Despite the wrath of the Sulu communities, Christopher Hill, US assistant secretary for East Asia and the Pacific, justified the US role of assisting AFP campaigns, together with the police, in countering terrorism (GMANews.TV, 5/25/2006). What he meant was that it was all right to violate the Philippine Constitution and circumvent the vaguely and loosely formulated VFA. BAYAN secretary general Renato Reyes contended that US intelligence work, reconnaissance, and training of AFP soldiers “are part and parcel of actual combat operations” and their embedding in AFP units “shows that GI Joe is more than just an adviser and observer” (News Release, 8/15/2007). A melodramatic but highly prejudiced “insider” account of how US intelligence personnel (CIA and other unsavory characters) and US Special Forces collaborated with local officials and military agents may be found in Mark Bowden’s narrative of the pursuit and killing of one ASG leader, Abu Sabaya, entitled “Jihadists in Paradise” (The Atlantic, March 2007; for a corrective to Bowden’s racist-ethnocentric, perspective, see Jose Torres Jr, Into the Mountain: Hostaged by the Abu Sayyaf. 2001).
Amid daily testimonies of the carnage and destruction affecting millions of inhabitants in the southern Philippines, progressive representatives in the Philippine Congress have urged a thorough probe into the permanent presence of US troops . Personalities such as Rep. Maria Climaco of Zamboanga City and Amina Rasul, lead convenor of the Philippine Council for Islam and Democracy, have also urged action to stop US meddling on behalf of the corrupt, bankrupt Arroyo despotism. BAYAN and other civil-society groups recently petitioned the Legislative Oversight Committee on the VFA to terminate all agreements allowing foreign troops (not only the US but also the Australians and other nationalities) interfering in the ongoing hostilities, thus violating the Philippine Constitution (News Release, 9/25/2008). They also demanded that the Department of National Defense and AFP arrange “the immediate pull-out of US troops and the dismantling of their facilities in Mindanao. However, unless millions of Filipinos commit open civil disobedience and paralyze traffic, business, and government operations–that is, unless massive “people power” erupts to protest the corruption, puppetry and criminality of the US-Arroyo regime–it is unlikely that the Arroyo clique and its American patrons would scrap the VFA and all other instruments of US control. Fighting in the jungles and countryside, in synchrony with parliamentary mass urban mobilizations, may have to accelerate until the comfortable lives of the elite and the complacent middle class becomes impossible to sustain. (Bulatlat.com)
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E. SAN JUAN, Jr. directs the Philippines Cultural Studies Center in Connecticut, USA. He was recently visiting professor of English & Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines, and will be a 2009 Spring Fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University. His recent books are US IMPERIALISM AND REVOLUTION IN THE PHILIPPINES (Palgrave), IN THE WAKE OF TERROR (Lexington Books), BALIKBAYANG SINTA: AN E. SAN JUAN READER (Ateneo University Press), and FROM GLOBALIZATION TO NATIONAL LIBERATION (University of the Philippines Press).
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Posted By Sonny San Juan to HIMAGSIK KAYUMANGGI at 10/28/2008 10:41:00 AM
