ISSUE ANALYSIS No. 07
Series of 2009
Ten
Years of the Visiting Forces Agreement: An Assessment
The
Filipino people will muster the will and determination to flush
out foreign troops from our territory, as they mustered the will
and power to dismantle U.S. military bases in 1991.
By
the Policy Study, Publication, and Advocacy (PSPA)
Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG)
May 29, 2009
The presence of heavily armed U.S. soldiers even in the remote areas
of the Philippine countryside is now becoming a normal part of the
local scenery. As we mark the ten years (1999-2009) of the Visiting
Forces Agreement (VFA, ratified by the Philippine Senate on May
27, 1999), it has made our countryside a free-fire zone for so-called
joint military exercises using live ammunition and artillery that
have killed, injured or maimed our people including children. These
foreign troops enter Philippine territory without passports or visas,
without clearances from our customs or immigration authorities,
without quarantine clearances from our health authorities, and with
neither licenses nor registration for driving their vehicles in
our country. They have gotten away with murder, attempted murder,
rape, harassment of our women, maltreatment of our countrymen, and
destruction of our environment. A document called the “Visiting
Forces Agreement” has given them the right to do so.
More than 40,000 U.S. troops have entered Philippine territory in
more than 25 provinces this way since the VFA took effect in 1999.
They came in more than 78 U.S. naval vessels and fleets which include
nuclear-armed aircraft carriers, cruise ships, submarines - all
in clear violation of the Philippine constitutional prohibition
on the entry of nuclear weapons in any part of the country.
The VFA is the most anomalous aspect of our foreign relations today,
17 years after the historic dismantling of the U.S. military bases
in 1992. It is a shameless document that is one-sided because it
is not reciprocal. It denigrates the Philippine constitutional provision
about “equal protection of the laws” by the very fact
that it grants special rights and privileges to armed foreign troops
on Philippine territory. The VFA has been an indignity to our people,
a travesty to our people’s rights and rule of law. This is
why Filipinos from all walks of life all over the country continue
to protest this so-called treaty. It reminds us that we are still
not really sovereign in our own territory as a nation.
The VFA is thus and indeed a bad example for other proposed or pending
military agreements with other countries such as the Philippine-Australian
Status of Visiting Forces Agreement which is still pending in the
Senate, or similar draft agreements with Singapore and New Zealand.
These are ostensibly using the VFA with the United States as a model.
Is the VFA legal and constitutional?
Clearly, the 2000 and 2009 Supreme Court decisions on the VFA only
allows for joint military exercises like the Balikatan (shoulder-to-shoulder),
and small unit joint training exercises. It does not allow basing
rights or facilities to be constructed for transient U.S. forces
visiting the Philippines. It also does not allow U.S. forces to
be involved in counterinsurgency operations in the country.
Basing
rights or privileges
But since 2003, U.S. congressional budgetary documents have referred
to the installation of “forward or advance operating bases”
being set up in the Philippines. These have meticulously been exposed
by Focus on the Global South researcher Herbert Docena in several
articles (Docena, 2006). The facilities for the U.S. Joint Special
Operations Task Force-Philippines (formerly called the Operation
Enduring Freedom-Philippines), now deployed all-year round in the
country, have been beefed up with the U.S. Department of Defense
contracting the American defense contractor Global Contingency Services
LLC with a US$14.4-million (or P650 million pesos) contract for
“base development” in Mindanao. These facilities which
have been constructed are described by no less than official U.S.
documents and in their Pentagon lexicon as “forward operating
bases” or “advance operating base,” especially
those that have been set up in various parts of Mindanao inside
Philippine Army camps. In reality, these are permanent operating,
support, intelligence and training bases set up in direct support
for Philippine counterinsurgency operations. Are these really allowed
by the provisions of the VFA and by the Philippine Supreme Court?
Role
in counter-insurgency activities
The Philippines, under the cover of Balikatan exercises, is being
used as a laboratory for the latest U.S. counterinsurgency tactics
and strategies in the Philippines, which are then used in other
U.S. military interventions in other countries. This includes the
“security-development approach” in counter-insurgency.
The traditional role of the U.S. Army in overseas operations include
“small unit training of local forces, civic action initiatives,
psychological warfare”. But there are “non-traditional”
operations which are implemented in conjunction with agencies responsible
for development assistance like the USAID and other conduits like
the U.S. Institute for Peace, the National Endowment for Democracy,
etc.
General T. Galvin of the U.S. Army testified in U.S. Senate congressional
hearings that U.S. Special Operations Forces are also used in “direct
action”, including “small unit commando activities,”
where “speed and surprise…dictate, otherwise they are
for security assistance, combat intelligence and communications.”
(Galvin, 1987) Or under a special Executive Order 12333 issued by
the President of the United States since the 1980s, they can engage
in covert surgical “special activities” beyond the training
of local government forces as Mobile Training Teams (MTT).
U.S. military presence in the Philippines today relies heavily on
covert U.S. military involvement through U.S. Special Operations
Forces (SOFs), service intelligence organizations, the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) and other covert U.S. intelligence agencies like the
National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) playing a central role. Other agencies include the United
States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Peace Corps,
which specialize in the “hearts-and-minds approach”
using so-called humanitarian or non-lethal aid. Covert action includes
unconventional warfare, intelligence operations and psychological
operations (psy-ops) in target areas such as remote communities
suspected of being “controlled or influenced by insurgents”.
Their activities provide the fundamental elements in supporting
local counterinsurgency operations.
Under the VFA, “U.S. civilian personnel directed by the U.S.
Department of Defense” are also given special rights and privileges
like their uniformed U.S. military counterparts. Their range of
activities include economic, civic, military, diplomatic and political
action, all aimed at achieving the political/psychological (psy-ops)
objective to undercut a movement’s support base and destroy
its credibility and influence to provide support for U.S. objectives.
Humanitarian or civic action missions, in the form of medical/dental
(MEDCAP) teams purportedly to meet human needs, are meant to penetrate
local political infrastructures and achieve the objectives of psychological
operations. This is what U.S. manuals on counterinsurgency say about
these “non-lethal tools” for counterinsurgency and about
the purposes of these activities (US Army, 1975).
This is also why U.S. intelligence operatives and counterinsurgency
specialists under the coverage of the VFA now are seen freely roaming
the General Headquarters of the Armed Forces of the Philippines
in Quezon City and other AFP camps. They provide critical battlefield
intelligence and communications/logistical support for large and
small-unit local counterinsurgency operations.
Let us review the real role of the “humanitarian missions”
of the U.S. Department of Defense. During the Philippine-American
War, General Arthur McArthur (General Douglas McArthur’s father
who served in the U.S. Army during its “pacification”
of the Philippines) made the following frank statement before the
57th Congress of the United States:
“One
of my purposes was to improve roads for strategic purposes entirely.
I got $1 million gold for the purpose. Whatever incidental advantage
arose to the community was, of course, in consequence of the military
necessity. My view was to make passable roads during all seasons,
so that by assembling troops at central points and connecting the
outpost by wire, we could rapidly move from the rendezvous to the
extremities, and thereby avoid the necessity of scattering into
so many posts.”
United States Marines and Special Operations Forces are actually
doing battlefield intelligence and psy-ops as they conduct infrastructure,
civic action and “humanitarian missions” with USAID
personnel in many parts of the country today, using the VFA as a
cover. Meanwhile, the Philippines’ VFA Commission, which was
ostensibly created to oversee the implementation of VFA provisions,
including monitoring violations, has only become the principal apologist
for the onerous agreement, while consistently covering up even the
most brazen violations of the agreement by U.S. military forces.
Resistance
to VFA
The people of Mindanao, especially in the Autonomous Region of Muslim
Mindanao, are waging a continuous campaign to stop U.S. military
intervention—both covert and overt—in the internal conflict,
which has only complicated the situation in the second largest island
of the Philippines. Lately, the people of Bicol region have scored
a tactical victory in the struggle against the restoration of U.S.
military forces by forcing the rollback of 6,000 U.S. troops and
forcing them to send instead a so-called 100-member U.S. military
“humanitarian mission” in the Balikatan exercises. BAN
Balikatan (Bikol Against Balikatan) and the SUMABA KA (Speak Out!)
or Sorsogon United Movement for Peace Against Balikatan have successfully
forced the retreat of BK ’09 into a defensive position. A
people’s caravan that traveled in all of Bicolandia’s
provinces highlighted a strong people’s resistance to the
VFA which is being used as a camouflage to U.S. involvement in counterinsurgency
and the restoration of de facto basing rights in the country.
The Filipino people will muster the will and determination to flush
out foreign troops from our territory, as they mustered the will
and power to dismantle U.S. military bases in 1991.
------------------------------------------------------------
This
issue analysis was written by Roland G. Simbulan, Centennial Professor,
University of the Philippines, and Senior Fellow, Center for People
Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG).
Sources:
Docena,
Herbert (2006). Unconventional Warfare. Focus on the Global South.
Also see Docena, Herbert, At the Door of the East (The Philippines
in United States Military Strategy).
Galvin,
T. General (1987). Testimony before th US Senate Committee on Armed
Services. Feb. 23, 1987.
United
States Army, (1975). Guide for the Planning of Counterinsurgency.
Department of the Army, Washington, DC.
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