MANILA -- What Filipinos failed to do in 40 years, erupting Mt. Pinatubo did in a matter of days.
It took a volcano, which had been inactive for more than 600 years, to send the Americans packing out of the largest and most strategic U.S. bases outside the continent. Shortly before it started erupting on June 15, Mt. Pinatubo -- 16 kilometers east of Clark Air Base and 35 kilometers northeast of Subic Naval Base -- forced 20,000 U.S. service personnel and their families out of the country.
The eruptions also gave anti-bases and anti-nuclear activists in the Philippines a stronger voice. With the mammoth American evacuation, anti-nuclear activists raised the alarm of radioactive emissions from nuclear weapons they believe are stored at the bases. The disaster also revived offers from the clandestine National Democratic Front to resume talks with the government toward a political settlement and an end to Asia's oldest insurgency.
In the 1950s, nationalists led by Claro M. Recto and Lorenzo M. Tanada called for the closure of the bases, which at that time sprawled over 180,000 hectares (nearly 500,000 acres) of agricultural land. Opposition heightened during the Vietnam War years when activists protested the use of the bases as staging points for attacks against the Vietnamese.
FOR MOST FILIPINOS, especially those born and bred under colonial U.S. power since the turn of the century, booting out the bases was unthinkable. Pinatubo made the options clearer.
Severely affected by the eruptions are the Central Luzon provinces of Pampanga, Tarlac, and Zambales, where strategic Clark Air Base, the 13th Air Force headquarters, and Subic Naval Base are located. Other facilities such as the Crow Valley Gunnery Range were also affected. Damage from the ashfall and mudflows was so extensive that in the first week some 80,000 hectares (nearly 200,000 acres) of farmland in the region had been destroyed.
Rehabilitation cost estimates reach as high as $536 million. Damage within a 10-kilometer radius from the volcano is irreversible. Monsoon rains in July triggered lava flows reaching as far as the Nueva Ecija province, which was severely hit in July 1990 by an earthquake registering 7.7 on the Richter scale.
After a visit to Clark this past July, U.S. bases negotiator Richard Armitage said it will cost $800 million to make the base fully operational; and there are the thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations and cuts in the U.S. military budget to consider.
Following a Philippine constitutional ban on foreign troops and military bases in the country after 1991, the Philippines and the United States started negotiating for pullout provisions on May 14 of last year. While the Philippines asked for $825 million per year for a seven-year period, the United States insisted on a 10- to 12-year period with continued access afterward.
Negotiators agreed on a draft treaty a month after the first Pinatubo eruption. The new draft, rated by Philippine President Corazon Aquino as "fair in the light of the present situation," has the United States paying $360 million for 1991 and then $203 million yearly for 10 more years for Subic Naval Base. Compensation, however, will be on a "best efforts basis" -- subject to yearly renewals by the U.S. Congress.
Meanwhile, Clark Air Base will be cleaned of ash and sand within a year and returned to the Philippines. The agreement also included non-budgetary assistance, including $100 million in excess defense equipment and $100 million in U.S. purchases of Philippine goods.
Bishop Antonino Nepomoceno, of the Nuclear Free Philippine Coalition, said the agreement "continued acquiescence to American interests." The details, he said, are nothing but "nails added to the coffins of our quest for a truly independent national policy." If government "wanted to really profit from the agreement," he said, it should have insisted on items that could help "in our effort to rehabilitate our damaged economy brought about by natural calamities and our leaders' agreement with our foreign creditors."
The Philippine government has sunk $1.8 million into studies for the economic conversion of the baselands. Study team director Jose Abueva, however, has thrown out the plans, saying they did not consider a volcano eruption.
The draft treaty faces rough sailing in the Philippine Senate, which under the constitution is authorized to ratify treaties. To pass, the draft has to gain a two-thirds vote of the Senate.
At least 12 of the 23 senators are reportedly against the original proposal. Senate President Jovito Salonga has been quoted as saying that, before the eruptions, the negotiations focused on national security. Today, he said, they have been transformed into a "real estate transaction."
Senators John Osmena and Ernesto Herrera have proposed a renegotiation with a $1 billion annual compensation and a period of no more than 10 years.
The Senate must also act quickly before the 1947 Military Bases Agreement, the treaty that currently governs the stay of the bases, expires on September 16. Even this deadline is being contested by the United States, which insists that a 1966 agreement provides for a one-year grace period in case a new treaty is rejected.
IN ANGELES CITY, where 52,600-hectare Clark Air Base is located, 27,000 Filipinos directly employed by Americans or by Filipino concessionaires will lose their jobs. Some 6,000 off-base houses and apartments have been abandoned, costing at least $1 million in lost monthly rentals.
An organization of poor urban dwellers is studying the possibility of suing base authorities for damages arising from an alleged release of water from a dam within Clark Base.
Anticipating a U.S. pullout, Angelenos have since 1988 moved away from selling PX goods or running nightclubs for American personnel. Most of the new ventures have been in furniture making. The chamber of commerce is also working hard to attract foreign investors.
Meanwhile, at least 255 workers at the Subic Ship Repair Facility have reportedly resigned for more stable jobs in the Middle East. A well-placed base supervisor, who asked not to be named, says that while it appears certain that Subic will be retained, the workers there may not be.
Roberto Flores, president of the Subic Base workers union, complains that base authorities have not given workers relief goods or entitled them to the 30-day paid emergency leave afforded their American counterparts. Base workers interviewed say the disaster showed what most of them refused to believe before: that the Americans will always place their interests over that of Filipinos, even the base workers who served them well for several decades.
Even Olongapo Mayor Richard Gordon -- who with a group of refugees was denied passage through the base at the height of Pinatubo's eruptions -- has reversed his stance advocating the continued stay of Subic Base in his city. Says Gordon, the Filipinos no longer "need the Americans," because they can survive on their own.
Sophia Lizares-Bodegon was a correspondent for Philippine News and Features at the time this article appeared.
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