Scrap the VFA
Mind-bogglingly, we had to go on to consider Glenn Defense Marine Asia’s defense that it was covered by the Visiting Forces Agreement instead of scorning it outright. Glenn Defense’s crime was dumping 189,000 liters of waste and 760 liters of toxic water into Subic Bay. The verdict, of course, was that it was not. VFA covered only US military personnel, Glenn Defense is a civilian company owned by Malaysians. But even if it were so, what of it? That makes it all right to turn the country into the (glowing) Payatas of the world?
It’s a throwback to the days when the Americans refused to acknowledge whether or not they were harboring nuclear weapons in their bases in Subic and Clark, their policy being to neither confirm nor deny. When it was widely known that their carriers did carry them—they were nuclear vessels, for crying out loud. In fact, when it was widely suspected, a thing confirmed by various studies after the bases were gone, that they were dumping waste in Philippine waters. Indeed, of leaving behind toxic waste on land, in Pampanga, after they fled the wrath of Mount Pinatubo.
The only thing new here is that the Malaysians have decided to add to the contents of the common toilet bowl. Why shouldn’t they when that was the practice well before their time? Hell, why shouldn’t they when they see a country that’s perfectly willing to be s-tted on by another country and keep begging for more?
The problem is not just Glenn Defense, though that company ought to be dragged to court and made to pay through its nose for the harm it has done. The problem is the VFA itself.
It has no business being there. And it was a dark day when Erap, who was among the so-called Magnificent 12, the senators who rejected the extension of the US bases in 1991, passed it during his time. Despite making the bases peripatetic instead of grounded, it was just “the return of the comeback.”
What has the VFA done for us? What has the Mutual Defense Treaty with the United States done for us? What has “special relations,” and “little brown brother,” and all this slavish groveling before America done for us?
Other than turn us into a royal dumpsite?
The VFA’s defenders point to American servicemen as doing a good job in Mindanao helping with engineering projects and tending to the medical and dental needs of the populace. That’s all very well, but why do we need soldiers to do that? Why not bring back the Peace Corps or some such group for it? Why bring in the War Corps, or Corpse, for it?
Quite simply, the VFA is a burden without benefits. At no time has that been more patent than today.
I don’t blame Barack Obama at all for not dropping by on his way to, or out of, Burma (Myanmar). Why should he? What has he got to be thankful to Filipinos for? When unlike the other Asian-Americans, the Fil-Americans went for his rival, Mitt Romney, with one of them, who was running for Congress in Ohio, even calling him a Hitler? But that’s nothing, they don’t take things personally there. More to the point, why should he when the Philippines, unlike the other Asian countries, doesn’t have to be wooed, it keeps flinging itself without felicitation or solicitation into his country’s arms? It can’t respect itself, others won’t.
We saw it when we tried to drag America into our confrontation with China. Or our war freak (as Antonio Trillanes put it) DFA chief, Albert del Rosario did, rattling his saber loudly at Limahong’s descendants, and succeeding only in showing the puffed-up posturing those who imagine themselves perched on top of the carabao, nakatuntong sa likod ng kalabaw, like to do. Of course the United States would have nothing to do with it. China owns America’s biggest debt outside America, America simply owns us. If we succeed in sparking a war with China, guess whose side America will take.
But far more than that, look at how America has treated our veterans.
Last Sunday, Veterans’ Day, US Ambassador Harry Thomas talked about what the Obama administration was doing to help the Filipino veterans of World War II. When Leonila Villanueva complained that she hadn’t received the $15,000 promised the veterans, she had the papers but wasn’t on the list, Thomas said: “I can’t promise you that there will be a positive result but they are going to look into it. They are going to come here and talk to people, so you hang in there.”
That’s all very well, too, but why do we have to hang in there? We’ve been hanging in there for as long as we can remember, and we’ve been hung up, or hung out to dry, for as long as we can remember, too. Most veterans cannot be paid because they are not on the list.
Why in hell should they have to be on the list to begin with? Because, in one of the cruelest episodes in history, in one of the most duplicitous and ungrateful acts in history, America decided to treat the people who to this day imagine they fought side by side with Americans in Bataan and Corregidor like dirtbags. When the war broke out, Franklin Roosevelt promised to indemnify the Filipinos to the last carabao. When it ended, his successor, Harry Truman, declared in the Rescission Act of 1946 that the Filipino contribution to fighting the Japanese “shall not be deemed to be or to have been service in the military or national forces of the United States or any component thereof or any law of the United States conferring rights, privileges or benefits.” Being on the list is already something we have to be thankful for, being a minor rescission of the Rescission.
No, the problem is not just Glenn Defense, it is this whole belief that our relationship with America constitutes mutual defense. It was never so then, it is never so now. You can’t respect yourself, others won’t. Before we’re totally turned to scrap, let’s:
Scrap the VFA.
