US never asked for possible deployment of Filipino troops in Taiwan: Marcos
As he reiterated that the Philippines will not allow the use of Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) sites for offensive actions against any country, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said the United States has never asked for possible deployment of Filipino troops should hostilities break out in Taiwan.
"No, the short answer is no, and the reason is that we have made it very clear that the bases that we have opened up to be used by the American forces in the Philippines. We have just identified four additional bases which we announced last month and these are, the original concept behind this cooperation agreement we have with the US from which these new bases were derived from it was really because of the effect of climate change and increasing instances of disasters in the Philippines," Marcos said in an interview at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) ASEAN Leadership Forum in Washington on Thursday.
"So again, to go back to, the quick answer is no, the United States has never, never said that this is a possibility. And we have also made it clear from our end, that we will. This is not what, this is not the purpose of those sites and this is not the, this is not the purpose of EDCA sites. This is not the way they will be used." he added.
Marcos added that the US has never brought up the possibility that the EDCA sites will be used for any offensive operations.
"And to but to be fair, the United States has never brought up the possibility that we will use, that the United States will use the EDCA sites as staging staging areas for any offensive action against any country," he said.
"I think we are in lockstep with the US without that they understand the concerns that the Philippines has and are sensitive to the reasons why we have those concerns," he added.
Marcos said that "EDCA sites were meant to be conceptualized really to be these places that we could use to provide quicker relief, rescue, do a better job in other words of rehabilitating and reconstructing the damage that would be caused" by disasters.
"Now with the increasing tension especially the Taiwan strait then the military aspect, the security and defense aspect... became part of that mission and that is why it became sensitive and that is why China has been terribly critical but I do everything I can. The foreign minister of China just visited with me, a couple of weeks ago, three weeks ago, and I told him and I assured him that no, these are not these are not intended to be military bases to attack to move against anyone, any country, not China, not any country," he said.
"If should there be such an attempt to use... the EDCA sites for offensive action, then that would be outside the parameters of what we had discussed and what the EDCA sites are for," he added. Robina Asido/DMS
