US urged to make crystal clear its support for constitutional order in RP

WASHINGTON – The massive scandal involving Chinese telecommunications company ZTE Corp. has the potential to become a major constitutional crisis in the Philippines, and Washington must make crystal clear its support of constitutional order in that Southeast Asian country, an article in a US think tank said.

The article posted on the Heritage Foundation website over the weekend said the ZTE contract to provide the Philippine government with a national broadband network at an obviously inflated price of $329 million pointed to a shameless level of corruption.

But as big as the scandal is in dollar terms, the most spectacular charge to emerge from the controversy is that the contract flows from a 2004 China-Philippines deal to put aside sovereignty claims in the South China Sea in order to conduct a joint seismic study, said the article by Walter Lohman.

Lohman is director of the Asian Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank with close ties to key Republican leaders in the US Congress.

Lohman said a striking thing about the seismic study is that it will include not only disputed areas of the South China Sea, but also parts of the Philippine continental shelf. The obvious danger is that such cooperation – far from the China mainland but close to the Philippines – will eventually threaten Filipino sovereignty, he added.

“Indeed, such a concession is difficult to understand strictly from an assessment of the Philippines’ national interest,” Lohman said.

The ZTE deal is only one element to emerge from $2 billion per year in Chinese project loans offered soon after the deal on the seismic study, his article said.

The loan program extends until 2010, President Arroyo’s last year in office, and has already facilitated dozens of deals beyond the ZTE broadband project.

Another massive deal that has aroused suspicion is the 25-year concession to the Philippines’ power grid. The biggest privatization in Philippine history, the $4-billion deal has a similar confluence of factors: Chinese involvement, high-value assets, and charges of connections to the Filipino first family, the article said.

“The economic costs of corruption are well documented. What is alarming about these cases is the possibility that corruption in the Philippines may have reached the point of trumping national interest.”

If the Filipino people – as represented by their representatives and senators – determine that the President is guilty of impeachable offenses, the Constitution of the Philippines has mechanisms for dispatching her.

If opponents judge the process too corrupt to render an accurate judgment, the answer does not lie in appeal to extra-constitutional means, but in a concerted effort to fix the system, however difficult and lengthy that may be, the article said.

“From the perspective of a concerned friend, it would be far more preferable for the president to finish her term in office – even if under a cloud of suspicion – than for the Constitution to be breached,” it said.