2 Bases a Key Electoral Issue : In Philippines, U.S. Link Remains a Near-Fixation

MANILA —  In 1898, Commodore George Dewey, commander of the U.S. Asiatic Squadron, sailed his ships into Manila Bay, destroyed the Spanish fleet and began a half-century of American rule in the Philippines.

Last week, Vice Adm. Paul F. McCarthy, commander of the U.S. 7th Fleet, entered Manila Bay aboard his flagship Blue Ridge, the guest of an independent Philippines.

The U.S. role has changed here--the Philippines has been completely independent since 1946--but the American connection remains a near-fixation among Filipinos, heightened now during the presidential campaign.

The presence of major U.S. military bases in the Philippines is an electoral issue, as is the foreign debt owed to American banks.

But most illustrative of the American connection is a widespread belief that Washington will somehow pull strings on the election itself, if it has not already done so.

“What’s the United States going to do?” resident Americans and visitors are asked.

Ambassador Stephen W. Bosworth gave this answer last week: “We don’t provide assistance to either of the political parties, and that makes us nonpartisan. . . . We are confident we can work with any government that wins a credible election.”

The Philippines were an American colony from 1899 to 1946, and “the historical relationship puts us unwillingly in the center of debate,” Bosworth conceded.

The electoral machine of President Ferdinand E. Marcos has accused the American CIA of funding a civilian poll-watching group that the Marcos camp says favors the opposition. Bosworth and the poll watchers flatly deny it.

Blas Ople, the Philippine labor minister, citing resolutions critical of Marcos in the U.S. Congress, said last week, “American intervention is a fact in the current political life of the nation.”

Supporters of Corazon Aquino, the president’s opponent in the Feb. 7 election, have accused Washington of propping up the authoritarian Marcos regime in its 20 years in power. “American guns are killing Filipinos,” they say.

The United States may appear to be an electoral whipping boy, but it is an inevitable target. Its clout in the Philippines is considerable.

America is the Philippines’ No. 1 trade partner, the foremost foreign investor, a fount of popular Philippine culture and home to nearly a million Filipino immigrants.

In nearly all these areas, American influence often grates on Philippine nationalism.

It’s a puzzling relationship. Marcos, for instance, stung in the past by opposition charges that his administration is dependent on U.S. aid, has said he will not be “an American lap dog.”

Clark Air Base and the U.S. naval base at Subic Bay, both nominally under Philippine command, are perennial political hot potatoes here.

The president favors retaining them, citing security needs.

“I am for the maintenance of a balance of power in Asia; otherwise there will be war. . . ,” Marcos said recently. “And that balance of power can be maintained only if those military bases are kept by the United States.”

In a televised interview last week, Marcos said, “I cannot imagine any serious leader wanting to take out the Americans from those bases.” Asked what would happen were Aquino elected, he declared, “Those bases will be terminated.”

Aquino says she will respect the current base agreement, which expires in 1991. After that? “A lot can happen between now and 1991,” the opposition candidate points out. “I want to keep my options open.”

Aquino Would Negotiate

Interviewed Sunday on the CBS News program “Face the Nation,” Aquino added that continued American use of the bases after 1991 would be negotiated, as past base agreements have been, but that the outcome of the talks would be subject to referendum. “After the negotiations, then we will present the matter to the Filipino people for their approval.”

Invited to criticize Reagan Administration policy toward the Marcos government, Aquino cautiously demurred. “Definitely the American posture has greatly improved, and I appreciate the fact that the United States is more greatly concerned now about the human rights problem in the Philippines,” she said. “And I think that is good enough.”

Aquino’s ambivalent position on the future of the bases was in part responsible for the decision of Bayan, an influential organization on the militant left, to boycott the election instead of supporting her.

With Bayan and the Communist Party boycotting the vote, the bases issue has diminished in importance, since the far left and determined nationalists have long been the greatest foes of the American military presence here.

American Influence Strong

American influence and the colonial legacy reach far beyond military matters, touching nearly all aspects of Philippine life.

Many in the upper classes pursue a non-Asian materialism, and the Filipino yuppies are faddish to a fault: Bombardier sunglasses and tank-tops are hot.

“Have you seen ‘Rocky IV?’ ” a cabdriver asked an American visitor. “It’s great. The Russian is trained on computers, but old Rocky just chops wood, and then he pounds the guy.”

Renato Constantino, a Philippine nationalist and essayist, wrote satirically: “The typical middle-class family . . . raises children so that they may have the pleasure of giving them American nicknames and hearing themselves called mommy and daddy in contrast to less fortunate nanays and tatays. Their boys must go to colleges well known for their basketball teams.”

Constantino’s works represent a revision of many American accounts of the colonial period here. He details and documents the savagery of American troops in quelling Filipino nationalists in the years after Dewey’s arrival in Manila Bay. He notes the order of Brig. Gen. Jacob H. Smith to turn the rebellious island of Samar into a “howling wilderness.”

Those were the years when American colonials began speaking of Filipinos as their “little brown brothers.”

American Image Softened

Constantino contends that reality was harsher: “American control of the educational system made possible the distortion or suppression of information regarding Philippine resistance to American rule and the atrocities committed by the American army to crush that resistance. . . . Memories of this period gradually faded as new generations emerged brainwashed from the schools. Through the alchemy of mis-education, the Americans were transformed from conquerors to solicitous friends.”

That image, bolstered by American-Filipino cooperation against the Japanese during World War II, created a near-mythological bond that stood in contrast to American economic exploitation here.

The bond was especially strong in the military. Even today, Filipinos serve aboard U.S. Navy ships. Tens of thousands of Filipinos, many of them skilled workers, support the 16,000 U.S. sailors and airmen at Subic and Clark. The U.S. military payroll for its own men and the Filipino workers is an important economic factor in the base areas north of Manila.

If a Philippine government denied the bases to the Americans, replacement would be financially and militarily costly.

The Pentagon has looked ahead to the possibility and has leased land on the Marianas island of Tinian and another island in the Palau group. But moving the Philippine bases to either of these places would add time to an American military response in the South China Sea, four to five days’ steaming by ship and a like number of hours for planes.

Most of the leased land on Tinian was part of a World War II U.S. Army Air Corps base that was home to the planes that dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. The land is overgrown with brush, and no usable facilities remain.

The Palau site presents an additional problem. Though still not independent from the United States, Palau has adopted a constitution that bans any nuclear weapons or nuclear-powered ships.

Subic Bay is a repair and supply base for ships of the 7th Fleet. American fighters, bombers and reconnaissance aircraft operate out of Clark Air Base. The primary responsibility is to keep open the sea lanes of the Western Pacific, but 7th Fleet ships operate as far away as Africa and the Arabian Sea. Growing Soviet sea and air power in the Pacific, including the operations at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam, have increased the demands on the fleet.

Ambassador Bosworth and other American spokesmen say Washington wants to keep the Philippine bases and is confident it can negotiate a new agreement five years from now when the current pact expires.

“I am convinced there is no good alternative, and we are here to stay,” Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), an Armed Services Committee member who visited the bases recently, told reporters in Manila.

Gramm said security around the bases has been tightened as the Communist-led insurgency has grown in the Philippines.

“But they are not invulnerable to terrorist activity,” he said.

Better communications equipment and weapons must be provided to the Philippine troops who guard the perimeters, Gramm insisted.

He added, however, that “intelligence indicates that the bases are not clearly a target.”

Perhaps not for the insurgents, but Subic and Clark will remain in the gunsights of nationalist rhetoric.