Two perspectives
MY disappointment at the verbal flak President Rodrigo Roa Duterte (PRRD) is getting for his refusal to accept EU (European Union) conditional aid comes from viewing the issue from two perspectives, friendship and history.
True friendship is based on mutual respect for one another’s individuality or sovereignty. Nothing a true friend does should diminish an individual’s or a nation’s self respect. A true friend, therefore, helps without putting into the terms of the agreement conditions that cannot be accepted without the recipient losing sel f -r esp ect .
Conditional aid is manipulative of an individual or of a nation’s weakness at the very least and is at worst oppr essi ve.
A friend who gives with self-respectdestroying conditions is simply not a true friend. From a historical perspective, conditional foreign aid degrades the Filipino people’s sovereignty.
It is a soft copy of the hard way Spain and the US colonized us and denied us the freedom to determine our unique identity and destiny as a free people.
Instead of apologizing and making reparations for stunting our natural growth they now treat us like wards who should be grateful to them for giving us back the liberty which they had no right to take away from us in the first place.
We are who we are not (a self-respecting nation) to a great deal because of the trauma of colonization. It is time to reclaim our self-respect and take destiny into our own hands. The EU and the US had absolutely no right to kill Asian, African and other natives in the process of forcibly taking absolute possession of the former’s lands.
They should apologize for this historical injustice and atone for it with unconditional reparation instead of presuming superiority and telling us by their conditional help how not to solve our problems.
Stopping extrajudicial killings(EJK), those confirmed by due process to be such anyway, is admittedly a good and worthy intention.
But that is an issue that, in the context of the current discussion, is secondary to the issue of Spain (the Dutch and the British also tried but failed) and the US not having the right then to subjugate us and not having the right now to manipulate us into doing things just to get their aid. EJK’s are an internal problem that is ours alone to solve.
Should the Filipino people decide to stop the war on drugs just to stop the presumed (because no legal due process has confirmed their existence) EJK’s, the EU and the US should respect our moral capability to do this our way and not by the conditions they set on their aid.
From their history as colonizers one can reasonably assume they extend aid with conditions mostly to advances their interests. We should only accept conditions that do not lose us our sel f -r esp ect .