Hundreds of Filipinos chanted anti-U.S. slogans and burned imitated American flags on Monday as the two-week joint military drill held by Filipino and American troops began.
The two armies held joint military drills almost every year in the past decade in the Philippines.
On Monday, Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Alberto Romulo, with presence of U.S. Ambassador Kristie Kenny and Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro, formally opened the RP-US Balikatan 2008 at the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) Commissioned Officers' Country Club in Camp Aguinaldo in Metro Manila.
This year's drill, with participation of 6,000 American soldiers and 2,000 Filipino soldiers, will focus on humanitarian missions which will boost the cooperation between two armies in delivering relief and assistance during natural disasters and other crisis that endanger public safety, according to the army authority.
The training ground is set at the northern Luzon region and the insurgency-infested southern region of Mindanao.
However, hundreds of civilian Filipinos marched to Camp Aguinaldo to protest against the war game in the Muslim-dominated Mindanao, where the U.S. government has been funding Filipino troops to fight militants belonging to the deemed regional terrorist organization Abu Sayyaf.
Local media reported that there were thousands of protesters in several big cities in Mindanao on Monday.
Protesters said the presence of American troops in Mindanao will only worsen the peace and order situation in the region.
House Representative Satur Ocampo said the war games were launched under the "auspices of the onerous and one-sided Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) and the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) between two countries."
He reiterated calls for the pull-out of U.S. troops from Philippine soil and the scrapping of the military treaty.
Public rage towards the joint war game has been stoking since 2005 when an American soldier in the Balikatan exercise was sentenced to life jail after he was found guilty of raping a 23-year-old woman in the former U.S. military base in northern Philippines.
Source: Xinhua
|
Comment
Tell A Friend
Print Format
Save Article