Guests of Friends

Guests of Friend

Vice President Nixon flew to Manila last week for the tenth anniversary of Philippine independence (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) bearing a document that bolstered Filipino national pride more than all the speeches, parades and fireworks of the young nation's U.S. style Fourth of July. The document: a U.S. agreement to "transfer and turn over to the Philippines" full and unqualified title to ownership of "all land areas used either in the past or presently as military bases" by the U.S. in the Philippines.

The document was designed to take the sting out of the sorest point of friction between the two countries. The issue has been synthetically whooped up by Filipino nationalists and complicated by maladroit handling by U.S. authorities in the Philippines and in Washington. The Philippines Act of Independence of 1934 gave the U.S. the right to maintain bases there after the islands became independent. In 1947, a year after actual independence was granted, 23 such areas were defined, only three of them major: Clark Air Field, 50 miles north of Manila; the Navy's Subic Bay installations on the northwest shoulder of Bataan peninsula; and the Navy's Sangley Point Air Base at Cavite, on Manila Bay.

Most of the agitation against the U.S. concerned old Fort McKinley on Manila's southeast outskirts. Fort McKinley, taken out of service after World War II, has been eyed by real-estate promoters who would like to subdivide it. Two years ago Attorney General Brownell rendered an opinion that the U.S. has legal title to Philippine lands bought from private owners; most of Fort McKinley was bought in this manner long before World War I. In the mouths of Filipino extremists, this claim to "title" became a nasty assertion of "sovereignty."

President Magsaysay, staunch friend of the U.S., convinced Secretary of State Dulles during his visit to Manila last March that the U.S. position should be changed in the interests of both countries. The U.S. now agrees to "turn over" U.S. owned "title papers and title claims" to the Philippines, thus upholding by implication the original validity of the U.S. claims. In effect, the statement changes little but accomplishes much. The U.S. will still have use of any bases stipulated by the 1947 treaty, but as guests instead of owners.

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