Asia Times: Philippines: Constitutional hypocrisy


	January 25, 2002	atimes.com

Editorials

Philippines: Constitutional hypocrisy

After much hullabaloo, the Philippines National Security Council presided over by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on Wednesday assented to the presence of US troops in the Philippines for extended joint military exercises (including in combat zones in the south) and related training missions.

Why all the fuss, led prominently by Vice President (and concurrent Foreign Affairs Secretary) Teofisto Guingona, who reportedly considered resigning over the issue? Your guess is as good as ours, but here's some background:

For several years now, with mixed success at best, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) have been engaging a Muslim terrorist and kidnap gang, the Abu Sayyaf group, numbering a few thousand and principally active on the Sulu Sea jungle islands of Basilan and Jolo. The Philippine military and US intelligence have developed reliable and detailed information on Abu Sayyaf connections with Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda. Abu Sayyaf activities constitute a clear and present danger both to Philippines and US national security and have done significant harm to the Philippines economy by keeping away foreign tourists and investors.

Hence, in the context of the 1951 US-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty and the 1999 Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), the US in late November sent a small group (two dozen) of military advisers to the Philippines to be attached to the AFP Southern Command in Zamboanga to advise on counter-terrorist military action. After President Arroyo's November 20 Washington, DC, visit, it was also decided between the US and Philippine governments that - starting in January - joint exercises would be held (including on Basilan) and that the US would provide sophisticated equipment to aid the AFP anti-Abu Sayyaf campaign.

And that's when the uproar started. Newspaper headlines saw the Philippines as "the next Afghanistan" in the war on terror. Motley groups of left-wing opponents of the deployment of US forces (joined by VP Guingona who - as a senator - had opposed the VFA) charged that the planned exercises would violate the country's 1987 constitution.

The relevant Article XVIII (Transitional Provisions), section 25 of the constitution, reads:

"After the expiration in 1991 of the Agreement between the Republic of the Philippines and the United States of America concerning military bases, foreign military bases, troops, or facilities shall not be allowed in the Philippines except under a treaty duly concurred in by the Senate and, when the Congress so requires, ratified by a majority of the votes cast by the people in a national referendum held for that purpose, and recognized as a treaty by the other contracting State."

Well, the VFA was duly ratified by the Senate in May of 1999. The August 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty remains intact. Jointly or severally, they surely sanction the US deployment by accepted international standards, conceivably even US combat missions if the Abu Sayyaf threat to Philippine and US national security is construed as an "external threat", as well it might be, given the Abu Sayyaf's Al-Qaeda links.

Why then the opposition of VP Guingona and the hand-wringing and political contortions by the president over the constitutional issue? Why, indeed, all that talk about the sanctity of the constitution by two politicians who came into their present positions by blatant violation of that now again sacred document - a mob-assisted military coup against the duly elected President Joseph Estrada a year ago? If a constitution (as the Supreme Court interpreted it) allows for seizure of political power with the assistance of violence and military treason, but not for mutual defense in the face of clear and present danger to national security, perhaps such a curious document should come in for serious revision - or its interpreters (political and legal) should simply acknowledge that it is merely a writ of convenience.

Arroyo's and Guingona's problem, of course, is that the very "civil society" (the peculiar name assigned to leftish opponents to US presence in the Philippines) is the same crowd that helped them to seize power in the so-called "Edsa II" overthrow of Estrada and on whose continuing support their governance depends.

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