Between an egg and a stone: An ocean of difference
Credit to Author: Mauro Gia Samonte| Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2020 16:52:16 +0000
I remember the days of activism in the ‘70s when, in illustrating the principle of dialectical materialism, activist educators (as I was once) would make a comparison between an egg and a stone.
“You heat up an egg, it will hatch into a chick. Why? Because the egg has the quality to turn into a chick,” so invariably went my illustration of the principle.
“But you heat up a stone, will it turn into a chick?” I would ask.
“No,” came the answer in chorus from my listeners.
“Why?” I would ask.
No answer came in chorus.
I would be gratified if a solitary voice sounded clearly, “Because a stone has no natural quality to be a chick.”
So, here we are faced with President Rodrigo Duterte’s outburst in defending Sen. Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa in his visa cancellation case with the United States. How do we situate that reaction?
Popular accounts have it that President Duterte has threatened to do a tit-for-tat by abrogating the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) between the US and the Philippines.
Senator dela Rosa had gone as far as confirming the cancellation with the US Embassy in the Philippines, so it would seem that after getting such confirmation, the Bato went running to the President and cried for help. And it does look trivial that the Chief Executive would exact vengeance of such magnitude for apparently so little a matter.
Truly serious issues like the rape by US Marine Lance Cpl. Daniel Smith of a 23-year-old Filipina in November 2005 would be a more likely and plausible cause for the President to abrogate a military alliance treaty with the US. But to do that just to assuage the feelings of a senator hurting from the cancellation of his travel paper, cannot the President be acting too petty for comfort?
The President is depicted in one report as angrily warning to abrogate the VFA if the cancellation of the Bato US visa is “not corrected.”
Is President Duterte, according to the opening analogy of this piece, trying to elevate Senator Bato to a pedestal of national icons that no foreign country could offend without offending national pride? But, according to one observer, the Bato has not even risen to the first step of that high pedestal. In one Senate hearing on students’ concern, Senator Bato looked a pitiable amateur, groping for arguments against a student leader chastising him for espousing the early release of former Calauan, Laguna mayor Antonio Sanchez, who is serving seven life sentences, including for the Eileen Sarmenta rape-murder.
The President’s threat to abrogate the VFA must go deeper in nuance and in impact than a futile exercise at turning a stone into a chick.
What the President could be concerned about is the fact that the cancellation of the Bato US visa is part of an American dynamic in the implementation of the Asia Reassurance Initiative Act (ARIA), signed by US President Donald Trump in December 2018. According to this Act, it is to the national interest of the US that the Indo-Pacific region must be kept open and free. But such “openness and freeness” for the US have suffered immensely with the Duterte pivot to China as soon as the beginning of his term in 2016.
President Duterte’s faith in China’s win-win formula for resolving the South China (West Philippine) Sea dispute has largely told on the US Indo-Pacific agenda, which now must contend with strong China presence in the Spratlys and around Scarborough (Panatag) Shoal. Moreover, China has succeeded in getting the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) out of the American scheme of a multilateral approach to the dispute by which America may be called to intervene. In lieu of this American agenda, Asean is now working out a code of conduct mainly along lines of bilateral solutions among the disputants, thereby effectively excluding the US from any consideration. I could imagine former president Barak Obama squirming in his rocking chair, he who at one East Asia Summit growled at the face of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao words to this effect, “We may not be a party in the South China Sea dispute, but we are a resident Pacific country, a Pacific power and a guarantor of peace in the Asia Pacific region.”
Observers of the South China tension would be better informed to learn that although ARIA authorizes the US to impose sanctions worldwide upon agencies and persons for human rights abuses — such as those being heaped upon Bato during his term as chief of the Philippine National Police — it likewise provides for a framework of Freedom of Navigation exercises in the South China Sea, which the US has continually been engaged with Asia Pacific allies Australia, Japan and New Zealand, with Taiwan joining in lately.
So by reacting angrily to the US cancellation of Senator dela Rosa’s visa, President Duterte perforce is well aware that he is standing up fiercely against an ogre much grander than a visa consul — the monstrous US machination for bringing conflict into the otherwise peaceful region of Asean. His pivot to China signified the President’s desire to achieve peace with Philippine neighbors — by which peace alone, particularly with China, prosperity for the country may be had.
That good life is now being handed by China to the Philippines, practically on a silver platter. Those two bridges now rising across the Pasig River are Chinese gifts of love for solving Metro Manila’s traffic woes. The Kaliwa Dam project has finally gone underway, in due time to provide Metro Manilans with much-needed water supply. Imports of Philippine agricultural products have gone full throttle, accounting for much over a billion-dollar earnings unequalled at no time in the country’s history before, and Chinese tourists, no longer restrained by similar embargo during the Aquino 3rd administration, now account for number one tourists arrivals in the Philippines. All this, just tasting, so to speak, the icing in the cake of the rich Chinese-Filipino relationship.
How would a President who has done all the above react to a taking away of all of these from his people?!
Rage, certainly.
Not for the personal hurt of Senator dela Rosa but against the continuing US maneuver to stay a power in the South China Sea — which must constitute the national hurt of the Filipino people.
But credit Senator Bato in this wise. For all his rolling around, he has gathered significant moss after all, that is, to serve as convenient fodder for the President’s firing one real salvo against the US.