President Arroyo's silly tirades against the Balikatan protesters

MARIE HILAO-ENRIQUEZ
9 February 2002



President Arroyo's silly tirades against the Balikatan protesters is an act of desperation


President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is at it again. In an incredible
display
of audacity and impudence, she says the people's organizations and
patriotic individuals protesting the ongoing Balikatan exercises cannot
call themselves "Filipinos." She lashes out at those opposed to US
military
intervention, calling us "cohorts of murderers."

This recent tirade of President Arroyo is a new high in absurdity for
her.
It further exposes her utter desperation to defend US imperialist
aggression in the country amidst raging mass protests nationwide.
Having
clearly run out of arguments to justify her barefaced complicity with
US
wars of aggression, she has resorted to silly demagoguery and
name-calling.

Yet calling us "terrorists" can never erase the validity of the
arguments
we raise against Balikatan and the US military presence in the country.
Branding our protests "un-Filipino" will not negate the facts: that
Arroyo's consent to the US military "exercises" in Mindanao and
elsewhere
is an obvious affront to the Constitution and tramples upon our
sovereignty
as a nation. Arroyo's use of McCarthyist rhetoric in a frantic effort
to
discredit us cannot undo the enormous social costs throughout history
of
having the US military troops in the Philippines.

As a matter of fact, it is the AFP and the US military who have been
engaging in state-sponsored terrorism in the country and the world. We
strongly urge her to investigate various accounts of human rights
violations by the Armed Forces of the Philippines in Basilan, even
before
US troops came to our shores. We strongly urge Arroyo to study the US
military's bloody historical record of wars and interventions
throughout
the globe. We strongly urge her to reexamine her own militarist
policies
that have been the bane to millions of Filipinos in war-torn Mindanao
and
the rest of the country.

Indeed, the only act that can assuage the intensifying anti-imperialist
sentiments of the people is for President Arroyo to immediately call on
the
pullout of all US military troops in the country. Her harebrained
name-calling, merely exposes to the Filipino people her utter despair
in
defending the indefensible, her truly "un-Filipino" puppetry to US
imperialist interests.###

KARAPATAN (Alliance for the Advancement of People's Rights)
NATIONAL OFFICE

Office: 23-D Mabuhay St., Central District
Diliman, Quezon City 1101, PHILIPPINES
Tel. Nos. (+632) 434-1865 / 9267877
E-mail: krptn [at] philonline.com; karapatan [at] edsamail.com.ph