude that His Excellency Hernandez De Leon, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Philippines to Australia, does not recognize President Noy as his boss.

Now some of you might say it’s unfair of me to conclude this just by looking at the websites.

Here’s my proof that it’s not.

Two political-appointed envoys – Domingo Siazon (Tokyo) and Delia Albert (Berlin) – have returned to Manila. But before they did, the websites of their embassies indicated that we had a change of government.

Philippine Embassy in Berlin

The Berlin Embassy website even posted a list of the new cabinet members of President Noy.

Perhaps Delia Albert had nothing to do with this. Perhaps this was the doing of the career officers left in Berlin whom Romulo did not seem to trust much to do the right thing. I don’t know. At least all of Germany knows we have a new president with a new cabinet.

Philippine Embassy in Tokyo

In his Independence Day speech, Domingo Siazon personally announced the proclamation of Noynoy Aquino as the new President and Jejomar Binay as the new Vice President.

Ellen Tordesillas rightly observes that political envoys can easily be recalled:

What disruption of diplomatic relations would happen if political appointees are recalled? Every embassy has a number two officer. They are usually career officers. They become charges d’affaires in the absence of an ambassador. The Vienna convention that governs diplomatic relations recognizes that role of CDAs.

Philippine Embassy in Washington website

Ellen is right.

The Philippine Embassy in Washington – the plum diplomatic post -  is headed by Willy Gaa, a career diplomat. Look at the Washington embassy website. Its home page clearly shows that President Noy is the new Philippine President.

Here’s a closeup of the “Embassy news” on the Washington Embassy front page:

From these examples, I can only conclude that the extended political appointees in the diplomatic service are causing harm to the new Aquino government by refusing to acknowledge its existence and by sowing confusion as to who is the incumbent Philippine President.

Will the incumbent foreign secretary Romulo please explain why this is happening and why he does not seem to trust the career service officers to do the job, pending new appointments to the top diplomatic posts?

I’m not blaming President Noy for this. He has so much on his plate. Romulo should answer for this because he was entrusted with this job.

UPDATE as of July 9,2010 at 9:05 a.m.

Late last night, Philippine Ambassador to Greece Rigoberto Tiglao e-mailed me about his Embassy website. He said:

Anyway, my side of the story and I really hope you correct your blog:

Our webmaster had blocked us out of the website, and refused to update
it for several months already, and just allowed us to update it ONCE after I practically knelt down to beg them to update it for the Independence Day celebrations since our countrymen kept on asking us how to get photos of the celebrations.

The reason why they have blocked us out (and changed the passwords) is that we have not been able to pay the webmaster for a year already, and my finance officer refused to sign the check for this, on grounds that he needed Manila’s authority to pay for it. Please contact my finance officer Mr. Leo Comaya (egcomaya2000@yahoo.com) to confirm this.

Be as it may, I will tap my own small personal funds to pay our webmaster so we could update our website.

He also said they had celebrated Independence Day on June 5, or days before the official proclamation of Noynoy Aquino as President:

Congress proclaimed NoyNoy June 9, and our celebration with fil community was june 5. My staff also was focused on the Independece Day, and as is the practice, govt cannot even refer to the new president until he’s proclaimed.

Overnight, Tiglao told the unpaid webmaster to update the website by paying him outright using his own money.

I will not repeat here the nasty words that Tiglao wrote me. I will only point out two  things to him:

First, this is my blog and I was not writing a news story this time. I indicate clearly when I’m writing a news story, like those that Tiglao used to write for Far Eastern Economic Review.

Second, Tiglao faults me for not taking his side before uploading my blog entry. I believe in this case that the websites spoke for themselves. Tiglao said his webmaster had refused to update “for several months already and just allowed us to update it ONCE after I practically knelt down to beg them to update it for the Independence Day celebrations since our countrymen kept on asking us how to get photos of the celebration.”

Tiglao has a point in saying that the embassy’s Independence Day celebration took place on June 5 when no formal winner had been proclaimed. But as you can see, the update of the website itself on the Independence Day story took place June 26. There was enough time between June 5 and June 20 to insert somewhere in that update that the Filipino leadership had changed.

Mr Ambassador  Tiglao, I’ve just checked  when you  last updated your embassy website. Your mention of “several months already” was actually under three months or last March 22,2010 during the election ban period. And you went out of your way to do a very, very extensive “staff written” update.

See below:

This is Ambassador Tiglao’s updated embassy website as of this morning:

An essay

By Raissa Robles

When does an affair of the heart become an affair of state and therefore a relevant news topic?

I was first drawn to look at the political implications of the romance between Shalani Soledad and Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III last January, way before the campaign season started, when I spied a  photo of Ms. Shalani prominently displayed in a picture frame inside a senior National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) official’s office.

I was intrigued and I wondered – why does the chief of the nation’s counter-terrorist unit (CTU) turn to muffin when he talks about Ms. Shalani? Everytime I had the occasion to interview CTU chief Ricardo Diaz it was always about murder, kidnappings and bombings, never about love or romance.

To try to make sense of this startling disconnect, I asked Mr Diaz this morning why he had that photo of him with Ms. Shalani on display even though he knew the Arroyo administration would not look kindly on it. I also asked his permission to name him.

Mr Diaz said the photo was snapped way back in 2005 during a birthday of his friend and former NBI colleague Atty. Ramon San Ramon, Ms. Shalani’s relative. Her complete name is Shalani San Ramon Soledad.

Last year when she started being named in the media, Atty. Diaz displayed the photo in his office and when anyone asked, is she your friend? “I would brag ‘yes, of course.’ ” (Mr Diaz has a fine sense of humor.)

“The truth is, she doesn’t even know me,” he told me today. (He also has on display photos of Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez, boxer Manny Pacquiao and famous American consumer advocate Erin Brokovich whom he once met.)

I asked him why he was not afraid even then of any retaliation, considering that Noynoy Aquino had vowed to bring the incumbent President Gloria Macapagal-Arryo to justice. Mr Diaz replied:

We’re really not for the administration. We are only for justice. Justice does not have any political color. We investigate, we get evidence.

I then asked him what his impressions were of Ms. Shalani. He said she was already a Valenzuela City councilor then but

I even mistook her for just a young teenager – very young-looking, very fair-skinned, very polite, very kind. She doesn’t have any airs of being a city councilor when she was a councilor already then.

It is always nice to ask crime investigators these things. They give  such detailed description.

He also recalled that her family was somehow related to Elsa Payumo, a former beauty queen. (Ms. Payumo was the 1963 Miss Caltex who later ran and won as councilor in Makati.)

Why did I bring this matter up? It is to show you that the Noynoy-Shalani romance is a matter of genuine public interest even in the corridors of government. Any affair of the heart is, for that matter.

This early, however, there are moves by President Aquino’s critics to make that illogical leap of reasoning and use his unmarried status and refusal to marry just yet as proof of his incapacity to govern. They call him mama’s boy, gay or crazy. (Just look at the readers’ comments I’ve received in this blog by clicking on the the following entries:

• Is Senator Noynoy Aquino really Abnoy? Here’s what his psychiatrist-classmate told me
• Senator Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino is autistic? Here’s the “proof”
• Senator Benigno tells why he’s not yet married at age 49

Personally, I find that thinking very weird. Why do many Filipinos readily accept Catholic bishops as political brokers although they are unmarried by choice and even wear long frocks in public?

In addition, being mama’s boy does not necessarily make a leader less effective. Proof of that is US General Douglas MacArthur whose mother shamelessly lobbied for his promotion. He got it too, thanks to mama. Noynoy Aquino credits his first win as senator to mama who tirelessly campaigned for him nationwide.

President Noynoy would have to reconcile himself, though, with  his love life always being made a hot button issue. At least one Facebook page has  sprung up lobbying for him to name Ms. Shalani his First Lady.

I can sympathize with him, but as a journalist I would still have to write about it. Within context of course.

And my context is this – I would not attribute his hesitation to marry to lack of courage or love or manhood, because I remember my best friend Tina, an Ateneo de Manila psychology graduate, telling me that a person can only take so much change within a certain period before this takes an emotional and physical toll.

It is barely a year since President Noynoy’s mother died. It is only 10 months since he decided to run for the highest office. It is only days since he won it. And he hasn’t even occupied the presidential palace.

Christ, give him a break.

So when’s the wedding, Mr. President?

I’m just joking.