With friends like this…
The usual suspects are complaining but the United States has finally paid for the damage wrought by one of its warships on the Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park in January 2013.
How magnanimous for the Philippines’ staunch ally to fork over nearly $2 million—P87,033,570.71, to be exact—for what was discovered and subsequently reported by Philippine rangers, but which the captain and other officers of the minesweeper USS Guardian considered such a piffling incident not worth reporting.
What was the warship doing anyway in the Unesco World Heritage Site where entry is restricted and permits required? Maybe it was keeping Philippine waters safe?
Tubbataha, one of the Philippines’ oldest ecosystems, holds a high diversity of marine life and is an important habitat for threatened and endangered marine species, including fish, reptiles, invertebrates and migratory birds. A key source of coral and fish larvae, Tubbataha
also has a decisive role in sustaining the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of Filipino fishers.
Because of its pristine waters, Tubbataha is a major tourism draw for serious divers as well. But really, the USS Guardian captain and other officers must have thought, with 7,107 Philippine islands (at low tide), there must be hundreds of similar reefs around, so why the fuss about this one?
Outraged environmentalists have pointed out that it would take a generation for the damaged reef to regrow and regain its magnificent biodiversity. But don’t all good things come to those who wait? Like that P87-million-plus compensation…
The same environmentalists have scoffed at the amount, saying it is way below the appropriate fine for damage to a national treasure. The US warship damaged 2,345.677 square meters of Tubbataha Reefs and paid a fine of only P24,000 per square meter of damage, they said, adding that a $27-million fine would be closer to the fines that America paid for the 2009 grounding of the USS Port Royal in Hawaii on Feb. 5, 2009.
In fact, a party-list lawmaker, Kabataan Rep. Terry Ridon, said the US government could have paid more had the case been pursued through international arbitration instead of being determined by a local law. Under international law, the grounding of a US military vessel on Philippine territory constitutes an infringement on our sovereignty.
But what’s a few million dollars between friends, right? After all, the Philippines flashes the US card every time it is threatened by increasing Chinese aggression over disputed claims in the South China Sea. With China refusing to submit to third-party arbitration under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, isn’t the Philippines lucky to have Big Brother around?
Philippine officials obviously see things from the US perspective as well, with US troops so welcome on Philippine soil that they feel right at home, Balikatan or no Balikatan. (It’s almost rude to ask about the whereabouts of the suspect in the murder of transgender Filipino Jennifer Laude.) And both officialdom and local folk are hardly exercised by the involvement of US troops in Mamasapano, insisting that terrorism is an international concern and we need all responsible nations to help out.
Indeed, friendship conquers all, including the toxic waste that America’s troops left in its former military bases in Subic and Clark. The cleanup is decades overdue, but what of it, right? It would be churlish to kick that sleeping dog awake when, just now, two years after the damage to Tubbataha, the “full requested amount” of compensation was received by the Philippine government. As the Department of Foreign Affairs said, “The most important thing is that the payment has been made, we can move forward, we can work together to strengthen our capacity to protect Tubbataha.”
And let us not forget what has been cited as “the various steps that [the United States] has taken … to deal with the event.” There’s America’s apology, its investigation of and shared information on what happened, its reprimand of its erring personnel, as well as the “great lengths and great expense to remove the ship, cut it in parts, and to make sure that further damage was not done.”
On top of such support, the Philippines also gains the all-important approval of the world’s most powerful nation, a comforting pat on the head, and a pledge of lasting friendship. How can one put a price on all that?
