Philippines is a military pawn, not an ally of imperialist US– CPP

MANILA — The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) blasted Thursday the military alliance between the United States government and the Philippine state. Describing it as “nothing but a big myth,” the CPP said “in reality, for the past 60 years of semicolonial rule, the US imperialism has only used the Philippines as a pawn in its military interventionism, wars of aggression and power projection in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.”

The CPP issued this statement a day after the visit of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the Philippines to mark the 60th anniversary of the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT). In a ceremony aboard the USS Fitzgerald, Clinton and Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Alberto del Rosario signed “The Manila Declaration” where the governments of the US and the Philippines reaffirmed the MDT and their supposed commitment to “address regional and global challenges, including maritime security and threats to security such as climate change, nuclear proliferation, terrorism and transnational crime.”

The Manila Declaration is full of rhetoric on ‘equality’ and cooperation,’ said the CPP, but they noted that it is still only a reaffirmation of “the long-standing unequal military, political and economic relations between the Philippines and the US, between a semicolony and an imperialist power.”




The CPP called attention to the fact that the Manila Declaration was signed aboard an American naval shipped docked in Philippine waters, “in outright contempt of Philippine sovereignty.” That is symbolic, they said, of “the MDT as a document of prevailing neocolonial relations between the puppet Philippine government and its imperialist master.”

Misnamed treaty

Based on the CPP statement, even the name of the treaty the US and Philippine governments celebrated recently with Clinton’s “special visit” is false. “There is nothing mutual in the Mutual Defense Treaty,” they said, adding that “The MDT has never been anything to the Filipino people but a tool for the US to bind the Philippines to the geo-political strategic interests of the US.”

“On several occasion in the past, the MDT has been used by the US to compel the Philippine government to fight the US wars of aggression, overriding the diplomatic and political interests of the Philippines,” the CPP recalled. They cited how, under the MDT, Filipino troops had been sent to fight in “the US war of intervention against Korea in the 1950s and against Vietnam during the late 1960s.” They added that the Philippines has also been “used by the US as a base and launching pad for its wars of intervention against Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan.”



The misnamed treaty did not help but rather constricted and bound the Philippines in many self-destructive ways said the CPP in the statement. “As long as the Philippines is bound to the MDT, it can never claim to be neutral and independent,” they said. “With the MDT, the Philippines is bound to the foreign policy decisions of the US imperialists. It makes the Philippine government an enemy of the enemies of the US. It can only be friends with governments friendly to its US master.”

Master and puppet relationship, not ‘friends’ with benefits

“Between an imperialist power and a puppet state, there can never be anything mutual unless the master says so,” said the CPP.

The CPP reiterated the long-standing public clamor for the immediate abrogation of the Mutual Defense Treaty. Noting the US’ intensified efforts “to worm its way into the Asia-Pacific region,” they said, it is imperative and urgent for the Filipino people to push more vigorously for the repeal of the MDT. They warned that the US imperialist government has been using the specter of Chinese expansionism to provoke a dispute over the Spratly islands and use this as a pretext for increasing its naval presence in the South China Sea.




The CPP said that the US is doing all these because it wants “to project its military power and ensure its dominance in the Asian sea lanes, with the intent on forcing open and further penetrating the vast consumer market of China and the rest of the Asian countries.”




Text by Bulatlat.com / Marya Salamat. Photos by Marya Salamat and Janess Ann J. Ellao