CLARK FREEPORT – An activist group has urged the Senate to probe nagging reports that Pres. Aquino had committed to recent visitor US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey more access to parts of former US bases here and at Subic for US military operations.
The Pambansang Lakas ng Kilusang Mamamalakaya ng Pilipinas (Pamalakaya) also urged Malacanang to be “fully transparent” on what transpired between the President and Dempsey during the visit.
Pamalakaya noted that the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) has asserted that such an agreement was made before the President left for the United Kingdom and the United States in the first week of June.
Pamalakaya national chairperson Fernando Hicap said that such move would “pave the way for the virtual return of US military bases by allowing Washington to make use of their former military bases in support of US campaign to pressure China and strengthen its military hegemony in Asia and the Pacific region.”
“National interest obliges Pres. Aquino to reveal the real score about his agreement with Gen. Dempsey. What is this Aquino-Dempsey agreement which was officially sealed a day before his successive state visits to UK and US?” asked Hicap
“It appears to us that the former US military naval base in Subic is back to its former status as Washington’s biggest naval base outside mainland America. And the big trouble here is that President is hiding this matter from the knowledge of Filipinos,” he said.
Hicap urged Senate President Juan Ponce-Enrile and House Speaker Feliciano Belmonte to “compel Pres. Aquino to reveal Malacanang’s best kept secret with Dempsey.”
Last month at the height of the renewed controversies with China over the Panatag (Scarborough) shoal, the US attack submarine USS North Carolina surfaced at Subic Bay and this, Hicap said, could be initial part of moves to signify plans to allow more access of the US military to the two former US bases in the country.
“There is strong material basis in claiming that Aquino and Dempsey forged an agreement giving US the prerogative to transform the country in a archipelagic wide military bases for US war business and adventure in the Philippines and Asia-Pacific region,” added Hicap.
He noted that the agreement between Aquino and Dempsey reportedly allows US naval ships and military aircraft to use Clark and Subic facilities with ‘prior clearance from the Philippine government.
Pamalakaya said that such an agreement “signals the deployment of large numbers of American troops, naval warships, aircraft, drones and other military facilities on large-scale basis, even larger than that under the 1947 RP-US Military Bases Agreement (MBA).”
The former US bases at Clark and Subic were used by the US for its operations in the 1970s in the Vietnam War and in its various operations against Iran in the 1980s.
