EDITORIAL - Revisiting the VFA

After US Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that a contingent of their elite Special Forces would remain in Mindanao, Malacañang invoked the Visiting Forces Agreement as the basis for the American deployment. This should remind Malacañang of the need to review the agreement and assert Philippine sovereignty by correcting certain VFA provisions that are lopsided in favor of US troops.

Those provisions were highlighted in the case of US Marine Lance Cpl. Daniel Smith, whose conviction for rape was overturned earlier this year shortly after his accuser, known as Nicole, obtained a US visa and left the Philippines to stay “for good” in the United States. Before her departure for the land of her dreams, Nicole released a statement declaring that she was no longer certain that she had been raped.

Even before Nicole, a young, single woman with no regular means of livelihood, managed to obtain what looks like a US green card, controversy had dogged the rape case after the Philippine government allowed the US embassy to take custody of Smith. Both governments cited provisions of the VFA to justify Smith’s transfer, in the dead of night, from the Makati City jail to the embassy compound. When Smith was finally cleared of the charges, he left the Philippines even more stealthily than Nicole.

The lack of reciprocity and vague wording in the VFA as well as the so-called VFA II need a second look if the security cooperation between the two countries is to mature into a healthy alliance. American troops returned to the Philippines upon the invitation of Manila in 2002, a decade after the US bases here were shut down. The world was still in shock over the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, and the Philippine government appeared helpless in stopping the kidnapping rampage of the Abu Sayyaf. Even Philippine senators seen to be antagonistic toward the US grudgingly gave their support at the time to President Arroyo’s SOS to Uncle Sam.

There was no timetable given for the deployment of the Americans in Mindanao. No one is sure if Robert Gates’ recent announcement in Washington was unilateral; all that Malacañang had to say was thank you. With the Philippine government unlikely to oppose the continued US troop presence, it should at least correct certain provisions in the agreement that serves as the basis for the American deployment. Certain legal quarters are saying that the VFA is not even legally binding. Such questions need to be settled before another incident such as the case of Daniel Smith crops up and again strains relations.