Treason in dirty Chinese loans?

Treason in dirty Chinese loans?
Under Beijing gun, Gloria commits RP to Spratly deal
Malaya 2/23/2008
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PRESIDENT Arroyo and former Speaker Jose V. de Venecia may have committed treason if the Philippine government signs a so-called "Spratly Deal" with Beijing in exchange for loans attended by bribery and corruption.

Malaya publisher Amado Macasaet said he was told by a source that under the "Spratly Deal," China would be allowed to explore territorial waters of the Philippines.

"This is treason because the pact has the effect of giving away Philippine sovereignty to a foreign country. In return, Chinese-owned firms provide the Philippines with overpriced loans for numerous projects," he said.

He said the issue has not reached the attention of the Senate but "when it does, I am reasonably certain that the Upper House will insist that the agreement be considered a treaty which must be ratified by the Senate."

He said he was told that officials of the Philippine Navy and the Department of Foreign Affairs have raised the question of sovereignty. "My source told me that they were ignored without even explaining what the matter is all about or how the Philippines can benefit from it."

Macasaet said the Chinese are pressing for commitment on the deal. "It has not signed the North Rail agreement and insists that the Spratly deal be concluded simultaneously with the $500 million rail modernization project that covers 27 kilometers from Caloocan to Malolos, Bulacan."

He said Arroyo and De Venecia chose to ignore the fact that all minerals and marine resources are owned by the country whose domain extends 200 nautical miles from its nearest shoreline.

This, he said, is provided under the UN Conference on the Law of the Seas.

Since the project involves national sovereignty and patrimony, the "Spratly Deal" should be in the form of a treaty subject to the ratification by the Senate, he said.

Macasaet said someone who supports the deal told him that the mode should be a joint venture, not an executive agreement.

But then a lawyer claimed that a joint venture is a blatant mode of a circumventing the treaty ratification required by the Constitution.

The lawyer said a joint venture is not acceptable because it is a commercial transaction.

On the other hand, a treaty is a sovereign act that must be ratified by the Senate.

Under a treaty required by the Constitution, the Philippines partly or wholly cedes its sovereign rights.

The national broadband deal with Chinese firm ZTE Corporation and the North and South railway projects would be financed by loans from China. The Department of Trade has signed a memorandum of agreement with ZTE International for four projects that would cost around $4 billion.

The Department of Education and Culture has its Cyber-Ed, also to be financed with loans from China. There are talks of overprice in all these projects.

Macasaet said his source told him that behind all these loan accommodations from China is the motive that both Arroyo and De Venecia agreed to.

The Spratly deal also includes special and exclusive economic zones, already contained in the memorandum of agreement signed between DTI and ZTE International.

Sensing the threat to its claim to the same group of islands, Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian visited the Spratlys last Feb. 2 over the objections of China, but with very few words of protest from the Philippines.

DIRTY PROJECTS

Said to be potentially rich in gas and oil deposits, the Spratlys are claimed as a whole by China, Taiwan and Vietnam, while parts of it are claimed by Malaysia and the Philippines.

As it now turns out, the real motive of China is to explore, under an agreement, internal waters of the Philippines. These waters are limited to Filipinos.

"We all talk about loans from China and the briberies that attend them. Unknown to many of us is the fact that China may not sign the final agreements for these dirty projects unless the Philippines signs a deal covering the Spratlys," Macasaet said.

"The Chinese obviously dangled anomalous loans in exchange for the Spratly deal. What is involved here is not just bribery. It’s something worse. Its high treason," he said.

Macasaet said that in this treaty which both countries cover with the word "deal," the Senate has been completely ignored.

FAT BRIBES

In sum, Macasaet said, the accommodations in the form of billions of dollars of loans, overprice not included, are carrots dangled by the government of China, to get back a bigger payoff – the exploration of internal waters which belong exclusively to the Filipinos.

"How soon or how late the Chinese government will sign the final agreement for the loans and the projects is an indication of how we have plunged ourselves into an abyss that is nothing but high treason," he said.

Macasaet said his source in Malacañang intimated that the agreements for the North and South Rail may be not be finally signed until Arroyo and De Venecia make good their word that the Philippines will allow China to explore its internal waters.

Manila’s Bungle in The South China Sea

Far Eastern Economic Review
January/February 2008
Manila’s Bungle in The South China Sea
by Barry Wain


When Vietnamese students gathered outside the Chinese Embassy in Hanoi last December to protest against China’s perceived bullying over disputed territory in the South China Sea, it signaled Hanoi’s intention to turn up the heat a bit.

And Beijing reacted in kind; instead of downplaying the incident, a foreign ministry spokesman complained, “China has indisputable sovereignty over the South China Sea islands.” The bluster on both sides, while just a blip in this long-running feud, is a timely reminder that the South China Sea remains one of the region’s flashpoints. What most observers don’t realize is that in the last few years, regional cooperative efforts to coax Beijing into a more measured stance have been set back by one of the rival claimants to the islands.

Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s hurried trip to China in late 2004 produced a major surprise. Among the raft of agreements ceremoniously signed by the two countries was one providing for their national oil companies to conduct a joint seismic study in the contentious South China Sea, a prospect that caused consternation in parts of Southeast Asia. Within six months, however, Vietnam, the harshest critic, dropped its objections and joined the venture, which went ahead on a tripartite basis and shrouded in secrecy.

In the absence of any progress towards solving complex territorial and jurisdictional disputes in the South China Sea, the concept of joint development is resonating stronger than ever. The idea is fairly simple: Shelve sovereignty claims temporarily and establish joint development zones to share the ocean’s fish, hydrocarbon and other resources. The agreement between China, the Philippines and Vietnam, three of the six governments that have conflicting claims, is seen as a step in the right direction and a possible model for the future.

But as details of the undertaking emerge, it is beginning to look like anything but the way to go. For a start, the Philippine government has broken ranks with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which was dealing with China as a bloc on the South China Sea issue. The Philippines also has made breathtaking concessions in agreeing to the area for study, including parts of its own continental shelf not even claimed by China and Vietnam. Through its actions, Manila has given a certain legitimacy to China’s legally spurious “historic claim” to most of the South China Sea.

Although the South China Sea has been relatively peaceful for the past decade, it remains one of East Asia’s potential flashpoints. The Paracel Islands in the northwest are claimed by China and Vietnam, while the Spratly Islands in the south are claimed in part or entirety by China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei. All but Brunei, whose claim is limited to an exclusive economic zone and a continental shelf that overlap those of its neighbors, man military garrisons in the scattered islets, cays and rocks of the Spratlys.

After extensive Chinese structures were discovered in 1995 on Mischief Reef, on the Philippine continental shelf and well within the Philippine 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone, Asean persuaded Beijing to drop its resistance to the “internationalization” of the South China Sea issue. Instead of insisting on only bilateral discussions with claimant states, China agreed to deal with Asean as a group on the matter. Rodolfo Severino, a former secretary-general of Asean, has lauded “Asean solidarity and cooperation in a matter of vital security concern.”

Asean and China, however, failed in their attempt to negotiate a code of conduct. In the “Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea,” signed in 2002, they pledged to settle territorial disagreements peacefully and to exercise restraint in activities that could spark conflict. But the declaration is far from watertight. A political statement, not a legally binding treaty, it doesn’t specify the geographical scope and is, at best, an interim step.

Since the issuance of the declaration, a tenuous stability has descended on the South China Sea. With Asean countries benefiting from China’s booming economy, boosted by a free-trade agreement, Southeast Asian political leaders are happy to forget about this particular set of problems that once bedeviled their relations with Beijing. Yet none of the multifaceted disputes has been resolved, and no mechanism exists to prevent or manage conflicts. With no plans to discuss even the sovereignty of contested islands, claimants now accept that it will be decades, perhaps generations, before the tangled claims are reconciled.

Recent incidents and skirmishes are a sharp reminder of how dangerous the situation remains. In the middle of last year, Chinese naval vessels fired on Vietnamese fishing boats near the Paracels, killing one fisherman and wounding six others, while British giant BP halted work associated with a gas pipeline off the Vietnamese coast after a warning by the Chinese Foreign Ministry. In the past few months, Beijing and Hanoi have traded denunciations as the Chinese, in particular, maneuver to reinforce territorial claims. Vietnam protested when China conducted a large naval exercise around the Paracels in November.

China’s decision in December to create an administrative center on Hainan to manage the Paracels, Spratlys and another archipelago, though symbolic, was regarded as particularly provocative by Hanoi. The Vietnamese authorities facilitated demonstrations outside the Chinese diplomatic missions in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to make known their displeasure.

Friction can be expected to increase as the demand for energy by China and dynamic Southeast Asian economies rises and they intensify the search for oil and gas. While hydrocarbon reserves in the South China Sea are unproven, the belief that huge deposits exist keeps interest intense. As world oil prices hit record levels, the discovery of commercially viable reserves would raise tensions and “transform security circumstances” in the Spratlys, according to Ralf Emmers, an associate professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

President Arroyo’s agreement with China for a joint seismic study was controversial in several respects. By not consulting other Asean members beforehand, the Philippines abandoned the collective stance that was key to the group’s success with China over the South China Sea. Ironically, it was Manila that first sought a united front and rallied Asean to confront China over its intrusion into Mischief Reef a decade earlier. Sold the idea by politicians with business links who have other deals going with the Chinese, Ms. Arroyo did not seek the views of her foreign ministry, Philippines officials say. By the time the foreign ministry heard about it and objected, it was too late, the officials say.

Philippine diplomats might have been able to warn her that while joint development has been successfully implemented elsewhere, Beijing’s understanding of the concept is peculiarly Chinese. The only location that China is known to have nominated for joint development is a patch off the southern coast of Vietnam called Vanguard Bank, which is in Vietnamese waters where China has “no possibly valid claim,” as a study by a U.S. law firm put it. Beijing’s suggestion in the 1990s that it and Hanoi jointly develop Vanguard Bank was considered doubly outrageous because China insisted that it alone must retain sovereignty of the area. Also of no small consideration was the fact that such a bilateral deal would split Southeast Asia.

The hollowness of China’s policy of joint development, loudly proclaimed for nearly 20 years, was confirmed long ago by Hasjim Djalal, Indonesia’s foremost authority on maritime affairs, when he headed a series of workshops on the South China Sea. Mr. Hasjim set out to test the concept of joint development, taking several years to identify an area in which each country would both relinquish and gain something in terms of its claims. In 1996, he designated an area of some thousands of square kilometers, amounting to a small opening in the middle of the South China Sea, which cut across the Spratlys and went beyond them. Joint development, unspecified, was to take place in the “hole,” with no participant having to formally abandon its claims. Beijing alone refused to further explore the doughnut proposal, as it was dubbed, complaining that the intended zone was in the area China claimed. Of course it was, that being the essence of the plan, without which it was difficult to imagine having joint development.

China’s bottom line on joint development at that time: What is mine is mine and what is yours is ours.

Beijing and Manila did not make public the text of their “Agreement for Seismic Undertaking for Certain Areas in the South China Sea By and Between China National Offshore Oil Corporation and Philippine National Oil Company.” After the agreement was signed on Sept. 1, 2004, the Philippine government said the joint seismic study, lasting three years, would “gather and process data on stratigraphy, tectonics and structural fabric of the subsurface of the area.”

Although the government said the undertaking “has no reference to petroleum exploration and production,” it was obvious that the survey was intended precisely to gauge prospects for oil and gas exploration and production. Nobody could think of an alternative explanation for seismic work, especially in the wake of year-earlier press reports that CNOOC and PNOC had signed a letter of intent to begin the search for oil and gas.

Vietnam immediately voiced concern, declaring that the agreement, concluded without consultation, was not in keeping with the spirit of the 2002 Asean-China Declaration on the Conduct of Parties. Hanoi “requested” Beijing and Manila disclose what they had agreed and called on other Asean members to join Vietnam in “strictly implementing” the declaration. After what Hanoi National University law lecturer Nguyen Hong Thao calls “six months of Vietnamese active struggle, supported by other countries,” state-owned PetroVietnam joined the China-Philippine pact.

Vietnam’s inclusion in the modified and renamed “Tripartite Agreement for Joint Marine Seismic Undertaking in the Agreement Area in the South China Sea,” signed on March 14, 2005, was scarcely a victory for consensus-building and voluntary restraint. The Philippines, militarily weak and lagging economically, had opted for Chinese favors at the expense of Asean political solidarity. In danger of being cut out, the Vietnamese joined, “seeking to make the best out of an unsatisfactory situation,” as Mr. Severino puts it. The transparency that Hanoi had demanded was still missing, with even the site of the proposed seismic study concealed.

Now that the location is known, the details having leaked into research circles, the reasons for wanting to keep it under wraps are apparent: “Some would say it was a sell-out on the part of the Philippines,” says Mark Valencia, an independent expert on the South China Sea. The designated zone, a vast swathe of ocean off Palawan in the southern Philippines, thrusts into the Spratlys and abuts Malampaya, a Philippine producing gas field. About one-sixth of the entire area, closest to the Philippine coastline, is outside the claims by China and Vietnam. Says Mr. Valencia: “Presumably for higher political purposes, the Philippines agreed to these joint surveys that include parts of its legal continental shelf that China and Vietnam don’t even claim.”

Worse, by agreeing to joint surveying, Manila implicitly considers the Chinese and Vietnamese claims to have a legitimate basis, he says. In the case of Beijing, this has serious implications, since the broken, U-shaped line on Chinese maps, claiming almost the entire South China Sea on “historic” grounds, is nonsensical in international law. (Theoretically, Beijing might stake an alternative claim based on an exclusive economic zone and continental shelf from nearby islets that it claims, but they would be restricted by similar claims by rivals.) Manila’s support for the Chinese “historic claim,” however indirect, weakens the positions of fellow Asean members Malaysia and Brunei, whose claimed areas are partly within the Chinese U-shaped line. It is a stunning about-face by Manila, which kicked up an international fuss in 1995 when the Chinese moved onto the submerged Mischief Reef on the same underlying “historic claim” to the area.

Some commentators have hailed the tripartite seismic survey as a landmark event, echoing the upbeat interpretation put on it by the Philippines and China. The parties insist it is a strictly commercial venture by their national oil companies that does not change the sovereignty claims of the three countries involved. Ms. Arroyo calls it an “historic diplomatic breakthrough for peace and security in the region.” But that assessment is, at the very least, premature.

Not only do the details of the three-way agreement remain unknown, but almost nothing has been disclosed about progress on the seismic study, which should be completed in the next few months. Much will depend on the results and what the parties do next. Already, according to regional officials, China has approached Malaysia and Brunei separately, suggesting similar joint ventures. If it is confirmed that China has split Asean and the Southeast Asian claimants and won the right to jointly develop areas of the South China Sea it covets only by virtue of its “historic claim,” Beijing will have scored a significant victory.


-----------------------------------------------------------
Mr. Wain, writer-in-residence at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, is a former editor of The Wall Street Journal Asia.

The China Card

John Nerry and Manuel L. Quezon III
9/19/07

ON June 15, 2007, I wrote a blog entry titled “New Asian alliance,” pointing in turn, to an article by Brahma Chellaney, a professor of Strategic Studies at New Delhi University, titled Playing the new Great Game in Asia and beyond. The article said a new exploratory alliance, had emerged in our region:

A nifty new enterprise to discuss security dangers in the Asia-Pacific and evolve a coordinated approach — the Quadrilateral Initiative — has kicked off with an unpublicized first meeting. U.S., Japanese, Indian and Australian officials, at the rank of assistant secretary of state, quietly met recently on the sidelines of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) gathering in Manila.

The emerging four-power alliance was aimed at China. Writing in the Asia Sentinel, Gavin Pao took a look at where that exploratory alliance is, at present: Strategic Chess: Do four-power military exercises and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization foreshadow a new sphere of conflict? In it, the author writes that a massive naval exercise took place at the same time as the APEC Summit. Participants in the exercise were members of the Quadrilateral Initiative -referred to in the article as the Quad Alliance- which has its own security focus, the Malacca Strait. That focus, in turn, represents a threat to Chinese interests:

All four Quad countries are keen to ensure that the Malacca Strait between Malaysia and Indonesia, the world’s busiest waterway, is kept free of threats. Roughly 30 percent of the world’s cargo trade passes through the strait and the need to ensure safe passage is certainly paramount. The strategic importance of the strait as a conduit for oil imports is sacrosanct to a number of countries, including China, Japan and South Korea.

However, with the Quad exercises being conducted with a heavy arsenal that included aircraft and submarines, it is clear that potential threats posed unconventional forces, like terrorists or pirates, have hardly been accorded first priority. Moreover, effective patrolling of the strait can be enforced primarily through close coordination between Malaysian, Singaporean, American and Indonesian intelligence agencies, without any need for substantial Indian or Japanese involvement.

The irony regarding the argument for protecting the Malacca Strait is that controlling it through a forum in which China is not involved effectively hangs a psychological noose over China’s head. Roughly 60 percent of China’s foreign trade and 75 percent of its oil imports also pass through the Malacca Strait, and it explains why China has been so aggressive in creating new transport outlets for itself away from the coast.

The story goes on to discuss how the various members of the Quad Alliance are responding to China, with Australia cozying it up with Beijing and other countries being more ambivalent. And how Beijing sees its prospects:

China, meanwhile, remains confident in its backyard, with much of the region under its sway. While ASEAN countries still look to the US as the region’s ultimate guarantor of security, Beijing has played a skillful diplomatic game in Southeast Asia, according the region top priority during a time when the United States has tended to take ASEAN for granted, as symbolized by Condoleeza Rice skipping several key ASEAN summits. Philippine President Gloria Arroyo even referred to China as a “big brother” at an ASEAN summit this year.

In contrast, if you look at my July 26, 2007 entry on the debate on where American commitment to Philippine security really stood, Filipino officials, like their Asean counterparts, get mixed and usually not very encouraging messages from the USA. American think tanks, on the other hand, are quite aware of the ebb and flow of American prestige vis-a-vis China in the Philippines, and have tried to influence official policy. But they’ve failed.

A reason may be that the Bush administration has nailed America’s future to Iraq: the American historian (and blogger) David Kaiser says the US faces a Turning Point so significant it represents the fourth great crisis of American national life:

The fourth great crisis of our national life is upon us. The first (1774-1794) created our republic; the second (1857-68, or 1857-72 in the South) preserved it; and the third (1929-45) made us a leading world power. Ever since Strauss and Howe published The Fourth Turning at the end of 1996, their readers have been speculating about when the crisis would come, and what it would be about. President Bush’s speech last Thursday, in my opinion, answered those questions. We now know the issue that the next ten years will decide: the nature of the United States’ role in the world in general and the Middle East in particular. We shall either emerge, for good or ill, as the world’s remaining imperial power living in a long-term garrison state, or we shall step back and begin to allow the world to take care of itself again.

There seems little place in this American crisis, for South East Asia. Which brings us to the Philippines and the administration’s “China card.”

Back in October, 2005, I’d pointed out in my blog (see IV, 2) that one political card the administration was playing, was the “China card.” This was most obviously played on July 8, 2005 when both Secretary Romulo and Speaker de Venecia (de Venecia, particularly insistently) said China supported the President.

This was at a time when the United States seemed ambivalent, at best, about the administration and was even suspected of maneuvering to kick the President out. China maintained an official posture of enthusiastic support for the President, and began giving token aid to the AFP, which traditionally, has been totally dependent on American assistance and thus, susceptible to American pressure. That assistance remains small, but China continues to increase it, little by little, as well as aggressively pursuing commercial contacts and official assistance, as demonstrated by the ZTE deal.

The President hasn’t been shy about singing the praises of China, just as China sees potential in Philippine investments to help supply raw materials. And of course it may be as simple as this: it’s easier, more pleasant, even more dignified, to do business with the Chinese than say, Europeans and Americans with their rhetoric about “transparency” and “honesty,” which the targets of Western preachiness tend to view as sanctimonious pap.

Our country and government is neither China’s biggest market or even a very large factor in the Chinese scheme of things. But influence is gained one small and big government at a time; what makes us important, in a sense, is if the UK and Japan served as super carriers for the projection of American power in Europe and Asia, the Philippines served as an escort carrier (when the bases existed) or escort destroyer (today) for the projection of American influence. In turn, Philippine governments tried to extract concessions from the US with varying levels of success.

Geopolitics is also domestic politics. China wants to be a Superpower, America wants to remain the only one, the Philippines, like Japan and indeed, also the rest of Asean, likes cozying up to America to counteract China, but China proves more attentive and generous than America… Domestically, the President has used China as a foil to America, and America seems to have resigned itself to realizing it needs the President, for now…

But think of this. The ZTE deal triggered a protest from the US Ambassador. The same deal has also reminded Filipino businessmen that contrary to their belief, up to this point, that the virtue of the President was she played politics ruthlessly, but unlike Estrada (and of course, Marcos) she intended to keep her hands off business, and in particular, big business. But the ZTE deal has intruded into the turf of big local players (PLDT and Globe, for one, the telecoms giants who could have profited from a national broad band scheme), as well as American business interests. So their hackles have been raised.

The easiest thing to do would be for the President to scrap the deal. But the Chinese have invested; if testimony is to be believed, money has exchanged hands. It becomes, then, a question of face. Face is something that is priceless; and if face is lost, the consequences go beyond dollars and cents.

This, then, is the dilemma of the government. Just as it’s begun to enjoy its cozy relationship with China, domestic politics has taken on an international dimension.

China moves to expand its reach

By Antoaneta Bezlova
Southeast Asia
Jan 29, 2008


BEIJING - Even as it expands economic cooperation with its wary Southeast Asian neighbors, China's thirst for energy is compelling it to resurrect territorial claims to resources-rich spots in the region that have lain dormant for years.

China's decision in late 2007 to create a new city administration responsible for the archipelagos of the Paracels and Spratlys islands in the South China Sea may not have made waves at home, but it sparked tensions in the region and focused neighboring countries' attention on the disputed territories.

Vietnam's two main cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh saw unprecedented street demonstrations in December with several



hundred young people marching round the Chinese Embassy and consulate with banners proclaiming "Down with China!" and "Long live Vietnam!".

In early January, a reported conflict between Chinese and Vietnamese fishing vessels in the international waters of the Gulf of Tonkin drew protests from the Chinese side. Chinese state media accused Vietnamese boats of firing and attacking the Chinese fishermen.

And even before the waters of the South China Sea calmed down, Taiwan announced that President Chen Shui-bian plans to visit the Spratlys islands, reinforcing Taiwan's claim to these disputed territories.

The island chains of Spratlys and Paracels have long been flashpoints. While the oil-rich Spratlys are claimed in full or part by China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan, the Paracels are claimed by China, Vietnam and Taiwan.

The 1980s and early 1990s marked a period of intense rivalry among Southeast Asian countries as they began building airstrips, fishing ports, lighthouses and sightseeing spots on the clusters of islands and reefs. They also began developing petroleum and gas resources in cooperation with foreign oil companies.

China prides itself for taking the lead in stabilizing this regional corner by engaging in a policy of "befriending and benefiting" its neighbors. In an effort to strengthen ties with the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Beijing has refrained from emphasizing territorial claims, insisting instead that the region should be developed together.

A 2002 breakthrough agreement between China and ASEAN committed all sides to resolving disputes in the South China Sea peacefully. Two years later, China and the Philippines agreed to exploit the oil and gas riches of the region together and in 2005 the two countries were joined by Vietnam in conducting a survey of the South China Sea to probe its reserves.

"China has always seen the resolution of disputes in the South China Sea as a process," says He Sheng, researcher with the China Institute for International Relations. "We need to start with objectives that are achievable and work gradually towards resolving the more difficult points. To achieve the goal of joint exploration and joint development of the sea resources we need more perseverance and trust."

The period of relative calm came to an abrupt end though in December when nationalistic street demonstrations, said to have been green-lighted by the government, erupted in Vietnam's main cities. Vietnam has been historically wary of its big neighbor and in 1979 the two countries fought a brief border war.

The protests followed reports of China's legislature ratifying plans for a huge new city administration called Sansha with headquarters in Hainan island to manage the three archipelagos of Paracel, Spratly and Macclessfield Bank.

China - itself adept at orchestrating "spontaneous" nationalistic demonstrations - chided Vietnam over the protests but refused to confirm reports of the planned upgrade of the islands administration from Woody Island in the Paracels to the new "county-level city" of Sansha (an abbreviation of Xisha, Nansha and Zhongsha, China's names for the archipelagos), part of Hainan province.

An official Internet site for Sansha city (www.sanshashi.com) however, states its inception date as of November 2007. It traces China's historical claims to the archipelagos back to their alleged discovery by the Chinese in the Qin Dynasty (around AD 200) and claims China stationed imperial troops on the Paracel Islands as early as 1045.

Last week, Chinese State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan and Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister Pham Gia Khiem held a round of talks in Beijing in an effort to put recent tensions behind. China did not waste time reiterating its claims over the disputed South China Sea islands.

"China has indisputable sovereignty over the South China Sea islands and the surrounding waters," Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said at a regular press briefing Thursday. "Leaders from both sides have agreed to settle the maritime dispute through dialogue and consultation."

"In recent years, China has been more assertive in all unresolved territorial disputes with neighboring countries but I believe the reason behind the decision for the creation of Sansha is oil," says a foreign diplomat in Beijing.

Since overtaking Japan as the world's second largest oil consumer in 2003, China has been closely scrutinized for its role in global energy markets. The country's voracious appetite for energy and commodities has been blamed for pushing up prices around the world.

Last year China relied on imports for 50% of its oil needs. While its oil imports amount to just 9% of the total amount of oil traded globally, the country's oil consumption is projected to rise precipitously in coming years.

Chinese experts speak of the need for Beijing to deploy "energy diplomacy" in order to secure the country's continuing supplies of oil and gas.

(Inter Press Service)

Philippines tears itself apart

By A Lin Neumann
Southeast Asia Online
Feb 25 2006

MANILA - The Philippines is marking the 20th anniversary of its finest political hour with a demonstration that its democracy remains brittle, its political institutions on the point of collapse, its economy as corrupt as ever and its leaders embroiled in endless rounds of infighting.

On Friday, as already-splintered veterans of the so-called People Power revolt prepared to mark the occasion when masses of people and military rebels peacefully forced then-president Ferdinand Marcos to flee the country on February 25, 1986, embattled President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo declared a formal state of emergency - a chilling echo of the language and tactics employed by Marcos when he instituted martial law in 1972.

Arroyo claims to have uncovered a plot hatched by a collage of the political opposition, rebel communists and "military adventurists" to topple her government. Her emergency decree comes fast on the heels of reports about troop movements and suspicious activities of at least one army general linked to previous military attempts to overthrow the government.

The left and the right, Arroyo said, "are now in a tactical alliance and engaged in a concerted and systematic conspiracy, over a broad front, to bring down the duly constituted government". She also said, "The claims of these elements have been recklessly magnified by certain segments of the national media."

The declaration gives her government broad discretionary powers, including provisions that allow authorities to arrest without warrants, seize public utilities and, if deemed necessary, to shore up national security and censor the media. Arroyo has not yet spelled out her plans to enforce her already shaky grip on political power, but the decree sends a worrying signal for the future of Philippine democracy.

The state of emergency led to the arrest of one general linked to previous coup attempts, a few other arrests and a ban on protests and ceremonies timed to the People's Power anniversary. But when Corazon Aquino, the woman who succeeded Marcos, led a peaceful march through the heart of the business district, authorities backed down after a brief standoff with riot police and allowed several thousand protesters to continue.

Aquino is the closest thing the Philippines has to a moral leader, largely considered above partisan politics, and anger over Arroyo's move during a virtual national holiday celebrating democracy may open the door to a broader movement against her government. "I am not an icon of democracy," Aquino said in Tagalog to cheering supporters. "You are all, collectively, the icon of democracy."

Aquino, who also supported the ouster of Arroyo's predecessor in 2001, then said in English: "Mrs President, I ask you to make the supreme sacrifice of resigning." The crowd roared back: "Gloria resign!"

As important in some ways as Aquino were others in the crowd - she was joined by some of the country's leading businessmen, whose support for Arroyo has been steadily eroding. "The state of emergency weakens her," said Jess Estanislao, a well-known banker and former finance secretary, as he marched with Aquino. "This is the beginning of the end for Arroyo."

That may be wishful thinking, but Arroyo, who was installed in office in 2001 on the wave of another popular revolt against then-president Joseph Estrada's government, has been unsteady for much of the past year. The controversy surrounding her administration came to a head last year when she was secretly taped discussing the 2004 presidential-election vote count with an election official on the telephone. The tapes were made public under mysterious circumstances, and her political opponents have been trying to force her resignation ever since.

The latest turn of the political screw is further evidence that the once-high hopes for better governance and more democracy engendered by the first People's Power revolt in 1986, a peaceful four-day uprising that inspired similar actions worldwide, have now come almost completely undone. In the intervening years, in many ways, things have gone from bad to worse.

Following Marcos, Aquino's administration was beset by numerous coup attempts by a politically active and restive military. Traditional elites, some of whom had run afoul of Marcos, returned with a vengeance to resume positions of privilege and patronage. Back-door deal-making was the order of the day, despite Aquino's morally upright reputation.

Marcos died in exile, but none of his cronies, the same men who helped him systematically loot the country, were successfully prosecuted. The group Transparency International says the official thievery under Marcos made his regime the second most corrupt of the 20th century - outdone only by Indonesia's deposed Suharto.

Marcos' notoriously flamboyant and wealthy widow, Imelda, has never been convicted of any crime, despite facing hundreds of court cases. She remains a fixture on the social scene, as bejeweled and lacquered as ever, and her children are gearing up for political careers.

After a period of relative political calm and notable economic progress under Fidel Ramos' six-year term in the 1990s, political turmoil returned soon after former actor Estrada was elected president on a populist ticket. Corruption allegations hounded his government and fueled the "People's Power 2" rallies that eventually overthrew his administration - even though he was democratically elected and is still popular with the majority of poor Filipinos.

The result of what is now more than two decades of instability that began under Marcos and continued through coup attempts and the two popular revolts, the last something approaching mob rule, has been anemic economic growth, entrenched poverty, soaring birth rates and a political system captive to shifting loyalties and endless intrigues.

The Philippines' economy is kept afloat largely on remittances from overseas workers with mainly menial jobs in more-developed economies. Those inflows amounted to a record US$10.35 billion last year, equivalent to a quarter of the country's exports, or about 12% of gross domestic product.

The current state of affairs raises questions among the political elite about the future viability of liberal democracy in the Philippines. "What is clear to me after 20 years is that democracy is not a prescription for economic progress. Not the way we practice it," said Teodoro Locsin Jr, one of Aquino's closest advisers and now a nominally pro-government congressman.

Indeed, so fractured is the political environment that none of the leaders of the first People's Power movement will appear together publicly to commemorate the events. Aquino, for one, is planning to attend a mass and a rally on Saturday at the shrine to "Our Lady of EDSA", a massive statue of the Virgin Mary erected near Epifanio Delos Santos Avenue (EDSA) in Manila, the place where nuns knelt in prayer in 1986 before the armored vehicles of Marcos' army to stop potential violence.

For his part, Ramos plans to preside at a flag-raising ceremony at another monument. Juan Ponce Enrile, who was linked to a series of coup attempts against Aquino, is boycotting the whole thing.

Even before her state-of-emergency announcement, Arroyo, the daughter of a former president and herself an anti-Marcos activist, was avoiding public commemorations of the event.

The depth of the infighting runs deep. Ramos, 77, who likes to view himself as a Filipino version of Singapore's elder statesman Lee Kwan Yew, has repeatedly demanded that Arroyo step down by next year and has called for a radical new constitution that would change the Philippines from a presidential to a parliamentary political system. "It is the only solution to our instability," he said in an interview.

Is Ramos involved in current plots? He won't say. "We are trying to keep everyone in the same ship," Ramos joked over drinks in his office after a long meeting with some of Arroyo's known enemies. "But not necessarily with the same skipper.

"Arroyo," he said, "is small-minded and self-centered." Her government, he believes, is corrupt and has lost its legitimacy. Noting the self-imposed exile of her husband, Mike Arroyo, after he was accused of involvement in a nationwide gambling syndicate, Ramos said, "The First Gentleman is the source of a lot of graft and corruption."

Politicians in the Philippines routinely rip into one another, so perhaps Ramos' comments should be taken with a pinch of salt. But the current political environment is as fractured as it has been in years. Whereas the struggle against Marcos had a palpable story line of good versus evil, the current free-for-all appears venal on all sides. Ever since Marcos fell, the Philippines has been exhausted by conspiracies, half-baked economic policies and endless political intrigue. Not to mention widespread disappointment.

What did Ramos expect when the revolt he began in 1986 succeeded? "Upwards, upwards, upwards," he said. Twenty years later? "We are sinking," he said.

A Lin Neumann is a veteran Philippines correspondent who witnessed the movement that led to the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

Philippines: Power, not Gloria

By Herbert Docena
Southeast Asia Online

MANILA - If the Philippines' current political crisis was initially about the political survival of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, it has quickly turned into something much bigger.

While the fallout from a scandal last year involving the president allegedly coercing electoral officials could have been contained, a confluence of events has since paved the way for a standoff that has polarized domestic political forces. Arroyo's fate is now almost incidental. Beneath the coup plots, shadow plays and shifting alliances is the protracted and unresolved class struggle for power.

Democracy lite

After the fall of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, Philippine conservative ruling elites aided by the United States moved quickly to reinstate the pre-dictatorship political system that had under Spanish colonial rule allowed them to entrench their economic dominance over society.

Smarting from the lessons of Marcos' dictatorship, and seeing that authoritarianism was not necessarily the most effective way to maintain their collective grip on power, the elite leaders restored civil liberties, but restricted democracy to mere electoral contests that - given the ossified distribution of wealth and power in the Philippines - remained structurally skewed in their favor.

Dubbed variably as "low-intensity democracy", "limited democracy" or "polyarchy" by academics, the post-1986 consensus became both the linchpin of stability and the source of legitimacy for Philippine ruling elites.

Through elections, the elite factions were able to manage competition among themselves while eschewing outsiders who lacked the resources required to challenge them at the ballot box. Those who won the elections were able to command obedience from the masses - not by force as in a dictatorship, but by reminding them that they (the leaders) were the people's choice.

Having dominated the state through the electoral process, the ruling elites have countered challenges to their rule by successfully thwarting persistent demands for a redistribution of power, wealth and economic opportunities.

One rough measure of the entrenched inequality: on the eve of the first "people power" uprising in 1985, the top 10% of the population took 37% of the total national income; the lowest 20% garnered a mere 5%. Twenty years later, judging by the latest available official data, the top 10% still controls a whooping 36% of the national pie, while the lowest 20% remains stuck at 5%.

Challenged from outside, crumbling within
Despite its strengths, the post-1986 political system has been inherently unstable. Over time, the masses became less content with the economic results of representative democracy.

Twenty years after the people-power uprising, official polls find that 57% of Filipinos still consider themselves poor, slightly higher than the 55% who felt poverty-pinched in 1983. As much as 20% of the population is unemployed, and every day as many as 2,000 Filipinos leave the country to work abroad. Economic growth has clearly failed to trickle down, the promises of globalization notwithstanding.

This failure of consecutive democratically elected governments to deliver greater economic good - much more than allegations of cheating and corruption - has progressively eroded the legitimacy of the political status quo. But even as the current political system has led to an expansion of the disfranchised and fueled resentment, it has simultaneously extended political freedoms to the middle class.

Those freedoms have strengthened the movements calling for substantive as opposed to "low-intensity" democracy. The openness afforded by "democracy lite" has ironically allowed for the rise of a vibrant leftist movement. Despite its weakness and fragmentation, it has not been quashed to the same extent as those in neighboring Indonesia and Thailand, where capitalists rule the roost.

Increasingly challenged from peripheral political actors, political elites were also increasingly challenged by divisions from within. Historically, internal stability depended on consensus in putting their collective elite interests above the narrow interests of individual factions. This, however, has recently not been the case.

In January 2001, elite factions displaced by Joseph Estrada's presidency seized on widespread anger at alleged corruption inside his government and rode to power on the wave of another people-power-type uprising.

In an alleged rigging of the 2004 elections - and by being reckless enough to get caught speaking privately with supposedly neutral election officials - Arroyo won the ire of fellow elites. The other elite factions, for their part, have seized on the scandal and are now trying to knock her from power. But by adamantly standing her ground, Arroyo has further stretched the limits and contradictions of the established political order.

The divided front

The post-1986 political consensus is now under unprecedented strain. Weakened by internal wranglings, the once-united front of the ruling elites is quickly crumbling. With very little economic progress to show for the past two decades, the government is finding it difficult to exact consent from the middle and lower classes. It is in this larger context that the current political crisis is unfolding.

Beneath the confusing web of coalitions and alliances among powerful families, politicians, military factions, religious groups and civil-society organizations, the fundamental political division in the Philippines today remains that between those who want to preserve their position of dominance in society and those who want to dislodge them. Overlaid on this polarization is the divergence between those who want to salvage the post-1986 system and those who want to dismantle it.

The problem for the preservationist camp, however, is that its proposed solutions to the current crisis have all been dead ends.

To deflect calls for her ouster, Arroyo has been pushing for constitutional revisions that, among other recommendations, would change the government from a presidential to a parliamentary system, which critics argue could be even more easily manipulated by the elites. The ruling class has been concerned by the power that direct presidential elections gives to the masses, as demonstrated by the election of Estrada - who, while a member of the ruling class himself, appealed to the poor by stoking their class resentments and notably was not anointed by traditional elites.

The constitutional solution Arroyo proposes has not gained political traction, however, and is unlikely to overcome formidable opposition. Faced with threats both from other elite factions and from the left, Arroyo has resorted to authoritarian measures, further undermining the post-1986 system of "limited democracy". The reimposition of what amounts to martial law by the recent declaration of a "state of emergency" and other authoritarian proclamations signals the willingness of Arroyo's government to resort to force when all else fails.

The anti-Arroyo factions that also strive to salvage the current political order have likewise only shot blanks. Drawing its constituency from rightists and centrists, and those leaning center-left, this motley political grouping is represented by the Aquinos, the Catholic hierarchy, and the business class, as well as social liberals and democrats.

Most of them have come together under the banner of the so-called Black and White Movement. At first, they pushed for strict adherence to the constitutional order and initially called for the succession of Vice President Noli de Castro to the presidency. But this has since been abandoned because de Castro still supports Arroyo, and even people from within their ranks see him as too lightweight to safeguard their interests competently.

They later supported last year's impeachment proceedings against the president. After that move was blocked by pro-Arroyo legislators, who still dominate Congress, some of them have started pushing for special elections - in short, a continuation of the post-1986 system of electoral democracy, although without Arroyo at the helm.

In transition

On the other side of this jagged divide are those who seek to dismantle the system altogether. Though they have different motivations, tactics and political alternatives, they have come around to a common conclusion: their solutions would require an extra-constitutional intervention and would not be bound by the parameters of the post-1986 political system.

On one end of this spectrum are those who feel that so-called "limited democracy" cannot be relied on to preserve order; its openness has only been exploited by so-called "communists" and by corrupt elites. This camp includes rightist civilian and military factions who want to establish a military or civilian-military junta, as well as factions inside the Arroyo government who are advocating repressive measures beyond those formally allowed under so-called "low-intensity" democracy.

Another point on this continuum is the tactical alliance among elite anti-Arroyo opposition groups, most of them right-wing groups linked to Estrada, but also including well-known personalities with leftist backgrounds, some associated with the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). Grouped under the Solidarity Movement, they are calling for a "transitional council" that will be composed of opposition politicians and some leaders of the party.

The politicians apparently see this as a way to regain power and restore elite democracy under their command. The CPP, for its part, presumably sees this as a chance to infiltrate the highest echelons of the state, even as it continues to implement its military strategy of encircling cities from the countryside and seizing power through armed insurrection.

Another section under the left's banner is the Laban ng Masa (Fight of the Masses) coalition. They are calling for a "transitional revolutionary government" (TRG) - without conservative elite forces represented in the leadership. This umbrella coalition brings together a diverse group of leftist political forces: Leninists together with autonomous social movements and non-governmental organizations, Maoists together with left-party formations that do not see the seizure of the state as the priority, socialists, left-liberals, greens, and others.

Most of the political blocs included here broke away from the CPP in the 1990s, and the coalition is the highest level of tactical and political unity they have achieved since then.

According to the coalition, the TRG's wild aim is to institute economic and political changes that have so far been resisted by the elites, such as land reform and the reversal of neo-liberal economic policies such as privatization and free trade and "structures of popular empowerment". Elections will then resume once their conditions are met, including the suspension of the constitution and the ones mentioned above. The TRG concept has been met with trepidation in the haciendas, in the business district, and at the US Embassy in Manila.

'American approval'

As different groups and factions scramble for power, the US Embassy has become a very popular destination. "What everyone is trying to do," confided one of the cabinet secretaries who recently resigned and joined the anti-Arroyo movement, "is to get American approval." Even the government has no illusions as to what the embassy can do: "If the Americans decide to drop support of the Philippine president, it crumbles," the president's former chief of staff, Rigoberto Tiglao, has acknowledged. [1]

That has been borne out historically. The Philippines was a US colony until 1946, but even thereafter Washington regularly intervened politically by financing preferred candidates and groups, conducting widespread covert operations, and helping to stage-manage elections.

In 1950, a US National Security Council document stated that among the United States' goals in the country was the maintenance of "an effective government which will preserve and strengthen the pro-US orientation". In 1972, the US supported the declaration of martial law because, as a US Senate report put it, "Military bases and a familiar government in the Philippines are more important than the preservation of democratic institutions."

When Marcos finally became more of a political liability than an asset to the US, Washington immediately transferred its support to the anti-Marcos elite factions, attempted to unify them, and ensured that they would call the shots in the anti-dictatorship movement.

All these were critical strategies to guarantee that the outcome of people power would not be inimical to US interests. How exactly the US is playing its hand during the current crisis may not be known for years to come. Since the crisis began, however, US officials have repeatedly stated that they would oppose another "people power" incident.

Tired but wiser

Unless Arroyo voluntarily resigns or goes along with counter-elite plots to preserve the current political order, another people-power-type uprising is still what most of the groups seeking the president's ouster are leveraging to force a political transition. Whether the outcome of another popular uprising will be special elections, a transitional council or a transitional revolutionary government is still unclear. Until now the two critical elements for past successful uprisings are still apparently missing: the support of the military and hundreds of thousands of people on the streets.

In the military, cracks are showing. The government may have foiled recent coup movements by some military factions, but it has not put an end to the restiveness inside the barracks.

And the fissures in society are increasingly being reflected in the chain of command. A nationalist, and some say progressive, bloc composed mostly of junior officers, is reported to be emerging. But as outside the barracks, the military is divided between those who are committed to defending the existing political order and those who want to reconstruct it. The question is, who will strike first and who will remain standing?

So far, the only political force that has been able to fill the streets on a sustained basis, though on a limited scale, is the organized left. Some analysts attribute the general public's refusal to join them to a so-called "people power fatigue", and view this as implicit approval of Arroyo and the existing political system.

The other explanation, however, is that the people are not tired, only wiser: having seen how the previous uprisings only led to the replacement of one elite faction with another, and witnessing no real change in their economic well-being, they may be loath to support another merry-go-round at the top. But if the right combination of factions and personalities were to coalesce, for better or worse, another popular uprising is not inconceivable.

Note
1. Raymond Bonner and Carlos H Conde, "In Manila, US drawn into fight". New York Times, July 23, 2005.

Herbert Docena is with Focus on the Global South, a research and advocacy organization.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

Deadly dirty work in the Philippines

By Cher S Jimenez
Southseat Asia online

MANILA - Political killings in the Philippines have escalated into a full-blown international issue, one that threatens to further undermine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's already wobbly democratic credentials and one that puts at long-term risk the Philippines' budding and lucrative military relationship with the United States.

Philip Alston, United Nations special rapporteur for extrajudicial killings, and three UN staff members arrived in Manila over the weekend to begin a three-week independent probe that will include meetings with high-level government officials as well as independent rights groups, some of which have had their members assassinated. Arroyo has also recently invited the European Union and certain individual European countries to assist with probes into the killings.

Significantly, the UN fact-finding mission comes hot on the heels of a revealing government-ordered investigation into the surge in political assassinations. Led by former Philippine Supreme Court justice Jose Melo, a commission on January 30 revealed in initial comments to the local media that members of the military were responsible for the "majority" of the killings, and although they acted of their own volition and not on direct government orders, that their superiors could be held accountable for their subordinates' crimes.

The military has already promised to prosecute any soldiers found to be guilty of extrajudicial killings. Meanwhile, Arroyo told foreign diplomats the day after the Melo Commission was released that both soldiers and armed leftist groups were responsible for the killings and that she believed "99.9% of our military are good, hard-working and patriotic Filipinos". The contents of the Melo Commission's report have not yet been revealed publicly.

Arroyo administration officials have consistently denied any responsibility for the killings, claiming reports that allege that the government ordered any of the deaths are being perpetuated by political opponents trying to destabilize the government and score political points before upcoming Senate elections. And judging by recent official statements, Arroyo believes that the UN's findings will somehow absolve her and her administration of any culpability for the killings.

Arroyo could, however, be in for a rude awakening. UN special rapporteur on indigenous peoples Rodolfo Stavenhagen said over the weekend that her government's inability to stop the extrajudicial killings and the pattern of human-rights violations victimizing human-rights defenders, social activists, community leaders and other innocent civilians "is seriously undermining the international standing of the Philippine government".

Echoes of Marcos

That echoes what rights groups such as Karapatan have been alleging for years. Since Arroyo took power in 2001, at least 830 people have been killed in an extrajudicial fashion, including 365 mostly left-leaning political and social activists, Karapatan claims. The larger figure includes assassinations of journalists, judges and lawyers known to be sympathetic to leftist causes. Civil-society and rights groups have frequently criticized Arroyo's perceived public indifference to the murders, raising questions of whether she is either unable or unwilling to stop the violence.

To be sure, there are questions about how much control Arroyo really has over certain military commanders and their lower-ranking officers. Her administration has occasionally been beset by military mutinies and alleged foiled coup attempts. However, the recent escalation in violence has placed her six-year administration on pace to surpass the total number of extrajudicial killings documented during the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos' brutal tenure. During his 20-year rule, including a decade under martial law, more than 3,000 people associated with the communist movement were killed. That's a particularly damning comparison for Arroyo, a US-educated economist and self-professed democrat.

It could also significantly act to complicate her government's relations with the United States, which is barred by the Leahy Amendment from providing military or police assistance to governments found to be involved in systematic rights abuses. Arroyo has firmly allied herself with the US-led "war on terror", and the Philippines has allowed US special forces and other military personnel to take up positions in the south to provide technical, logistical and, apparently in certain instances, operational support to the Philippine military in combating Muslim separatist insurgent groups, one of which Washington claims has ties to al-Qaeda.

Significantly, the US, no doubt at Arroyo's urging, also included the heavily armed and well-entrenched New People's Army (NPA), the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines, on its list of international terrorist groups. According to Karapatan, the US has on several occasions directly supported the Philippine military's pursuit of the armed communist militia, which has been fighting the central government for more than 40 years, because of its alleged new united front with certain guerrilla Muslim organizations.

In 2002 Arroyo announced an all-out war against what she deemed internal security threats including armed leftist groups, a master military plan known locally as Oplan Bantay Laya, or Operation Plan Defend Freedom. That assault was scheduled to conclude last year, but it was recently extended by her government through 2010, when Arroyo's constitutionally mandated term as president ends. Last year was notably the bloodiest yet for extrajudicial killings, with a total of 185 people, mostly left-leaning activists, murdered without trial or punishment for the perpetrators.

It was also during this period that Arroyo made the controversial Presidential Proclamation 1017, granting exceptional unchecked powers to the executive branch. Last February she activated that order to place the country under a state of emergency and allowed law-enforcement officials to conduct warrantless arrests of alleged enemies of the state, including some members of the political opposition and journalists from critical media outlets. It's notable now that Arroyo's crackdown on civil liberties conspicuously coincided with a spike in political killings.

State of denial

Even with the international spotlight on Arroyo's rights record, Philippine military and police officials continue to play down the mounting death toll, claiming that there have been no more than 100 political-related killings over her government's six-year term. As in the past, the government blames the NPA for most of the killings, claiming the rebel group is purging its own members or those who have abandoned their ideological cause. But the pattern of the killings seems to indicate that left-leaning activists are often being targeted by security forces the same as armed NPA rebels.

Rights organizations and reportedly the Melo Commission have openly blamed particular prominent members of the military - specifically now-retired General Jovencito Palparan - for the killings of social and political activists sympathetic to the communist movement. According to Karapatan's records, more than 100 of the extrajudicial killings took place in Southern Tagalog, Eastern Visayas and Central Luzon regions, where Palparan had been assigned as a battalion commander.

Palparan told the Associated Press that "there was no evidence against him or any of his men" after the Melo Commission submitted its report to Arroyo. But Palparan's case could soon put Arroyo's government in a tricky spot. The recently retired Palparan was praised by name during Arroyo's State of the Nation address last June for his efforts in helping to reduce the strength of the communist insurgency. During the same nationally televised address, she also lamented the upsurge in unexplained extrajudicial killings.

Meanwhile, Armed Forces Chief of Staff Hermogenes Esperon has said Palparan can no longer be held accountable for any charges related to the killings because his military service has ended. Bishop Juan De Dios Pueblos, a member of the Melo Commission, said that the fact his fact-finding team's authority and findings had no legal binding was apparent in the alleged "arrogant" way Palparan answered question's from the commission's members.

In the coming months, the UN and potentially the EU will likely add a new, more legalistic and potentially damning perspective to the intensifying domestic debate about whether the killings are a matter of central government policy or the dirty work of a few wayward security officials. Whether international probity will be enough to stem the bloodletting and bring high-level Philippine officials to account still seems doubtful as the killings continue this year. What does seem certain is that the Philippines' international reputation as a respectable and stable democracy will soon take another hit.


---------------------------------------------------------
Cher S Jimenez is a Manila-based journalist with the BusinessMirror newspaper. She recently received a grant from the Ateneo de Manila University to conduct investigative journalism on illegal workers in the United Arab Emirates.

(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.