When President Aquino travels overseas, the front rows on both sides of a plane aisle have two vacant seats. One is beside him, for the comfort of the Chief Executive.
The other is beside Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario, for the comfort – and safety – of other passengers.
Del Rosario has recurring nightmares, and when he does, he can get violent in his sleep. Once, while seated on a plane, Del Rosario woke up to find himself tightly gripping his seatmate Bert Romulo, at the time the foreign secretary, by the shirt collar.
Another time, the sleeping Del Rosario gave his seatmate a karate chop. The seatmate, a businessman, was shaken but unhurt.
The nation’s top diplomat suspects that his nightmares, which include being kidnapped, stem from his ordeal during World War II. He and his sister nearly died at their family home in Sta. Mesa, Manila during the bombardment that obliterated nearly the entire city and left some 100,000 people dead.
The five-year-old Del Rosario was left with a gaping hole in his skull. His three-year-old sister had a chunk of her back torn away. Guerrillas found them but could not rush them to a hospital. Instead they were brought to the empty house of a neighbor who during the war was given refuge by the Del Rosario family when the Japanese were hunting him down – Albino SyCip, father of accounting and law firm founder Washington SyCip.
There the Del Rosario siblings spent the night, bleeding as fighting continued around them. The next day in a Sta. Mesa hospital, Del Rosario sat quietly, too stupefied by the pandemonium and suffering around him to cry out in pain as a doctor stitched together his head, without anesthesia, using abaca fiber. To this day, Del Rosario says, he still remembers vividly the sights and smells in that hospital.
His skull never fully grew back. Today there is a soft spot where the hole used to be in Del Rosario’s head. A few months ago an MRI scan showed shrapnel still floating around in his brain.
Asked by doctors whether the head trauma affected him, Del Rosario replied, “Sometimes my wife thinks I’m going crazy.”
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The Chinese will probably agree, and they may wonder whether P-Noy has a similar hole in the head. The buzz is that Beijing has given up on improving relations with Manila under P-Noy and is instead waiting for him to “graduate” from the presidency before attempting to revive bilateral ties, which are currently in the ICU.
With China’s aggressive reclamation activities in disputed waters, however, it’s doubtful that whoever succeeds P-Noy in 2016 will soften on seeking international involvement in maritime disputes in this part of the world.
Beijing is taking another tack to expand its sphere of influence. It is proposing a Chinese-led counterpart to the World Bank-International Monetary Fund and the Manila-based Asian Development Bank (ADB), which has always been headed by a Japanese. The proposed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) will have a seed capital of $100 billion, of which half will be put up by who else but the Chinese.
The United States and Japan do not contribute more than 23.5 percent each to the total funds of the ADB. A similar bank to be put up by the BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – will have equal fund sharing of 20 percent from the five countries; an Indian will be its first head under a rotating basis.
Beijing says the proposal for the AIIB is being supported by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. This is news to at least one ASEAN member that is not heavily dependent on the Chinese market: the Philippines.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch with the Chinese, so its $50-billion proffered contribution is sure to have strings attached. Beijing is currently busy trying to keep out the maritime disputes from the agenda of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) this week in Milan, Italy. Beijing is also moving to keep the issue out of the agenda of the ASEAN Regional Forum, which tackles security issues.
Del Rosario is flying to Milan tomorrow, and part of his mission is to keep ASEM aware of the importance of the maritime disputes.
We would hope that the Europeans, who profess to champion human rights, global best practices in trade and other issues as well as freedom of navigation, would send a strong message to China about these values through ASEM. But because most members of the European Union, like some 100 other countries, have China as their top trading partner, maybe Del Rosario will find himself on a quixotic mission.
That isn’t going to stop him from trying. War wounds softened a part of his skull, not his guts. And he can be persistent in working for an objective.
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As a management student in New York, Del Rosario held three jobs to be completely financially independent and pay his way through college.
Like P-Noy, the young Albert loved cars, and used his hard-earned money to buy his first car – a Jaguar used for a year and a half by the previous owner. But he gave up the car to pay for his wedding in Vancouver, Canada to Gretchen de Venecia, the Filipino-German daughter of diplomat Policronio de Venecia, who headed the first Philippine consulate in Hamburg when the country opened formal ties with Germany.
The two had met at Tavern on the Green in Manhattan and dated for a year before the wedding. Gretchen, first cousin of former speaker Joe de V, was working as a designer in a New York fashion atelier.
Now the Cabinet’s richest member, Del Rosario recalls living with his wife and son in 1963 on a food allowance of $2 a week. But he still loved cars, and saved up to buy a brand-new Corvette. In 1964, he became the first Filipino to bring to the Philippines a Volvo; the second one was brought in by Jun Magsaysay.
His nightmares, Del Rosario noticed, were triggered by stress and fatigue. Some years ago, his health problems were aggravated by knees weakened by age. After two surgeries in one knee, the cement used to hold the knee in place somehow found its way to his lungs, made him cough out blood and came close to killing him.
In a discussion over the weekend that shifted between his love life and disputes with the Chinese, Del Rosario said he survived that health crisis, but he has since avoided kneeling down.
Back in 1962 the knees were still fine. Did he propose to Gretchen on bended knees?
“I am not the kneeling type,” Del Rosario replied.