PRRD’s pronouncement for US troops to leave Mindanao is not policy yet – Palace

From the Philippine News Agency (Sep 13): PRRD’s pronouncement for US troops to leave Mindanao is not policy yet – Palace

Malacanang clarified on Tuesday that President Rodrigo Duterte’s pronouncement that US troops should leave Mindanao is not yet a policy of the present administration.

”It is not a policy yet. Nobody acted on it yet but these are backgrounders for possible future action,” Presidential Spokesperson Ernesto Abella said in a media briefing in Malacanang.

”There is no specific directive as to how this pronouncement will be effected. The President has already painted a picture and let’s see how it goes,” he added.

Abella said President Duterte is just setting the foreign policy “that is an independent one and not dependent on one superior state or two from which we can depend on.”

”In other words, this action, these references are intended to communicate to one and all that we need to be ready to chart our own course,” he explained.

He also explained that the Philippines is not turning its back on the United States, one of the country’s oldest and closest allies and source of many assistance during calamities.

”We’re not turning our back on anybody. We are just simply charting an independent course,” he clarified.

Abella said when President Duterte made his pronouncement that the American troops should leave Mindanao, “he was simply presenting a context why there was conflict in Mindanao.”

”The Muslims have this long historical and cultural wounds which have been left unaddressed and unatoned for and unrepented for that they held in their collective memory in which they see the Americans as perpetrators of a wrong that has not been addressed and the Philippines having ties with the Americans are therefore also suspect in their intention regarding peace in Mindanao,” Abella explained.

Abella was referring to the photos of the Bud Dajo massacre that President Duterte showed during the last Monday’s oath taking of his 43 appointees. The photos showed the US soldiers with dead Moro rebels and civilians killed in Jolo in 1906 during the Filipino-American war.

”It is a lingering skeleton which in a sense, removes the moral ascendancy of those who criticizes the Philippines regarding the human rights killings. So in a sense, what I’m saying is this skeleton in the closet erodes the moral ascendancy of anybody who has not sufficiently addressed their own faults,” Abella said.

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