DAVAO CITY, Philippines – Two partylist representatives from Mindanao welcomed President Rodrigo Duterte’s recent pronouncement to review the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA).
“We have been saying at the very onset that EDCA is a slap on our sovereignty as a country. It is unconstitutional and extremely onerous,” Bayan Muna Rep. Carlos Isagani Zarate said in a statement on Monday.
Signed on April 28, 2014 by former Philippine Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin and U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Philip Goldberg, EDCA grants the U.S. the ability and flexibility to station its military forces and war materiel anywhere in the country.
Zarate added, “it is very laudable that President Duterte is now pursuing an independent foreign policy.”
Zarate’s statement came as Duterte, speaking at the Masskara Festival in Bacolod City on Sunday, noted that EDCA was not signed by his predecessor, then-President Benigno Aquino III and the President of of the United States.
Duterte said he will review EDCA, threatening to ask the U.S forces to leave the country.
For Zarate, the President’s decision will give him more liberty to establish an independent foreign policy. “This is to give more life, spirit and credence to the Constitutional edict of pursuing an independent foreign policy.”
“The interest of the Filipino people and the nation is our primordial consideration,” the lawmaker from Mindanao said.
Zarate said the country has been perceived as a “surrogate or vassal state” contrary to the popular notion that it is an ally of the U.S.
“Our past leaders have allowed such treatment is our country’s grave misfortune,” he said. “But Pres. Rodrigo Duterte’s major foreign policy tectonic shift will restore the rightful equal place of the Philippines in the community of nations.”
Since 2014, several lawmakers questioned the agreement’s constitutionality but the High Tribunal in its July 26 decision ruled that EDCA was constitutional.
Meanwhile, Anakpawis partylist Rep. Ariel Casilao said EDCA, “run smack against” the countrys’s sovereignty.
“No previous administrations had the guts to take on the US gov’t, not only in terms of questioning its foreign policy relations but also reminded them of their gross atrocities against the Filipino people during their colonial rule, except the president,” Casilao said.
Casilao said the continuing presence of US troops in the country is a symbol of their colonial remnants.
“Through sheer violence and deception, it [US troops] managed to imposed its will to the Filipino people politically, in economy, cultural and military,” Casilao added.
Anakpawis urged the public to “support the President’s initiative to attain a nationalist independent policy.” (davaotoday.com)
