People power should get credit, too
Once a bastion of US military might in Southeast Asia, the former Subic base has become a luxury destination that offers water fun activities, like jet skiing. —EV ESPIRITU
ANGELES CITY—Credit for the withdrawal of US military bases in 1992 always went to the so-called “Magnificent 12,” members of the Senate who voted in 1991 to end a treaty that would have kept the bases in the Philippines.
But at the 25th commemoration of that historic vote on Sept. 16, 1991 and the departure of the last US soldier from the former Subic Naval Base on Nov. 24, 1992, university professor, Roland Simbulan, trained the spotlight instead on the “power of the people.”
“The real moving spirit behind the 12 senators was the broad and unified people’s movement outside the Senate,” said Simbulan.
“In the end, it was the power of the people that ended the most visible symbols of our colonial legacy and Cold War in the Philippines,” he said at the Pedro Abad Santos Lecture Series of the Holy Angel University here on Thursday.
Simbulan said he considered himself an insider in the Senate from 1987 to 1995 having served as a senior political consultant for foreign policy and national defense issues.
Anti-treaty movement
Clark Air Base in Pampanga and Tarlac provinces and Subic Naval Base in Bataan and Zambales provinces used to be fortresses of the Spanish colonial government until the American colonial government defeated Filipino revolutionaries in 1901, converting these and 14 other facilities for its expansion in Asia.
Simbulan called the unity of senators, groups and individuals against the bases as the “Anti-Treaty Movement.”
He recalled that outside the Senate (now the National Museum), more than 150,000 people held a vigil under heavy rains.
Prostituted women in bars around Clark and Subic played important roles, too, providing information about what American units were deployed in those large bases.
“Optimism and hope were the order of the day,” Simbulan said. “Sept. 16, 1991 was a great political victory for the Philippine nationalist movement,” he said.
Those who voted in favor of Sen. Wigberto Tañada’s Resolution No. 1259 rejecting the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Security, which would have kept the bases in the Philippines, were Senate President Jovito Salonga, Senators Agapito Aquino, Juan Ponce Enrile, Joseph Estrada, Teofisto Guingona, Sotero Laurel, Ernesto Maceda, Orlando Mercado, Aquilino Pimentel Jr., Rene Saguisag and Victor Ziga.
Lobbyists
Simbulan said some officials of the administration of then President Corazon Aquino acted as lobbyists for the US government in back-channel talks.
“In doing so, they were ready to violate the 1987 Constitution,” said Simbulan.
Simbulan said Richard Armitage, assistant US defense secretary at that time and head of the US bases negotiating panel, is partly to blame for the treaty’s rejection. According to Simbulan, Armitage’s “brazen and brusque behavior” antagonized senators.
Part of the credit, Simbulan said, should also go to insiders in the Office of the President at that time.
Many senators who served from 1987 to 1992 were lawyers of political detainees during the Marcos dictatorship, Simbulan said, which made them natural allies of antibases and anti-imperialist activists.
The fight also hinged on the nuclear weapons-free provision of the 1987 Constitution. The Senate also approved by 19 votes the Freedom from Nuclear Weapons Act on June 6, 1988.
The martial law experience under dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who was supported by America, “made more Filipinos more critical of US intentions, motives and interests in its former colony,” Simbulan said.
In his view, the draft treaty seeking the bases’ extension eventually lost because it was tilted in favor of the United States. Tañada’s resolution of nonconcurrence with the treaty won.
Historical amnesia
Linking the event to the present, Simbulan said: “Like the attempt at historical amnesia regarding the Marcos dictatorship and the 1986 People Power Revolution that ousted it, there are those who also want us to forget Sept. 16, 1991 and its historic significance and lesson.”
“Can it be that they want to use this historical amnesia as a political capital to seal [the] restoration [of the bases]?” he said.
He has one complaint: the whole country became a de facto US military base through the Visiting Forces Agreement in 1999 and the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement in 2014.
“We now seem to be passing a time warp,” he said.
The historic vote put back in government hands large tracts of base lands converted into economic zones, proving doomsayers wrong.
“We have looked back to learn the hard lessons. Now we can only move forward. Like the issue with the Marcos dictatorship, let us not swallow that which we have already thrown up in the past,” he said.
