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Friday, February 17, 2012

Part 5 - All quiet on the second front



EDITORIAL
Philippines: More pain, no gain
PART 1:
The sick man of Asia
PART 2: Goodfellas, with Tagalog subtitles
PART 3: Poverty and corruption, the ties that bind
PART 4: Last one leaving please turn off the lights


Gallery 1




Gallery 2
MANILA - If the going gets tough in the United States, President George W Bush could always consider a move to the Philippines. He would beat Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in a presidential race, hands down, no recounts.

Arroyo's approval rate currently stands at 48% - and falling, according to Social Weather Stations, an independent think-tank. Meanwhile, Bush's approval rate among Filipinos is 57%, according to a survey by Globescan and the University of Maryland - taken before truck driver Angelo de la Cruz's kidnapping by Islamic militants led the Philippine government to an early withdrawal of its contingent in Iraq. The Philippines was the only country in the survey in which Bush had positive numbers.

Bush has already been to Manila - last October, as part of a whirlwind six-nation Asian tour. At the time, he took credit for the United States building the Philippines into "the first democratic nation in Asia". Every Filipino familiar with his country's history would strongly disagree with Bush's rewrite. After the Spanish-American War then-president William McKinley annexed the Philippines, turned it into a colony, and for 14 years bitterly fought the Philippine independence movement. More than 200,000 Filipino civilians and soldiers were killed. The US, for its part seems not to have learned much from this colonial adventure. Harold Cole, an economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, says, "If Bush had applied these lessons to the American plans for invading Iraq and transforming the Middle East, he might have proceeded far more cautiously."

The second front
As far as Arroyo's government is concerned, the Philippines is indeed the second front in the "war on terror" - a favorite line of the Bush administration. But local critics, such as Jose Enrique Africa of the Center for Anti-Imperialist Studies, strongly disagree: "The
US's overall geopolitical agenda for the Philippines goes far beyond just this [war on terror], and it aims to consolidate the country as a vital strategic location for regional force projection." Being designated a major non-NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) ally, or MNNA, last October made Arroyo very proud. Africa stresses that the Philippines is "the first Asian neo-colony to be given MNNA status - Thailand being the second, soon after - putting it in the same league as Israel and Egypt in the Middle East".

Arroyo more than welcomes a de facto US armed intervention, regulated by a Mutual Logistics Support Agreement (MLSA) that offers Philippine airspace and seaports to US forces and includes intelligence sharing and logistical support. For the moment this involves a rotating presence of at least 2,000 soldiers and Special Forces through at least 18 annual bilateral military exercises, lasting from one week to six months. Balikatan (shoulder-to-shoulder) so-called "training exercises" - to circumvent the Philippine constitution, which explicitly forbids foreign forces fighting in the country - are now an annual routine. In May 2003 these forces were handed a special gift from Arroyo: immunity from prosecution before the International Criminal Court. Bush has asked the US Congress to increase military assistance to the Philippines to US$164 million in 2005.

Arroyo's master plan since 2001 has been to turn Manila's fight against Muslim separatists into an anti-terrorist campaign, in exchange for increased US economic and military aid. This explains the Bush-Arroyo frenzy in tagging as terrorists the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), the New People's Army (NPA) and famous activist Professor Jose Maria Sison, the key political consultant of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), and currently exiled in the Netherlands. Labeling them as terrorists seemed the easiest approach to get them out of the way and force them to capitulate. They didn't.

As for Arroyo's gamble in the Angelo de la Cruz case, it was not even a gamble. If de la Cruz had been beheaded, she knew there would have been another People Power in the streets of Manila - this time against herself. According to Social Weather Stations, 67% of Filipinos approved the withdrawal from Iraq, despite fears that US work visas for overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) might become harder to come by. Arroyo lost nothing, apart from being on the receiving end of the usual barbs from Washington hardliners. There are at least 4,000 OFWs working in Iraq at the moment. They are civilians only in name and remain especially valuable because they are engaged in military-related work inside US military bases in Iraq.

The export of labor is the only thing the Philippines has to offer: "well-educated, low-cost and English-speaking" workers, according to the government line. There are already 1.5 million OFWs established in the Middle East, most of them in public-works and energy-industry projects. There may be a flurry of new openings in information technology, catering, finance and accounting. But not in Iraq before the January elections - if they indeed take place.

Hard talk
Wishful thinking is the name of the game as far as the much-vaunted "special Filipino-American relationship" is concerned. Respected activist Walden Bello reminds anyone willing to listen that "when, during the late 1950s, president Carlos Garcia pushed for 'Filipino First' and imposed foreign-exchange control to help native industrialization and minimize importation of luxury items, American foreign-policy makers helped Diosdado Macapagal [Arroyo's father] defeat Garcia since Macapagal promised to remove the exchange control".

Furthermore, when Ferdinand Marcos "imposed martial law to perpetuate his presidency beyond the two-term limits of the Philippine constitution, America disregarded the 'showcase of democracy' in Asia and instead supported Marcos - because he promised to send Filipino troops to Vietnam and let [the US] use military bases in bombing Vietnam".

But as far as the Filipino elite are concerned, the "special relationship" is a God-given fact. Arroyo's government saw the "correct" positioning of the Philippines on the "war on terror" as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get rid of Muslim separatism, especially in strategic Mindanao - located close to Indonesia and critical checkpoints in the Strait of Malacca, Sunda, Lombok and Makassar, areas through which at least 40% of Japanese and ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) trade transits.

Arroyo is a protege of former president Fidel Ramos, who brokered an agreement with the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) in 1996 that would guarantee autonomous rule for the Moro areas. Critics in Manila say this only formalized the surrender of the MNLF. Nothing much has been done since then, apart from negotiations between the government and the more militant Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), brokered by the Malaysian government.

Arroyo has recently approved, in principle, a so-called integrated peace plan to solve all the ills of Mindanao. This plan spells out the "continuation and conclusion" of peace talks not only with the MILF
but with the CPP, the NPA and the NDFP; implementation of the peace agreement with the MNLF, as not much happened since 1996; amnesty and rehabilitation for former rebels; rehabilitation and development of the areas involved in the conflict; a "catch-up development program for the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao [ARMM] and affirmative action for Muslims"; and a lot more dialogue. Elections in Mindanao are tentatively scheduled for next May.

But in Mindanao, the overall sentiment is that the region has been forgotten by the central government. There are no jobs: seven to eight people in 10 go to Sabah, in Malaysia, to find work. Muslims are being driven, maybe not to direct support, but at least to sympathy toward the MILF.

As for the communists, the CPP and the NPA, they are even more active under Arroyo than before. The military says the NPA currently has 10,000 fighters with 7,000 weapons. Their network is spread out all over the country, and not only in the north. The MILF has even struck a working alliance with the NPA: it has learned that guerrilla warfare can be very effective.

And as for the Abu Sayyaf, the Muslim extremist group operating in the southern Philippines, the consensus in Manila is that it is completely neutralized. Its ties to the Philippine military are notorious. "The Americans created them themselves," says Bobby Tuazon of the independent website Bulatlat.

If anyone asks Colonel Alfonso Bernate of the 201st Infantry Brigade in Calauag, Quezon, he's figured it all out. Bernate has launched a campaign in elementary and secondary schools teaching students that the real reason for the Philippines' poverty is insurgency. According to this brigade commander - whose opinion is far from being an exception in the Philippine army - many of the country's neighbors solved their insurgency problems while the Philippines was left behind along with Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos because of their economic difficulties. Sounds like bureaucrats in Manila blaming the capital's urban nightmare on the poor.

What about China?
Luis Jalandoni, the chief negotiator of the NDFP, and Maulana Alonto, a member of the MILF peace panel, have both accused Arroyo of bad faith. According to Alonto, the MILF has not talked formally with the government since negotiations broke down in Malaysia last year. Alonto charges that "the US supplies lethal war materials to the Philippine army, which they use to devastate Moro communities".

Jalandoni, based in the Netherlands, says his end of the peace talks were postponed so the government would remove the CPP, the NPA and Professor Sison from the US and European Union lists of foreign terrorists. Jalandoni even accuses the Arroyo government of black ops, as it has accused the MILF of collaborating with Jemaah Islamiya and al-Qaeda. But both the NDFP and the MILF leadership insist they want to talk peace - provided Arroyo's government respects the agreements it signed with them.

Arroyo also has to balance seriously her US addiction with the Philippines' key potential economic and strategic partner in Asia: China. Rommel Banlaoi, a professor at the National Defense College and author of The War on Terrorism in Southeast Asia, writes that "although Manila has an irritant issue with Beijing on the issue of the South China Sea, there is now a growing recognition among Philippine officials that the South China Sea unites rather than divides China and the Philippines". Banlaoi adds that "if the US is using the Philippines and other allies in the region as counterweights against the growing influence of China, the Philippines can also utilize China as a counterweight against American well-entrenched influence in Philippine foreign and security policy".

There are serious doubts in Manila on whether the positioning of the Philippines as the second front of the "war on terror" has done any good for the country, has improved its economy or made the Philippines safer. And as "special" as the relationship may be, answers to these crucial questions are not likely to come from Washington.

This is the final article in this series.

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