The Occupied Republic

From: D. de la Paz

The Occupied Republic

For a people without memories and a nation without national pride, the question of independence might be irrelevant. That would be the case until we find ourselves off-balance, alone in a lurch and standing without crutches.

Twenty years is enough time for a political domino to fall and enough to prove the doomsayers correct. In that time we have not had a foreigner owning vast and valuable tracts of real estate and protecting their global interests first and foremost with ours as an afterthought. We have not had a mutual legislature-approved treaty promising the automatic defense of our weak democracy from those directly opposite our shores where roost some of the most aggressive regimes.

A swarm of whining mosquitoes could have overpowered our air force and a fleet of croaking frogs could have sunk our navy. So they said we needed someone else to keep our independence and sovereignty intact. The verbal irony alone should have betrayed the logic of that assumption had not the distinctly Celtic-sounding names of those foisting such grandiloquent declarations been as ironic.

In Celtic Briton in general and in Welsh in particular, combining “gor” - the Cymry word for “spacious” and “din”, the word for “fortress” - the resultant proper noun aptly describes a garrison.

Then and now, a few anachronistic politicians remain steeped in and stupefied by imperial, modern-day colonialism. Some remain comfortable in dependent mendicancy. In that cradle, they subscribe to the indispensability of foreign aid. Others simply remain stupid.

They warned that without foreign bases, foreign investors would leave and virtually orphan us. After all, was not an unfriendly regime just a sea away and was not secession being waged and funded from across unguarded straits in Mindanao.

Two weeks ago, under the sponsorship of the Jose W. Diokno Foundation, the Lorenzo Tanada Foundation and the Constantino Foundation, the country commemorated the anniversary of the abrogation of the country’s last remnant of foreign rule. Twenty years ago twelve senators stood against the indefinite extension of foreign military presence initially agreed to in 1947 by then president Manuel Roxas.

Under the 1947 bases agreement, Roxas allowed foreigners intrusive liberties that denigrated Philippine sovereignty and national self-esteem contributing to a mendicant Filipino culture.

Is it any wonder that we should have a beggar’s psyche? The agreement provided for about twenty-three foreign bases and utilities used exclusively for 99 years. It prohibited the Philippines from hosting any other base. It also allowed foreign nationals in those bases the right to tax, the right to issue licenses, and to establish and control public utilities without congressional approval or franchising. In return, we received corned beef and alphabet soup. We had access to PX goods, bore fatherless G.I. babies and learned to spell out VD, AIDS and HIV.

Arrayed against self-determination and what Renato Constantino Jr. identifies as a “nation’s dignity and interest”, those who would have us continue as an occupied republic evoked frightening apocalyptic images of an economic doomsday.

Fortunately, the domino did not fall.

On the eve of the abrogation, diligent, determined and driven, Corazon Aquino, armed with a sense of duty, aware of her responsibilities as an icon, and supported by some of the best minds of the republic, set the stage for the economic take-off her successor capitalized on. Aquino’s formula for fierce independence was an uncanny chemistry of fortitude and liberalization.

By honoring all debts her government effectively reduced risk and eventually, the cost of capital, thus providing expansion wherewithal. With the liberalization of the banking sector even as she strengthened it through capitalization requisites, much-needed debt capital soon flowed into the economy.

Those that doomsayers said would stay away did not. Cory’s liberalization of the energy and telecommunications industries and the deregulation of the oil sector brought in direct investments from Singapore, Thailand, South Korea, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and China.

Unfortunately, freedom is such that it must be defended constantly. Globalization’s challenges are more complex, the threats of subservience, often insidious. In the last administration, our highest officials and foreign governments attempted to apportion the Philippines and barter away almost a third under the pretext of ancestral domain. For a pittance, the same administration bargained off virtual control of our power backbone where compensation trickles in while prospective expansion capital remains burdened on Filipinos.

However onerous that might seem, its impact on national security is no less as perfidious as Benigno Aquino III’s recent invitation to establish our government’s broadband system to a foreign government with whom we have hostile territorial disputes. Far from diligent and driven, absent a sense of duty and unaware of his responsibilities, it is our misfortune that he fails to recognize betrayal as well as latent threats that sell-out national security, sovereignty and pride.

Indeed, some are without memory.