The VFA issue and the Lipa massacre

To critics of President Duterte’s who angrily announced he would abrogate the VFA it may be useful to read the Constitution on the issue.

“Article 18 Section 25. After the expiration in 1991 of the Agreement between the Republic of the Philippines and the United States of America concerning military bases, foreign military bases, troops, or facilities shall not be allowed in the Philippines except under a treaty duly concurred in by the Senate and, when the Congress so requires, ratified by a majority of the votes cast by the people in a national referendum held for that purpose, and recognized as a treaty by the other contracting State.”

This was pointed out by Ambassador Reynaldo O. Arcilla who has the credentials to know more about the issue.

We may have been dismayed by President Digong’s outburst that he would scrap the Visiting Forces Agreement if the US does not “correct” the cancellation of Sen. Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa’s visa.

The more relevant question was “Will the US defend us from, in my view, a remotely possible Chinese armed aggression?” Maintaining the VFA, the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) and the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) is inconsistent with an independent foreign policy.

The first two are constitutionally infirm. The two agreements are null and void ab initio since they are not recognized as treaties by the US.

Neither the VFA nor the EDCA was “recognized as a treaty by the other contracting State (US),” a conditio sine qua non. The US Senate never ratified either one.

“This agreement shall remain in force until the expiration of 180 days from the date on which either party gives the other party notice in writing that it desires to terminate the agreement.”

Next in line for termination should be the EDCA. Aside from its onerous provisions, it is also null and void from the beginning. How to terminate it? Section 4, Article 12 of the EDCA states:

“This Agreement shall have an initial term of ten years, and thereafter, it shall continue in force automatically unless terminated by either Party by giving one year’s written notice through diplomatic channels of its intention to terminate this Agreement.”

Digong categorically stated that he does not want any military alliance with any country, be it China, Russia or the US.

How to terminate the MDT? Article 8 of the treaty states: “This Treaty shall remain in force indefinitely. Either Party may terminate it one year after notice has been given to the other Party.”

To Arcilla scrapping the three agreements would be Digong’s greatest legacy. History will single him out for liberating the Philippines from US neo colonialism, achieving true independence and paving the way to greater economic progress.

By chance this was also the week I met up with my friend, Jose Lorenzo Tan who now lives in Lipa. We talked about restaurants and food in Lipa but we ended up talking about how much Filipinos suffered because we were an American colony at the time.

This may be an unseen danger in the future of an alliance not of our own making. It is not about academic discussions but about real stories that are now being unearthed of how Filipinos suffered in an American-Japanese war.

“Many of the atrocities that the Japanese committed, I used to hear when I was a child – but more as folklore. The stories in this article, in contrast, are all taken from published documents.

Although the Japanese committed countless atrocities in many places around the Philippines during World War II, majority of these were committed from 1944-1945 in the Province of Batangas, where an estimated 25,000 men, women and children, mostly non-combatants or civilians, were massacred by the Japanese.

While the number of people killed is enough to make the blood boil, the methods employed simply redefines the meaning of the word brutality.

For instance, during the trial of Tomoyuki Yamashita, the general under whose command many of these war-time atrocities were committed, many mothers testified that “babies had been torn from their arms, tossed high into the air, and, when falling, were caught upon the up-thrust bayonets of Japanese soldiers standing nearby.” The date 11 February 1945 was among the darkest in the history of the then town of Lipa in Batangas. “Almost an entire community” was massacred by Japanese soldiers in the barrio of Marauoy1 just north of the town’s poblacion or center.

Seth Mydans of The New York Times writes “Jintaro Ishida knows his country’s guilty secrets.

He knows, for example, about the massacre at the well in the Philippine village of Lipa, where 400 people were thrown to their deaths. The blood lust of the soldiers ran so high, he says, that one of them smashed a rock onto the head of a woman who was combing her hair.

He seems driven by a compulsion to overcome the ignorance of his countrymen, which he says he shared. A Japanese military unit ran wild in the village of Lipa, killing a total of more than 1,000 people.

Today, Mr. Ishida seems stunned by what he has learned about his comrades and about human nature.

Mr. Ishida is one of a small corps of researchers who are swimming against the tide of ignorance in Japan. A former newspaper reporter named Katsuichi Honda has published research about war crimes in China. A professor named Aiko Utsumi has researched war crimes committed in Indonesia.

The result is an extraordinary work of parallel reporting, a book called ‘’The Remains of War: Apology and Forgiveness,’’ published this year in English by Megabooks Company in the Philippines.

Its Japanese title is ‘’The Killers and the Killed.’’ Like his earlier book, ‘’Walang Hiya,’’ which in the Philippine language of Tagalog means ‘’Without Shame,’’ it offered the first opportunity for the Japanese to hear the stories of the victims.