Military cooperation between the Philippines and the United States appeared to be undisturbed on Tuesday, as the Southeast Asian country sought to temper comments by its president suggesting American troops should leave Mindanao, where they have been helping to fight an insurgency.
Brig. Gen. Restituto Padilla, a spokesman for the Philippine armed forces, said the remarks the president, Rodrigo Duterte, delivered on Monday at a swearing-in ceremony for officials in Manila were an expression of “his concern to the U.S. servicemen in Mindanao.”
“Pursuant to the same statement, he desires that our American counterparts should be eased from harm’s way,” General Padilla said.
Mr. Duterte said on Monday that the American Special Forces in Mindanao should withdraw.
“I do not want a rift with America,” he added, “but they have to go.”
Abu Sayyaf is holding at least 23 hostages, including a Dutch bird-watcher seized in 2012 and a Norwegian taken last year from a beach resort he helped manage near Davao City, where Mr. Duterte was formerly mayor.
General Padilla said the military had yet to “receive any specific directives as to how this pronouncement will be effected,” and that any changes would “affect only a token number of American servicemen who are confined mainly in Zamboanga City,” on Mindanao. Those affected, he said, provided technical assistance and training to their Filipino counterparts.
The general also emphasized that the alliance remained “rock solid” and that activities scheduled for the rest of 2016 were expected to continue. Plans for next year and beyond are also unchanged, he said.
Mr. Duterte’s spokesman, Ernesto Abella, said that there “remained no official directives” as of Tuesday regarding an American withdrawal, and that the president’s statement about the soldiers was not an order but “an injunction, like a warning.”
Mr. Abella emphasized that the government was not preparing to cut economic or military ties with the United States, but that it was seeking to create an independent policy in the south.
He also portrayed Mr. Duterte’s comments as part of an attempt to highlight an aspect of American history on Mindanao that could hinder the government’s efforts to gain the trust of rebels on the islands.
In his appearance on Monday, Mr. Duterte showed photographs and cited accounts of American atrocities against Muslims during its occupation of the country more than a century ago.
“The lack of acknowledgment by the Americans of their shortcomings, and our continued collaboration with them, is the true origin of the ethnic conflict in Mindanao,” Mr. Abella said.
“The Muslims doubt Filipinos want genuine peace with them, while we are viewed as dependent on America,” he added. “The continued presence of the Americans in Mindanao is perceived to underscore this.”
Mr. Abella said that a majority of Muslims in the southern Philippines felt that Americans were the “perpetrators of a wrong that has not been redressed.” By extension, he said, leaders in Manila were also seen as “suspect in their intentions regarding peace in Mindanao.”
The latest controversy comes just a week after remarks by Mr. Duterte cast a shadow over President Obama’s visit to Laos for a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Those remarks, including an angry rebuke to Mr. Obama for warning Mr. Duterte to observe human rights and the rule of law in his campaign against drug-related crime, led to the cancellation of a formal meeting between the two. Mr. Duterte is hugely popular at home as a result of the crackdown, which has claimed many hundreds of lives since he took office this year.
At the peak of a joint campaign against Abu Sayyaf in Mindanao, the United States had 1,200 special forces in the area providing technical and logistical support to the Philippine military. That program was discontinued in 2015, but small numbers of advisers remain.
The Philippine Senate voted to end the lease on two vast American bases in 1991. But Manila later ratified an agreement that provided the legal basis for the resumption of large-scale joint military exercises. American troops subsequently returned to train Philippine forces to fight Abu Sayyaf.
John Kirby, a spokesman for the State Department, said on Monday that Manila had not formally explained what Mr. Duterte meant, but that Washington remained “committed to our alliance.”
“We maintain concerns about the safety of our troops all around the world,” Mr. Kirby said. “It’s one of the prime considerations of American military leadership.”
I find Duterte’s attempt to fix the blame for the “Moro problem” on the United States to be a very thinly veiled attempt to deflect any US criticism of his human rights record in killing thousands of Filipinos as part of his anti-drug campaign. I have already addressed the false moral equivalency of his argument in a previous comment (See http://retiredanalyst.blogspot.com/2016/09/duterte-orders-us-special-forces-out-of.html?showComment=1473726676041#c72943821980853619110
ReplyDeleteNow I will address his faulty historical analysis.
Where did the term “Moros” come from? It came from the Spaniards after they arrived in the Philippines around 1521. They found Muslims inhabiting the islands, and after just having ejected the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, they were not inclined to deal with the local Muslims with a velvet glove. Hence they referred to the local Muslims using the pejorative term Moros and engaged in open warfare with them almost from the very beginning of their arrival in the country.
As the Spanish converted local tribes to Christianity they used these converts in their attempts to subjugate the Muslim tribes in the South. This led to several hundred years of intermittent warfare were Filipino Christian converts were used in the Spanish campaigns to subjugate “Moro” populations resulting in the deaths of thousands.
In response, Muslims in the South engaged in brutal raids where thousands of Christian Filipinos perished and thousands more were enslaved.
Following independence from the US in 1946, the Philippine government engaged in overt attempts to Filipinize the Moros through the education system. In addition, the central government in Manila sent thousands of settlers to Mindanao to cultivate expropriated Moro lands. The influx of settlers turned Mindanao which was predominately Muslim into a predominately Christian region with Moros maintaining predominance in only a handful of provinces that now make up the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).
While the Moro National Liberation Front, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and other Moro groups chide the United States for having included Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago as part of the Philippine state when in granted independence to the Philippines, these groups have historically reserved their ire for the quasi-colonial policies of the Christian government in Manila which they often refer to as “Imperial Manila.”
So if one is looking for the root of the “Moro problem” Duterte doesn’t need to look abroad he just needs to focus on the failed Moro policies of “Imperial Manila.” But he knows that already. Isn’t that the driving force behind his effort to introduce federalism as the form of government for the Philippines?