SCARY END

THE CORONA CHRONOLOGY

By Mauro Gia Samonte

WHEN US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin E. Dempsey arrived June 4,2012 for a one-day visit to the Philippines, hardly did the public suspect anything unusual or alarming. It looked like one of those occasions when a top foreign dignitary happens to have a stopover in the country and makes a courtesy call on the President. And even as, after meeting up with President Aquino, the US official proceeded to Camp Aguinaldo for another round of talks with his Philippine counterpart, AFP Chief of Staff Jessie Dellosa, still this appeared normal.

Read More

            What appeared curious, however, was that the Dempsey visit came just five days after the conviction of Chief Justice Renato C. Corona in his celebrated impeachment trial. No apparent connection was manifest between the two events, but to one who had been wringing his head in order to make sense out of the Corona impeachment, the timing seemed to say it all: it was scary.

            Before the visit, the impeachment trial appeared in a frenzy to get the whole process over with. Impeachment Court presiding judge Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile at one time declared as a matter of mandate that the Corona impeachment must be resolved on or before May 31.

            What was so important about May 31?

No answer to the query came because the question was never asked at all. And after the final oral arguments on May 28, the Presiding Senator-Judge ruled the case submitted for resolution, and the next day 20 senator-judges found Corona guilty as charged (for easy reference, call them Senate Guilty 20), with 3 declaring him innocent. Thus on May 29, the Corona impeachment ended a good two days to the deadline.

By timeline reckoning, therefore, the Dempsey visit manifested itself as a kind of consequence of the Corona impeachment, or at least it happened in the aftermath. And it could not have happened before, because at that time the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore had not yet taken place and it was from that event that Dempsey had to come to visit the Philippines.

            The Shangri-La Dialogue was a gathering of top military officials of countries in the Asia Pacific region. In that meeting, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta explained the so-called US rebalancing in the Asia Pacific region and got assurances of enhanced security alliances with the countries participating, among them, of course, the Philippines, represented by Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin and AFP Chief of Staff Jessie Dellosa. It was agreements reached in that meeting which Dempsey must convey to President Aquino.

            Now, Senator Enrile did not give any reason for wanting to finish the impeachment trial by May 31, but the Shangri-La Dialogue took place June 1, 2 and 3, and given this timeline the deadline set for the impeachment end gets a good amount of logic.

            The Corona impeachment must be gotten over with, for whatever purpose it must have been meant to serve, in time for the cementing of military alliances in the Singapore event, which cementing Dempsey briefed President Aquino on for reaffirming with the United Kingdom and, more particularly, with the United States during his visits to those countries scheduled to begin the very next day.

Meantime, the Scarborough Shoal standoff suddenly shocked the nation beginning April 8. Instigated by American industrialist billionaire Loida Nicolas-Lewis, originally a Filipina from Bicol, what looked like rent-a-crowd citizen groups protested Chinese incursions into Philippine waters. It appeared a war mania against China was spreading across the country and among Filipino communities in  key spots in the world. China rightly saw the US maneuvers as moves aimed at containing it right in its own waters and castigated the “current Philippine leadership” for playing into this American scheme.

To this day, the war scare continues.

In February, we had begun sensing that the country was heading toward this situation, but for utter want of factual details by which to make any definite conclusions, we could only confine ourselves to citing the pertinent chronology of events (The Corona Chronology, opening post of this Blog).

Here’s how the article delineated the chronology.

November 15, the day the Supreme Court issued the TRO on the BI watch list order.

That same day, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived for a two-day visit to the Philippines.

That same day, President Barack Obama arrived in Australia for talks with the Australian government for the basing of some 2,500 American soldiers in the continent.

Both Clinton and Obama came directly from the just-concluded APEC meeting in Hawaii, to join each other again, after their respective visits, at the East Asia Summit opening in Bali, Indonesia November 16.

November 15, P-Noy postpones his trip to Indonesia, apparently to manage hands-on the GMA travel imbroglio. Actually he had to be on hand for talks with State Secretary Clinton on matters which though never made public were nonetheless hinted at by developments the next day.

November 16, Clinton leads the commemoration of the 60^th anniversary of the RP-US Mutual Defense Agreement which despite the dismantling of American bases in the Philippines remained intact; the lifetime of the pact is indefinite and may be terminated only one year after notice from either side.

     

The event took place on the deck of the American warship USS Fitzgerald, docked at the Manila Bay.

Observers said her appearance on the deck of the warship was highly symbolic of the maritime conflict the US have with China over the latter’s perceived naval expansionist thrust in the South China Sea. On the occasion, Clinton signed a joint declaration with Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario renewing American commitment to the defense pact and serving notice of Washington’s continuing position that territorial disputes in the South China Sea should be settled peacefully. Significant in her declaration was her reference to the disputed area by its Philippine name: the West Philippine Sea.

“We are strongly of the opinion that disputes that exist primarily in the West Philippine Sea between the Philippines and China should be resolved peacefully,” Clinton said in  a televised news conference with Secretary Del Rosario. “Any nation with a claim has a right to exert it, but they do not have a right to pursue it through intimidation or coercion.”

The perception by the article as early as then was that the Corona impeachment was being undertaken to serve a need – whatever that was – in the obvious urgency of the US to establish dominance in the Asia Pacific region. It painted the scenario that either way the impeachment trial went, it would lead to chaos which the President could seize upon to justify his one-man rule. The Senate, as impeachment court, convicted Chief Justice Corona, but no such chaos ensued.

Have we, then, misread the events?

For a moment, we were ready to accept we had.

And in the interim – from the promulgation of the guilty verdict by the Senate Guilty 20 up to the Dempsey visit June 4 – we found ourselves giving up on any further possibility that Chief Justice Corona might still avail of various other legal remedies that remained open for him, like the infirmities of the articles of impeachment and the Supreme Court TRO versus opening of dollar accounts, issues that in the opinion of legal experts cannot just be ignored by the High Court; resolving these issues could cause a reversal of the impeachment court verdict.

But then came Dempsey that June 4 – like the final step on the gas pedal to cause the Corona Chronology engine to go full throttle.

Beginning June 5, President Aquino embarked on state visits to the UK and the US in which with the leaders of the two countries he adopted, along with a number of peripheral concerns, the main security agreements reached in the Shangri-La Dialogue.

            He got UK Prime Minister David Cameron supporting the Philippine position on the West Philippine Sea issue.

            At the inauguration of the US-Philippine Society in the immediately-ensuing Washington visit, he spoke words which though couched in metaphor was clear in message.

“It is not my intention to embroil the United States in military intervention in our region… As the US government undertakes what it calls re-balancing in Asia, the challenge for the US is to make this re-balancing meaningful,” President Aquino declared.

The statement is a veritable reprise of what President Barack Obama declared in the East Asia Summit in Indonesia November 2011: “…while we are not a claimant in the South China Sea dispute, and while we do not take sides, we have a powerful stake in maritime security in general, and in the resolution of the South China Sea issue specifically — as a resident Pacific power, as a maritime nation, as a trading nation and as a guarantor of security in the Asia Pacific region.”

A day ahead of his meeting with the US President, President Aquino echoed the Obama sentiments in this manner: “We recognize that your interests lie in freedom of navigation and unimpeded commerce as well as a common adherence to fundamental concepts of international law.”

It was a foregone conclusion that when the two leaders met in Washington the following day, they would be singing perfectly in unison on security over Asia Pacific. And to pave the way for this duet, a day before President Aquino’s visit,  the US Senate passed a resolution calling for increased defense and security cooperation in the Philippines.

President Aquino came home from the visit with a commitment from the US for, among other things, the establishment of a Coast Watch System involving the construction of a Coast Watch Center covering the entire archipelago. Part of this system was an initial donation of a coast guard ship to beef up the already existing coast guard vessels of the Philippine Navy.

So now, where has the Corona impeachment gone in this final scheme of things?

We seem hard put to make any connections, except that we notice in both the meetings President Aquino had with Cameron and Obama a clear stand on the Mindanao peace process: that it must succeed immediately.

Now, the Mindanao peace process was the starting point of our original article, The Corona Chronology. On the whole, we endeavored to show that solving the MILF insurgency in Mindanao is an imperative of the US need to establish military bases in the island, and such imperative would be best served if Mindanao were chopped off from the Philippine republic.

            In other words, it would be to the best interest of the US that Mindanao became an independent entity, the BANGSAMORO JURIDICAL ENTITY, which would be easier to deal with in regard to establishing military installations, rather than with the Philppine republic which would require the US to hurdle the Senate and then the Supreme Court for the purpose, assuming that it got the approval of the President.

 In 2008, this would have been accomplished through the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD), reached by the government peace negotiators and the MILF that year. The MOA-AD provided for the establishment of a Bangsamoro Juridical Entity (BJE), a sub-state for Mindanao having its own independent executive, legislative and judicial branches of government and its own armed forces, with the Philippine government limited to 25% share of the natural resources of Mindanao.

On August 5, 2008, the MOA-AD was scheduled for signing. But local government units, particularly Cotabato and Palawan, which would be affected by the agreement petitioned the Supreme Court to stop the signing, and even before the high court could rule on the petition, then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo ordered the government negotiating panel in the peace process not to sign the MOA-AD.

Observing the parallel flow of the Corona impeachment and the resumption of the Mindanao peace talks which opened in Malaysia January 17 – a day after the start of the Corona impeachment trial – we endeavored to check what position Chief Justice Renato C. Corona took in the MOA-AD petition.

And this is what we originally wrote about our findings:

Nevertheless, the Supreme Court ruled on the issue, calling the MOA-AD unconstitutional. Among the justices who participated in the ruling was then Associate Justice Renato C. Corona, who adopted the position taken by Associate Justice Dante Tinga thus: “It takes no inquiry at great depth to be enlightened that the MOA-AD is incongruous with the Philippine Constitution.”

This was the precise position of the sitting Chief Justice of the Supreme Court at a time when another attempt had to be made in ramming down the throat of the Philippine nation  through the MOA-AD the Bangsamoro Juridical Entity.

From a report by Roy Lagarde in CBCP News, June 15, 2012, we get this latest bulletin on the MILF position in the current round of talks in the Mindanao Peace Process: “Iqbal (MILF chief negotiator) said the recent talks ended without any accord yet and reiterated it would not sign any peace deal with the government unless President Benigno Aquino III grants its demand for a Muslim sub-state.”

Assuming, again, President Aquino approves the MOA-AD and the BJE now, would it pass the Senate? The Senate Guilty 20 would confirm it would. But then, would the Supreme Court agree? The position of Chief Justice Renato C. Corona back in 2008 was clear and unequivocal and should be more overriding at a time that he sat as Highest Magistrate of the land: he would not allow the diminution of Philippine sovereignty.

Thus, finally, we see all pieces falling into place on why Chief Justice Renato C. Corona had to be impeached.

And it scares. It strikes at the very foundations of Philippine democracy, or what little we still got of it. It shows that any foreign nation need not really embark on a physical armed aggression to conquer the Philippines. Just take the President, the Senate and the Supreme Court and without the people knowing it, you got the whole country under your control.

The one single remaining question now on the Corona Chronology is who replaces impeached Chief Justice Renato C. Corona?

In this, scariest are the ideas being promoted. The next Chief Justice need not be part of the government and need not be old. And of the 26 so far nominated for the position, the most youngish-looking is a government outsider, Atty. Marvic Leonen – the Chief government negotiator in the Mindanao Peace Process.

Make that out.

Read More