MANILA: Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang was due to arrive in Manila Friday to try to boost ties with the Philippines, which is staging its largest-ever military exercises with the United States.
Philippine officials said Qin is set to meet President Ferdinand Marcos on Saturday after an initial meeting with his Philippine counterpart Enrique Manalo.
Qin’s visit coincides with the Philippines and the United States holding their largest joint military exercises, with nearly 18,000 troops taking part in live-fire and combat drills until April 28.
Marcos has sought to strengthen ties with Washington after his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, trashed the alliance and shifted toward Beijing for economic deals and infrastructure projects.
This was despite conflicting territorial claims between China and the Philippines in the strategic South China Sea.
“Regional security issues of mutual concern” will be part of the discussions, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) said in a statement. Strengthening cooperation in agriculture, trade, energy and infrastructure is also on the agenda.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said on Friday Qin’s visit is aimed at “enhancing mutual trust” and “properly handling differences” with the Philippines.
“China looks forward to strengthening communication with the Philippines through this visit,” Wang told a regular briefing.
Overlapping claims in the South China Sea have been a sticking point in the relations between the two countries.
Beijing claims almost the entire waterway, deploying hundreds of vessels there to patrol the waters and occupy reefs.
It has also ignored a 2016 international tribunal ruling that its claims have no legal basis.
Qin will be marking his first visit to the Philippines as foreign minister.
His predecessor, Wang Yi, was the first foreign minister to visit Marcos last year, describing his election in June as “turning a new page” that would create a “new golden age of bilateral relations” between the two countries.
Since then, however, Marcos has gravitated closer to the United States.
The Philippine leader will meet US President Joe Biden next month to discuss efforts to strengthen the longstanding alliance between the treaty allies.
Manila and Washington agreed in recent months to restart joint maritime patrols on the South China Sea and agreed to expand US forces’ presence in the country.
Marcos has also allowed the United States to rotate its troops around four additional sites under a 2014 deal that originally identified five locations.
The new bases include a naval base and airport in northern provinces near Taiwan and an air base off an island near the South China Sea.
While the Philippine military is one of the weakest in Asia, the country’s proximity to Taiwan and its surrounding waters would make it a key partner for the United States in the event of a conflict with China.
The DFA said Qin’s visit will also build on Marcos’ visit to Beijing in January, when he and Chinese president Xi Jinping agreed on a “friendly” handling of disputes.
Weeks after Marcos’s visit, Manila accused a Chinese vessel of using a military-grade laser light against a Philippine patrol boat.
The DFA had said it filed more than 70 protests against China’s “persistent and illegal presence in Philippine water” since Marcos assumed the presidency last year.
Chinese FM to visit Manila during Philippines-US war games
https://arab.news/vs8x3
Chinese FM to visit Manila during Philippines-US war games
- Overlapping claims in the South China Sea have been a sticking point in the relations between the two countries
Afghan returnees in Bamiyan struggle despite new homes
- More than five million Afghans have returned home since September 2023, according to the International Organization for Migration
BAMIYAN, Afghanistan: Sitting in his modest home beneath snow-dusted hills in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan province, Nimatullah Rahesh expressed relief to have found somewhere to “live peacefully” after months of uncertainty.
Rahesh is one of millions of Afghans pushed out of Iran and Pakistan, but despite being given a brand new home in his native country, he and many of his recently returned compatriots are lacking even basic services.
“We no longer have the end-of-month stress about the rent,” he said after getting his house, which was financed by the UN refugee agency on land provided by the Taliban authorities.
Originally from a poor and mountainous district of Bamiyan, Rahesh worked for five years in construction in Iran, where his wife Marzia was a seamstress.
“The Iranians forced us to leave” in 2024 by “refusing to admit our son to school and asking us to pay an impossible sum to extend our documents,” he said.
More than five million Afghans have returned home since September 2023, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), as neighboring Iran and Pakistan stepped up deportations.
The Rahesh family is among 30 to be given a 50-square-meter (540-square-foot) home in Bamiyan, with each household in the nascent community participating in the construction and being paid by UNHCR for their work.
The families, most of whom had lived in Iran, own the building and the land.
“That was crucial for us, because property rights give these people security,” said the UNHCR’s Amaia Lezertua.
Waiting for water
Despite the homes lacking running water and being far from shops, schools or hospitals, new resident Arefa Ibrahimi said she was happy “because this house is mine, even if all the basic facilities aren’t there.”
Ibrahimi, whose four children huddled around the stove in her spartan living room, is one of 10 single mothers living in the new community.
The 45-year-old said she feared ending up on the street after her husband left her.
She showed AFP journalists her two just-finished rooms and an empty hallway with a counter intended to serve as a kitchen.
“But there’s no bathroom,” she said. These new houses have only basic outdoor toilets, too small to add even a simple shower.
Ajay Singh, the UNHCR project manager, said the home design came from the local authorities, and families could build a bathroom themselves.
There is currently no piped water nor wells in the area, which is dubbed “the dry slope” (Jar-e-Khushk).
Ten liters of drinking water bought when a tanker truck passes every three days costs more than in the capital Kabul, residents said.
Fazil Omar Rahmani, the provincial head of the Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation Affairs, said there were plans to expand the water supply network.
“But for now these families must secure their own supply,” he said.
Two hours on foot
The plots allocated by the government for the new neighborhood lie far from Bamiyan city, which is home to more than 70,000 people.
The city grabbed international attention in 2001, when the Sunni Pashtun Taliban authorities destroyed two large Buddha statues cherished by the predominantly Shia Hazara community in the region.
Since the Taliban government came back to power in 2021, around 7,000 Afghans have returned to Bamiyan according to Rahmani.
The new project provides housing for 174 of them. At its inauguration, resident Rahesh stood before his new neighbors and addressed their supporters.
“Thank you for the homes, we are grateful, but please don’t forget us for water, a school, clinics, the mobile network,” which is currently nonexistent, he said.
Rahmani, the ministry official, insisted there were plans to build schools and clinics.
“There is a direct order from our supreme leader,” Hibatullah Akhundzada, he said, without specifying when these projects will start.
In the meantime, to get to work at the market, Rahesh must walk for two hours along a rutted dirt road between barren mountains before he can catch a ride.
Only 11 percent of adults found full-time work after returning to Afghanistan, according to an IOM survey.
Ibrahimi, meanwhile, is contending with a four-kilometer (2.5-mile) walk to the nearest school when the winter break ends.
“I will have to wake my children very early, in the cold. I am worried,” she said.
