Crucial U.S.-Manila Talks on Bases Begin This Week

In a meeting room of a modern convention center on the shores of Manila Bay this week, 10 men and women from the U.S. and Philippine governments will begin a series of crucial negotiations that will shape the future of America’s military presence in this strategic Pacific Ocean nation.

At stake for the United States is, first and foremost, U.S. taxpayers’ money, and analysts predict that the negotiations may well lead to a doubling of the price America now pays to maintain its two largest military bases outside the United States--Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base, sprawling installations that together form the front line of the Pentagon’s defense strategy in Asia.

Technically, the two five-member teams will be discussing financial compensation for the final 3 years of the agreement that has permitted the United States to maintain the facilities here for the last 50 years.

But the agreement expires in 1991, and negotiators on both sides agree that the talks, which begin Tuesday, will be a barometer of whether the government of President Corazon Aquino plans to end America’s 90-year military presence in its former colony. If the decision 3 years from now goes against the United States, it could cost U.S. taxpayers as much as $10 billion to move the bases, experts say.

The talks come at a time of unprecedented nationalist rhetoric in the Philippines, with this island nation of 58 million increasingly impoverished people facing its most prolonged economic crisis since independence from America in 1946.

Nationalism and the economic crisis are combining to bring enormous pressure on Aquino, who officially has maintained that she is keeping her options open on the bases issue, either to end the agreement in 3 years or at least demand huge increases in the amount that the U.S. government has been giving the Philippines as compensation for the bases, which has averaged $180 million a year.

The gulf between the American position and that of the Philippine government can be seen in the very words the two sides are using to describe the subject of this week’s negotiations: The Americans call the compensation package “aid”; the Filipinos maintain that it is “rent.”

In an effort to widen that gap, students and leftist groups have scheduled a series of street demonstrations against the bases as well as a 3-day mock negotiation session for some time this week.

Many of Manila’s daily newspapers, which have been bastions of nationalist commentary since Aquino took power and freed them from censorship, have been running long, front-page series largely critical of the bases’ presence.

“After waiting for four decades, the patient Filipino suddenly finds himself in a position to reassert himself, redeem the lost pride of a colonized people and to restore the vigor of a damaged economy,” declared the Philippine Inquirer in the first story of a recent 14-part series on the U.S. bases.

And the country’s senators and congressmen have spent dozens of hours discussing the bases issue critically in speeches and at roundtable discussions for several weeks.

‘Bases Will Have to Go’

“I think it’s obvious that sooner or later, the bases will have to go, but the real question is how and when,” declared Sen. Leticia Ramos Shahani during one such recent forum. “We have to cut the umbilical cord at a certain point or we will always be a neo-colony. . . . But it’s like you’ve been addicted to drugs, and a sudden withdrawal could cause more trauma. If you do it all right away, you might even die.”

Shahani, who was framing what is probably closest to a moderate position on the issue, heads the Philippine Senate committee that would have to approve any action on the future of the bases, which provide tens of thousands of Filipinos with jobs and contribute hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the Philippine economy.

Seated beside Shahani that morning, though, was a fellow senator, Wigberto Tanada, who has been an anti-bases activist for decades.

“The bases have been a continuing temptation for the Americans to intervene in our internal affairs,” Tanada argued. “We may not be as thoroughly prepared as we want to be, but now is as good a time as any to become independent, self-reliant and break that cycle of dependence on the Americans.”

Much Higher Price Urged

Perhaps the most widely held position, though, was stated that day by Sen. Ernesto Maceda, who heads the Senate committee on defense and national security. Maceda, who maintained that ultimately the government will hold a national referendum on the issue, believes that the bases should stay, but that the Philippines must demand a much higher price from the American government.

“If there is no substantial increase in compensation offered, then I certainly would consider it a waste of time even discussing an extension of the treaty,” Maceda said.

Foreign Affairs Secretary Raul Manglapus, who heads the Philippine government’s negotiating team, already has hinted to reporters that the government plans to demand more than $1 billion for the final 3 years of the agreement. For all of the past 5 years, the United States has committed a total of just $900 million, $475 million of it in military aid and the remainder in general economic assistance.

Tempered Criticism

Manglapus, a progressive who had taken a strong anti-bases position before he joined Aquino’s Cabinet, has tempered his criticism of the bases in recent months. But, in all of his recent speeches, Manglapus has made clear the government’s intention to use the base renegotiations as a tool to “slay the American father-figure image.”

“The powerful shadow of America remains cast over our land,” Manglapus declared in what he billed as an important foreign policy speech March 29. “The Americans solved their problem by crawling away from the British shadow, thus speeding their growth. (But) the long, fixed shadow of Subic and Clark stretches over the land and mind of the Filipino.”

Manglapus went on to stress that the U.S. payments to the Philippines are only one-sixth of the total of $1.3 billion that America pays the governments of Greece, Turkey and Spain to maintain military bases there, and he reiterated his belief that Clark and Subic exist only to further America’s security interests, not those of the Philippines.

In a recent interview, Defense Secretary Fidel V. Ramos, who is also a member of the government’s committee that has been reviewing the bases, said: “The U.S. facilities at Clark and Subic really do not directly benefit the defense of the Philippines, because we are now involved in (fighting) an insurgency, and we cannot use the American military forces against the (rebels).”

Seen as Concerted Effort

Such hard-line rhetoric, which most analysts believe is part of a concerted Philippine government campaign to justify the huge compensation demands it is expected to make, has ruffled many Americans here, both government officials and civilian expatriates.

“It really is very discouraging to hear such things,” one longtime American political analyst in Manila said. “But many of us think that is how it is meant--to discourage us and put us on the defensive as we go into the upcoming talks.”

And the U.S. government has been trying to counter the rhetoric with a propaganda campaign of its own. Although few Philippine newspapers have emphasized the American position, the U.S. Embassy has issued a series of pamphlets and news releases stressing the full range of economic benefits that the bases have brought to the country.

The bases’ compensation package has already financed construction of 2,280 elementary schools, 1,112 roads, 11 major regional marketplaces, while dozens of other road and port-improvement projects are already under way, the pamphlets have stressed. The bases’ agreement has also permitted the government to buy hundreds of millions of dollars in critical military equipment to help the armed forces fight the nation’s still-growing Communist insurgency.

Source of Employment

A slick booklet on the bases recently published by the U.S. Embassy also notes that, beyond the official compensation, they employ 68,000 Filipino workers at a time when unemployment is at a record level here. An additional $655 million is spent each year through base contracts to local companies, utilities fees, local house rentals and consumer spending by the 20,000 Americans and their 25,000 dependents living on the bases.

What is more, U.S. officials have been increasingly critical lately of the Philippine government’s inability to spend the massive international aid that it already is receiving. The U.S. Agency for International Development has pointed out that just 10% of the $145 million it has allocated for current projects here has been spent and, in testimony in Washington late last year, State Department officials said that, due to inefficiency and bureaucratic red tape, the government has more than $1 billion in aid from international donors backed up in its pipeline.

Noting the increasingly bitter tone in the current rhetoric, several prominent analysts fear that the talks themselves serve only to further strain U.S. ties with a nation that traditionally has ranked among its closest allies.

“The capacity for both sides to insult and misunderstand each other is enormous, with the potential for both to cut off their noses to spite their faces,” said Richard Kessler, a longtime Asia expert who is now a scholar in residence at Washington’s American University, in a recent analysis of the negotiations written for the Asia Society.

“If the dialogue continues along these lines, focusing on such issues as rent or aid, it will be a dialogue of the deaf.”