Clinton Visit Revives Ties With Philippines After Pullout : Asia: The trip comes two years after America's bitter military exodus. Manila now focuses on development and regional relations.

By JIM MANN

Nov. 14, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

MANILA — America always seems to dream of the Asian mainland, but it always returns to the Philippines.

And so, in the person of President Clinton, America symbolically came back to the Philippines on Sunday, just two years after a bitter exodus from the military bases it had occupied for nearly a century.

This time, the tone was less grandiose than that of the most famous returnee here, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who once said that the Philippines “fastened me with a grip that never relaxed.”

MacArthur left the Philippines for Australia in 1942 promising to come back. He kept his promise by wading ashore at Leyte two years later with the words: “I have returned. . . . Rally to me! . . . The guidance of divine God points the way. . . . Follow in his name to the Holy Grail of righteous victory.”

Sunday’s American return under Clinton was far more modest. But his arrival here was nonetheless welcomed, particularly after the bitterness of the 1992 American departure from Clark Air Base and the Subic Bay Naval Base. It represents “a revival of the old friendship between our two peoples,” Manila Mayor Angelo Lim said Sunday.

“It is a signal to the world that the Philippines is back on the economic map,” said Irene Natividad, head of the Philippine-American Friendship Assn. and one of several prominent Philippine Americans who flew back to Manila for Clinton’s visit, the first here by a U.S. President in two decades.

Still, America came back Sunday to a different Philippines, one much more preoccupied with Asia and with the task of economic development than was the former colony that America left behind.

“We have found ourselves back in Asia,” said former Philippine Vice President Emmanuel Pelaez, who served as ambassador to the United States during the closing of the U.S. bases. “Both Japan and Taiwan are transferring their factories here, where land and wages are cheaper. You know, the Japanese prefer (workers who speak) English.”

The signs of change were evident at Subic Bay, which had been the center of U.S. naval operations in the Pacific from the Boxer Rebellion at the beginning of this century to the Persian Gulf War of 1991.

On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher attended a signing ceremony for a new commercial venture at Subic Bay, one in which Federal Express will set up a new regional hub for its Asian operations.

“In the investment community, the Philippines are looked on as a promising opportunity now,” said Richard Solomon, a former U.S. ambassador to the Philippines. “The things we always hoped would some day work for them are beginning to work.

“They have an English-speaking work force. They don’t have the political uncertainties of, say, Indonesia. And (Philippine President Fidel V.) Ramos seems to have done a good job of getting the security situation under control.”

To be sure, not everything has changed.

Only one of the runways at Clark Air Base is ready for use. The rest of the base is still covered with volcanic dust, the continuing legacy of the catastrophic eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in June, 1991.

The efforts of the Philippine government to recover the billions of dollars in assets it estimates were stolen by the late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos and his cronies are still bogged down in the courts, not much closer to success now than when the litigation started eight years ago. “You know, lawyers can make things last forever,” Pelaez said.

Parts of Manila are still lined with hovels. The streets are still full of jeepneys, the colorful converted buses, jeeps and carts that are the country’s best-known mass transit and most popular folk-art form. And the handouts given to visitors by the U.S. Embassy contain security warnings that portray a different reality from the one the Philippines presents to potential investors.

“If in a taxi . . . do NOT allow the driver to pick up additional passengers,” the warning says. “Stay alert. Be prepared to take evasive action. Also, if you have packages with you and the driver asks you to get out to ‘check the tire,’ you will never see him OR your packages again.”

The Pinatubo eruption started the U.S. exodus from the Philippines, because it virtually eliminated any American interest in staying on at Clark Air Base.

At the time, Washington and Manila were in the midst of negotiations over the future of the bases but were far apart on money. The George Bush Administration was offering $450 million a year, and the Philippines was demanding $1.2 billion. The gap was never closed.

On Sept. 16, 1991, the Philippine Senate voted 12 to 11 to turn down a new agreement, effectively ordering the Americans to leave. That was only the beginning of the acrimonious end.

Bush wrote then-Philippine President Corazon Aquino, asking for a two- or three-year period for a gradual, orderly departure. As Pelaez sadly recalled Sunday, “We didn’t reply. . . . The (Philippine) nationalists wanted everything out in one year. And so the United States pulled out a lot of things that could have been left. There was some bad blood.”

On Nov. 24, 1992, the last U.S. warship sailed out of Subic Bay to strains of “Bye-bye, G.I.” on the shores. That ended 94 years of U.S. military presence in the Philippines, setting the tone for a new, more distant relationship between the two countries.

“The bases were the last remnants of the colonial era,” said Solomon, who served as the U.S. ambassador in Manila when the military facilities were closed. “It is a much less special relationship now, if it is special at all.”

Indeed, Clinton’s arrival here brought forth some wariness that the United States might be trying to revive the old paternalistic relationship in a country that has learned to live on its own.

“It would do well for Mr. Clinton not to act too much like the Great White Father,” warned an editorial in one newspaper, the Philippine Star. “The Philippines is no longer a child that needs a pat on the back.”

For the time being, at least, the United States and the Philippines seem to want different things from each other.

The Philippines seeks trade and investment from the United States. For its part, the United States sees the Philippines as an important democratic ally in its ideological skirmishes with Asian states such as China and Singapore.

Clinton evoked that struggle here Sunday. “The great wave of democracy that has swept the world in our time began here in the Philippines,” he said, referring to the 1986 “people power” movement that drove Marcos from office and made Aquino president. “What happened here . . . encouraged events in countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Russia.”

In addition to the common democratic ties, the United States still thinks about security links with the Philippines, perhaps with U.S. forces given some access to Philippine military facilities--such as the United States enjoys in Singapore.

“My assumption was always that after a cooling-off period of a couple of years, (the Philippines) might want to have us around again, particularly if the Chinese were exercising their weight in Asia,” Solomon said.

But that is for the future. Clinton’s visit Sunday focused on the past and on revival of the historic ties. The President talked of the Philippines as “our oldest friend in Asia, a nation that has done so much to enrich the United States.”

Sitting in the back of the cemetery at which Clinton spoke was Francisco T. Dandrido, a veteran who fought in a Philippine artillery unit with U.S. troops at Corregidor when they surrendered to Japanese forces May 6, 1942. He was held as a prisoner for six months.

Dandrido is now 76. His children have gone to work in Hong Kong. And last year, more than half a century after his service at Corregidor, he was given U.S. citizenship.

Dandrido wants to come to the United States. But he said sadly, “I have no money.”