Crowning revelation

Until last Tuesday, it seemed to a growing number of people that the Corona impeachment trial had become a huge waste of time and resources.  That is to say, for the Senate which otherwise should have paid attention to myriad matters of national importance;  for the prosecutors and defense lawyers who presumably have other cases to attend to; and not least of all, for the Filipino people, who are paying for the entire exercise and who had hoped to see some measure of justice meted out not just against the accused Chief Justice Corona but, prospectively, on the one person he sought to use his exalted position to protect from prosecution and punishment – former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Bayan Muna and other progressive party lists in the House of Representatives voted in favor of CJ Corona’s impeachment despite the lack of consultation that attended its passage tantamount to what some representatives denounced as railroading.  The main reason was the desire to clear the way to Mrs. Arroyo's prosecution and punishment for all her crimes against the people, foremost of which were the rampant extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances and reign of terrorism enforced by state security forces in rural and urban poor communities.

That CJ Corona is a lackey of Mrs. Arroyo and was installed into the highest position of the Supreme Court by her despite Constitutional prohibition (predictably set aside by the same High Court packed with Arroyo appointees) precisely to be mobilized at an opportune time to save Arroyo’s skin was what roused overwhelming public opinion to support the impeachment complaint. There was widespread outrage that the Arroyo couple’s brazen attempt to flee the country and be beyond the reach of its justice system was made possible by the Corona-led Supreme Court.

The people had been made by the Aquino administration and the Liberal Party to expect that the impeachment trial would fully expose the nefarious link between the midnight appointee Chief Justice and his erstwhile patron, Mrs. Arroyo.  It was something that would not have been possible in any ordinary judicial process, what with the highest magistrate himself sitting on the bench as the ultimate adjudicator.

But alas, such high but perfectly reasonable expectations were far from met.  

From day one, the lack of expertise and competence of the prosecutors was displayed not only in the amateurish fumbling and unfamiliarity with court rules and procedures, but worse, in the lack of preparation and cohesion in mustering and presenting the evidence on the charges against the accused.

The incohesion would further be manifest, though not publicly, in the disagreements within the prosecution on what the direction and focus should be.

Eventually, the Aquino-LP tack prevailed, that the charges mainly be on Corona's non-disclosure of his wealth (presumably ill-gotten) rather than the abuse of his authority in using the SC to allow and cover the flight of the Arroyos from the country to escape prosecution for plunder and other high crimes. This culminated in the prosecution's precipitate withdrawal of five of the eight original charges, focusing almost solely on Article 3 and paying only token attention to Article 7.

While the Defense reinforced by some evidently pro-Corona Senator-Judges made capital of the prosecution's weaknesses in presenting their evidence, it proved to be no better in preparing its own documentary and testimonial evidence and arguments.  Most of the Defense witnesses were ineffective, some counterproductive. And what would be the ominous prelude to the worst blunder of Corona testifying was calling in Ombudsman Carpio-Morales as a hostile witness.  This provided the introduction of testimonial evidence about Corona’s US dollar accounts that up until then could not be done by virtue of the Impeachment Court’s decision to be bound by the Corona SC’s prior TRO covering said dollar accounts.

What is noteworthy is that the Defense, in focusing on the bank accounts and SALN issue, managed or chose to totally ignore Article 7 with regard to Corona’s falsifying or misrepresenting the SC en banc decision so that the Arroyos could fly out of the country, as if by mutual agreement of the two court protagonists.

Thus, the impeachment court and the interest and attention of the public had been successfully diverted from the bigger crimes and anomalies that pervaded the GMA regime.

The bulk of Corona’s testimony capped the whole process, with Corona dwelling emotionally and in great detail on absolutely unimportant, irrelevant and immaterial details of his childhood and upbringing, his in-laws' family feuds, maligning the character even of the long dead, etc.

Penultimately, what was meant to appear as a magnanimous act by CJ Corona turned out to be a cheap trick designed to resonate with the public’s general suspicion regarding their congressmen’s propensity towards corruption.  Corona conditioned the waiver on his hidden bank accounts and other information related to his assets, liabilities and net worth on the execution of the same waiver by the 188 Congressmen who had voted to impeach him and by the unabashedly anti-Corona Senator-Judge Drilon, a condition Corona knew would be impossible to achieve.

Until, when he was almost done, Corona did what his even his most critical detractors had not imagined he was capable of.  Declaring himself “The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines”, Corona with utmost effrontery walked out of the proceedings and thus put himself above the Senate Impeachment Court he said he would subject himself to and above the very Constitution he had sworn to uphold.

With that, Corona unwittingly revealed to the entire nation, whose sympathy and support he had sought by appearing in the impeachment court, what kind of person and public official he really is.  It was absolutely the opposite of what he had tried to paint himself to be. Only the blind and naive could have missed it.

Ironically, it was this inadvertent revelation -- as well as the spontaneous outburst of disapproval it elicited -- that could prove to be the saving grace of the impeachment trial.  For if there was ever any doubt in anybody's mind that CJ Corona would be capable of such malfeances as blatantly distorting the Court’s en banc's decision to favor Mrs. Arroyo,  then all doubt must have disappeared at that moment.

For the impeachment trial to have not gone to waste, it would not be enough to conclude that CJ Corona indeed had deliberately misdeclared his SALN to conceal his financial transactions and his wealth.  Corona had argued as much and indeed it is a persuasive argument that such is not necessarily an impeachable offense.

Yet in the end Corona displayed the same arrogance and abuse of power, pitting himself and the SC he arrogates to be his own, against the Senate and HOR, above the law, in the very same way he did when he mobilized the Court and misused his powers to flout the Justice Department’s Watch List Order against the Arroyos.

Now that is absolutely and irrefutably an impeachable offense for which Corona should be adjudged unfit to remain Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. #

Published in Business World
25-26 May 2012

Mutual respect, mutual benefit

Just when the Philippines and China appear to be trying to ease tension over the disputed Scarborough Shoal, a state-of-the-art US attack submarine suddenly surfaces in the former Subic US Naval Base in Zambales, less than 200 kilometers away from the contentious maritime area.

The unmistakable message from the US is that like it or not, the Chinese and Philippine governments will have to take into serious account US interests in the East Asia region, and these are not necessarily consistent with the mutual interests of China and the Philippines.

The Aquino government had initially denied the unannounced presence of the submarine or feigned ignorance of its arrival.  Then, when forced to admit its presence, the lame explanation and obvious lie was that this was a “regular port call" much like those of other vessels from other countries.  Are they saying that warships from other countries also regularly make port calls at Subic or other Philippine ports?

At the very least, it could reignite the controversy over the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) and Mutual Logistics and Support Agreement (MLSA), and give credence to the view that the Philippines is in fact yielding its sovereignty to the US through the unhampered entry, stationing and exit of US forces and warships anywhere on the archipelago even as it adamantly protests and tries to fend off alleged Chinese incursions into its territorial waters.

The Aquino regime had earlier set off on the wrong foot when it called on Big Brother US for help, invoking the Mutual Defense Treaty, and bringing up the issue in the 2+2 defense & foreign affairs ministerial meeting.  The US, as expected, gave only a vague response citing the two countries’ long-standing alliance and so forth and so on but not giving the categorical commitment to rush to the Philippines’ aid in case of an armed confrontation with China.

The evident resort to the "US card" comes in form of the recently concluded Balikatan war exercises that included a mock retaking of an oil rig supposedly seized by terrorists that was held close to the disputed maritime area; the “2+2” meeting in the US; and now the port call of the USS North Carolina in Subic Bay, an attack submarine considered one of the “stealthiest, most technologically advanced” in the world.  Such types of submarines are capable of carrying and launching Tomahawk missiles with nuclear warheads, a possibility that the Philippine government cannot determine or verify as provided for in the VFA, despite a constitutional ban on nuclear weapons.

It points to the Aquino administration taking the wrong, dangerous, self-contradictory and ultimately counterproductive tack of inviting and even welcoming US intervention to ward off the Chinese.
Since it is clear by now, even to the most avid believers of US protection, that the Philippines has everything to lose from a military confrontation, it stands to reason that a diplomatic settlement based on international law is the most logical, imperative and desirable approach to the impasse.

So far, the public has been made to believe that in this international legal arena, the Philippine position is superior to that of China’s.  The government position that gets repeated in news reports seems simple enough: the disputed shoal is 124 nautical miles from the nearest base point in Zambales while it is a far distance of 550 nm from the nearest Chinese province; ergo going by United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), it is clearly part of the 200 nautical miles Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the Philippines.

Yet scholarly position papers available on the internet have pointed to the frailty or weakness of the legal position of the Philippines regarding sovereignty over Scarborough Shoal notwithstanding greater proximity to our coastline and despite the government’s apparent readiness to bring the issue to international arbitration versus China's rejection of the move.

A paper that came out in an on-line publication of the China-United States Exchange Foundation, a non-government and non-profit organization based in Hong Kong, “The Huangyan Island Standoff: A Review of the Claims and the Prospects for the Future” points out that “‘geographic proximity’ has long been dismissed by international law and practice as the principle of the solution of territory ownership.”  On the other hand, China bases its territorial claims on “(f)irst discovery, consistent administration, historical rights of fishing... all recognized as valid in international law to support territory claims.”

Moreover, the paper debunks the Philippine argument that Scarborough shoal is located within the Philippine (EEZ) and therefore it retains sovereignty over the area.  “It’s a false interpretation of UNCLOS. The basic principle of the law of the sea is ‘the land dominates the sea’, meaning it is the territorial sovereignty of coastal states that generates their sovereign rights and jurisdiction in the EEZ and over the continental shelf. The fact that Huangyan Island is within 200 nm off the Philippine coastline does not naturally give the Philippines sovereignty over it or make it part of its territory.”

The papers also argue that it was only in 1997 that the Philippine government staked a claim on the shoals, whereas these were not included in Philippine maps such the 1898 Spanish-American Treaty of Paris and subsequent official Philippine maps.

At the minimum, objectively speaking, sovereignty over the Scarborough Shoal is in contention by three countries China, Taiwan and the Philippines even though all three will insist, from their own point of view, that their claim is the rightful or superior one.

Given this fact, would it not be the better part of political wisdom, more so statesmanship, for the Aquino administration to seriously study and issue a rational and sober reply to the points raised by China rather than brandish the Philippines military alliance with the US to act as a counterfoil to China’s military strength and to make up for the Philippines’ military inferiority?

It also serves no purpose to keep whipping up pseudo-patriotic and ultra-nationalist sentiments against China and things Chinese. A sorry attempt by Filipino-Americans unabashedly in support of the Aquino administration and the pro-Aquino Akbayan party list to mobilize tens of thousands in coordinated protests at China’s embassies in the US, Philippines and elsewhere only managed to bring out scores of protesters, provoke counter-protests by Chinese nationals, generate apparently economic retaliatory sanctions by China and undermine whatever attempts of the Philippine government to to tone down the rhetoric and defuse the situation.

The bottom line of all these is that national sovereignty and security from external threats should be based on an independent foreign policy - one that takes Pihilippine national interest primarily into account, is not dependent on any foreign power and is grounded on the principles of mutual respect for each other's sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual non-aggression, non-interference in each other's internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit and peaceful co-existence (1955 Bandung Conference). #

Published in Business World
18-19 May 2012

Thorny sovereignty issue

It is quite easy for the Aquino government to arouse the people’s anger at China bullying in the South China Sea considering what appear to be clear encroachments on Philippine territorial waters and its 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Couple this with the sense of frustration that the Aquino administration and the Armed Forces of the Philippines are undeniably militarily powerless in this recent confrontation over Chinese fishing poachers protected by no less than two Chinese warships, the inclination to run towards Uncle Sam and sic US might and firepower to make China turn tail appeals to many pundits, whether professional or of the barbershop variety.

And thoroughly misses the point. There is more to the conflict in the Spratlys and Scarborough Shoal than an assertion of sovereignty arising from rival territorial claims.

This is not the first time tension rose over alleged incursions in the Kalayaan Islands which are also being claimed by the Vietnamese and Malaysians aside from the Chinese. But while the news would hog the headlines for a few days, not without a large dose of sensationalism about the risk of a military confrontation, there had never been such open clashes between Philippine and rival armed forces, with each side eventually stepping down, resorting instead to diplomatic protests until invariably the controversy simmers down and fades away.

Why is tension now escalating more markedly in the South China Sea and how shall the Philippines - a small and impoverished country, without any industrial base to speak of, with a corrupt and inept military geared more towards fighting home-grown armed revolutionary movements than for external defense and a neo-colonial ruling elite nurtured in the tradition of being the US vassal in the Southeast Asian region – assert its sovereignty and territorial integrity given its current “disadvantages”.

It must be acknowledged that China has indeed become an economic powerhouse over the decades as the ruling Chinese Communist Party has shed almost all pretense of being a socialist country and has harnessed China’s vast cheap labor power to become the foremost global sweatshop of advanced capitalist countries.

State monopoly capitalism under the iron-clad control of the CCP has been flourishing and in fact implements without apologies all the neoliberal, pro-globalization policies agreed to by imperialist powers and international agencies such as the IMF-World Bank-World Trade Organization. As a resurgent capitalist country relatively in less of an economic crisis compared to the US and EU, it is bound to accompany its economic boom with imperialist tendencies and ambitions. It is unsurprising that this is manifesting itself in East Asia where China is the giant no matter how one looks at things.

So is China more aggressive in its attempts to assert its territorial claims? Most undeniably so. Moreover China is engaged in projecting and flexing its steadily growing military power in what it considers its own backyard, proclaiming to all and sundry that it is prepared to stand its ground.

Yet no one should have any illusions what country is China’s current real rival in the region. Certainly not the Philippines or any of the other littoral countries making their various claims to different parts of the Spratlys.

In fact, by the end of the 20th century, US strategists and policy-makers had unanimously pointed to China as the most likely peer competitor of the US by the year 2020. Looking at China's economic performance throughout the current global crisis and its aggressiveness not only in world trade but also in international diplomacy, one can understand the growing concern in Washington and the Pentagon.

While neoconservatives are out of the White House, US President Obama is not rescinding his predecessor’s imperious declaration that never again will the US allow any competitor to even come close to becoming its peer politically, economically and militarily.

The first decade of that declared policy saw the US military machine trained on the Al Qaeda and the Taliban and such "rogue states" as Iraq and Afghanistan. Having declared significant successes in gaining control over the Middle East, the US has recently announced a shift of focus to the Asia Pacific, not mincing words on the need to contain China and prevent it from challenging US hegemony in the region.

In the US document “Sustaining US Global Leadership, Priorities for 21st Century Defense” released by the Pentagon in January 3, 2012, the US government stated that “Over the long term, China’s emergence as a regional power will have the potential to affect the U.S. economy and our security in a variety of ways… In order to credibly deter potential adversaries and to prevent them from achieving their objectives, the United States must maintain its ability to project power in areas in which our access and freedom to operate are challenged…States such as China and Iran will continue to pursue asymmetric means to counter our power projection capabilities.”

In this larger policy context, it is quite understandable that the national democratic alliance Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN) has charged the Aquino and US governments of conniving to utilize the ongoing Balikatan war games for the US’ power-projection scheme directed against China and for the more overarching goal of asserting its hegemonic designs in the Asia Pacific.

Worse, the Aquino government is clearly going whole hog in allowing the US to turn the entire Philippines into an operational base not only for war games but for future wars with its declared and undeclared enemies. In other words, we are wittingly and unwittingly being used as a pawn and surrogate battlefield for US-instigated conflicts.

In exchange for what? The Aquino regime is still working on false Cold War premises and expectations, as though the Mutual Defense Treaty were ever a guarantee that the US would rush to the defense or aid of the Philippines in any military conflict.

And while the US-China rivalry is real and military conflict is not improbable, the US maintains a dual policy of containment of and engagement with China, and China is going along with it, biding time as it beefs up its political, economic and military power.

In this context, the Philippines could only stand to lose by unconditionally tying its fate to the geopolitical interests and schemes of the US.

That, more than asserting our territorial claim to Kalayaan Islands and Panatag Shoal, is the bigger and more thorny sovereignty issue.#

Published in Business World

20-21 April 2012