This story
was taken from Bulatlat, the Philippines's alternative weekly
newsmagazine (www.bulatlat.com, www.bulatlat.net, www.bulatlat.org).
Vol. V, No. 4, February 27-March 5, 2005
U.S. Genocide in the
Philippines and the New Armed Intervention It is only a matter of
time when full-blown US intervention against forces of the New People’s Army and
the Moro Islamic Liberation Front is bound to result in the killing of thousands
of Filipinos in a horrific but preventable repetition of US genocide against the
revolutionary forces of the first Philippine Republic. BY E. SAN JUAN, JR. Lest people forget, the U.S. ruling class
today, since the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the Gulf War, has been
deeply mired in an unconscionable, self-destructive war against people of color
in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Colombia, Nepal, Mexico, Sudan, Somalia, and,
of course, the Philippines. With over 446,000 troops abroad in over 725 bases
worldwide, the U.S. is now transferring thousands of troops from its Okinawa
base to Luzon. Over 40 US Special Forces have been involved
in the raging battles in Mindanao and Sulu against Muslim insurgents; in
Cotabato, the US has been constructing a naval/air base larger than Clark and
Subic combined. Under the pretext of the Balikatan exercises since 9/11, the
Arroyo regime has allowed US troops to participate in counter-insurgency
maneuvers, some under humanitarian cover in the flood-stricken provinces of
Aurora and Quezon. It is only a matter of time when full-blown US intervention
against forces of the New People’s Army and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front is
bound to result in the killing of thousands of Filipinos in a horrific but
preventable repetition of US genocide against the revolutionary forces of the
first Philippine Republic. Except during the sixties when the
Filipino-American War of 1899-1902 was referred to as the first Vietnam, the
death of 1.4 million Filipinos has been usually accounted for as either
collateral damage or victims of insurrection against the imperial authority of
the United States. The first Filipino scholar to make a thorough documentation
of the carnage is the late Luzviminda Francisco in her contribution to The
Philippines: The End of An Illusion (London, 1973). This fact is not even mentioned in the tiny
paragraph or so in most U.S. history textbooks. Stanley Karnows In Our Image
(1989), the acclaimed history of this intervention, quotes the figure of 200,000
Filipinos killed in outright fighting. Among historians, only Howard Zinn and
Gabriel Kolko have dwelt on the genocidal character of the catastrophe. Kolko,
in his magisterial Main Currents in Modern American History (1976),
reflects on the context of the mass murder: “Violence reached a crescendo
against the Indians after the Civil War and found a yet bloodier manifestation
during the protracted
conquest of the Philippines from
1898 until well into the next decade, when anywhere from 200,000 to 600,000
Filipinos were killed in an orgy of racist slaughter that evoked much
congratulations and approval....” Zinn’s A People’s History of the United
States (1980) cites 300,000 Filipinos killed in Batangas alone, while
William Pomeroy’s American Neo-Colonialism (1970) cites 600,000 Filipinos
dead in Luzon alone by 1902. The actual figure of 1.4 million covers the period
from 1899 to 1905 when resistance by the Filipino revolutionary forces mutated
from outright combat in battle to guerilla skirmishes; it doesn’t include the
thousands of Moros (Filipino Muslims) killed in the first two decades of U.S.
colonial domination. The first Philippine Republic led by General
Emilio Aguinaldo, which had already waged a successful war against the Spanish
colonizers, mounted a determined nationwide opposition against U.S. invading
forces. It continued for two more decades after Aguinaldo’s capture in 1901.
Several provinces resisted to the point where the U.S. had to employ
scorched-earth tactics, and hamletting or reconcentration to quarantine the
populace from the guerillas, resulting in widespread torture, disease, and mass
starvation. In The Specter of Genocide: Mass
Murder in Historical Perspective
(2003), Prof. Gavan McCormack argues
that the outright counterguerilla operation launched by the U.S. against the
Filipinos, an integral part of its violent pacification program, constitutes
genocide. He refers to Jean Paul Sartre’s contention that as in Vietnam, the
only anti-guerilla strategy which will be effective is the destruction of the
people, in other words, the civilians, women and children. That is what happened
in the Philippines in the first half of the bloody twentieth century. As defined by the UN 1948 Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, genocide means acts
committed with intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical,
racial or religious group. It is clear that the U.S. colonial conquest of the
Philippines deliberately sought to destroy the national sovereignty of the
Filipinos. The intent of the U.S. perpetrators included the dissolution of the
ethnic identity of the Filipinos manifest in the rhetoric, policies, and
disciplinary regimes enunciated and executed by legislators, politicians,
military personnel, and other apparatuses. The original proponents of the UN document on
genocide conceived of genocide as including acts or policies aimed at preventing
the preservation or development of racial, national, linguistic, religious, or
political groups. That would include all forms of propaganda tending by their
systematic and hateful character to provoke genocide, or tending to make it
appear as a necessary, legitimate, or excusable act. What the UN had in mind,
namely, genocide as cultural or social death of targeted groups was purged from
the final document due to the political interests of the nation-states that then
dominated the world body. What were deleted in the original draft of
the UN document are practices considered genocidal in their collective effect.
Some of them were carried out in the Philippines by the United States from 1899
up to 1946 when the country was finally granted formal independence. As with
the American Indians, U.S. colonization involved, among others, the destruction
of the specific character of a persecuted group by forced transfer of children,
forced exile, prohibition of the use of the national language, destruction of
books, documents, monuments, and objects of historical, artistic or religious
value. The goal of all colonialism is the cultural and social death of the
conquered natives, in effect, genocide. In a recent article, Genocide and America (New
York Review of Books, March 14, 2002), Samantha Power observes that US
officials had genuine difficulty distinguishing the deliberate massacre of
civilians from the casualties incurred in conventional conflict. It is precisely
the blurring of this distinction in colonial wars through racializing discourses
and practices that proves how genocide cannot be fully grasped without analyzing
the way the victimizer (the colonizing state power) categorizes the victims
(target populations) in totalizing and naturalizing modes unique perhaps to the
civilizational drives of modernity. Within the modern period, in particular, the
messianic impulse to genocide springs from the imperative of capital
accumulation and the imperative to reduce humans to commodified labor-power, to
saleable goods/services. U.S. primitive accumulation began with the early
colonies in New England and Virginia, and culminated in the 19th century with
the conquest and annexation of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, Hawaii, and the
Philippines. With the historical background of the U.S. campaigns against the
American Indians in particular, and the treatment of African slaves and Chicanos
in general, there is a need for future scholars and researchers to concretize
this idea of genocide (as byproduct of imperial expansion) by exemplary
illustrations from the U.S. colonial adventure in the Philippines. Diagnosing Historical Amnesia When U.S. occupation troops in Iraq continued
to suffer casualties every day after the war officially ended, academics and
journalists began in haste to supply capsule histories comparing their situation
with those of troops in the Philippines during the Filipino-American War
(1899-1902). A New York Times essay summed up the lesson in its title, In
1901 Philippines, Peace Cost More Lives Than Were Lost in War (2 July 2003,
B1). An article in the Los Angeles Times contrasted the simplicity of
McKinley’s easy goal of annexation (though at the cost of 4,234 U.S. soldiers
killed and 3,000 wounded) with George W. Bush’s ambition to create a new working
democracy as soon as possible (20 July 2003, M2). Reviewing the past is instructive, of course,
but we should always place it in the context of present circumstances in the
Philippines and in the international arena. What is the real connection between
the Philippines and the current U.S. war against terrorism? With the death of Martin Burnham, the hostage
held by Muslim kidnappers called the Abu Sayyaf in Mindanao, the southern
island of the Philippines, one would expect more than 1,200 American troops
(including FBI and CIA personnel) training Filipinos for that rescue mission to
be heading for home in late 2002. Instead of being recalled, reinforcements have
been brought in and more joint military exercises announced in the future.
Since September 11, 2001, U.S. media and
Filipino government organs have dilated on the Abu Sayyaf’s tenuous links with
Osama bin Laden. A criminal gang that uses Islamic slogans to hide its
kidnapping-for-ransom activities, the Abu Sayyaf is a splinter group born out of
the U.S. war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and used by the government
to sow discord among the insurgent partisans of the Moro National Liberation
Front and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. Protected by local politicians and
military officials, the Abu Sayyaf’s persistence betokens the complicated
history of the centuries-long struggle of more than ten million Muslims in the
Philippines for dignity, justice, and self-determination. What is behind the return of the former
colonizer to what was once called its insular territory administered then by the
Bureau of Indian Affairs? With Secretary Colin Powell’s decision to stigmatize
as terrorist the major insurgent groups that have been fighting for forty years
for popular democracy and independence, the Communist Party of the Philippines
and the New People’s Army, part of a coalition called the National Democratic
Front of the Philippines, the introduction of thousands of U.S. troops, weapons,
logistics, and supporting personnel has become legitimate. More is involved than
simply converting the archipelago to instant military bases and facilities for
the U.S. military in a bargain exchange for the strategic outposts, Clark Air
Base and Subic Naval Base, which were scrapped by a resurgent Filipino
nationalism a decade ago. With the military officials practically
managing the executive branch of government, the Philippine nation-state will
prove to be more of an appendage of the Pentagon than a humdrum neocolony
administered by oligarchic compradors (a cacique democracy, in the words of
Benedict Anderson), which it has been since nominal independence in 1946. On
the whole, Powell’s stigmatizing act is part of the New American Century Project
to reaffirm a new Pax Americana after the Cold War Killing Fields in Islas Pilipinas Immediately after the proclaimed defeat of
the Taliban and the rout of Osama bin Laden’s forces in Afghanistan, the
Philippines became the second front in the U.S.-led war on terrorism. Raymond
Bonner, author of Waltzing with Dictators (1987), argues that the reason
for this second front is the desire for a quick victory over terrorism, the wish
to reassert American power in Southeast Asia. If Washington’s objective is to wipe out
international terrorist organizations that pose a threat to world stability, the
Islamic terrorist groups operating in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir would seem to
be a higher priority than the Abu Sayyaf (New York Times, 10 June 2002)
or those in Indonesia, a far richer and promising region in terms of oil and
other abundant natural resources. As in the past, during the Huk rebellion in
the Philippines in the Cold War years, the U.S. acted as the world’s policemen,
aiding the local military in civic action projects to win hearts and minds, a
rehearsal for Vietnam. The Stratfor Research Group believes that Washington is
using the Abu Sayyaf as a cover for establishing a forward logistics and
operation base in Southeast Asia in order to be able to conduct swift
pre-emptive strikes against enemies in Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, China, and
elsewhere. Overall, however, the intervention of U.S.
Special Forces in solving a local problem inflamed Filipino sensibilities, its
collective memory still recovering from the nightmare of the U.S.-supported
brutal Marcos dictatorship. What disturbed everyone was the Cold-War practice of
Joint Combined Exchange Training exercises. In South America and Africa, such U.S.
foreign policy initiatives merged with counter-insurgency operations that
chanelled military logistics and equipment to favored regimes notorious for
flagrant human rights violations. In Indonesia during the Suharto regime, for
example, U.S. Special Operations Forces trained government troops accused by
Amnesty International of kidnapping and torture of activists, especially in East
Timor and elsewhere. In El Salvador, Colombia and Guatemala, the U.S. role in
organizing death squads began with Special Operations Forces advisers who set up
intelligence networks ostensibly against the narcotics trade but also against
leftist insurgents and nationalists. During the Huk uprising in the Philippines,
Col. Edward Lansdale, who later masterminded the Phoenix atrocities in Vietnam,
rehearsed similar counter-insurgency techniques combined with other
anticommunist tricks of the trade. Now U.S. soldiers in active combat side by
side with Filipinos will pursue the terrorists defined by the U.S. State
Department, guerillas of the New People’s Army, Moro resistance fighters, and
other progressive sectors of Filipino society. Are we seeing American troops in the
boondocks (bundok, in the original Tagalog, means mountain) again? Are
we experiencing a traumatic attack of dejaˆ vu? A moment of reflection
returns us to what Bernard Fall called the first Vietnam, the Filipino-American
War of 1899-1902, in which at least 1.4 million Filipinos were killed.
The campaign to conquer the Philippines was
designed in accordance with President McKinley’s policy of Benevolent
Assimilation of the uncivilized and unchristian natives, a civilizing mission
that Mark Twain considered worthy of the Puritan settlers and the pioneers in
the proverbial virgin land. In Twain’s classic prose: Thirty thousand killed a
million. It seems a pity that the historian let that get out; it is really a
most embarrassing circumstance. This was a realization of the barbarism that
Henry Adams feared before Admiral George Dewey entered Manila Bay on 1 May 1898:
“I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year’s warfare in
the Philippines where we must slaughter a million or two of foolish Malays in
order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric trailways.” In Benevolent Assimilation: The American
Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (1982), Stuart Creighton Miller
recounts the U.S. military’s scorched earth tactics in Samar and Batangas,
atrocities from search and destroy missions reminiscent of Song My and My Lai in
Vietnam. This episode in the glorious history of the Empire is usually accorded
a marginal footnote, or a token paragraph in school textbooks. Miller only
mentions in passing the U.S. attempt to subjugate the unhispanized Moros, the
Muslim Filipinos in Mindanao and Sulu islands. On March 9, 1906, four years after President
Theodore Roosevelt declared the war over, Major General Leonard Wood, commanding
five hundred and forty soldiers, killed a beleaguered group of six hundred
Muslim men, women and children in the battle of Mount Dajo. A less publicized
but horrific battle occurred on June 13, 1913, when the Muslim sultanate of Sulu
mobilized about 5,000 followers (men, women and children) against the American
troops led by Capt. John Pershing. The battle of Mount Bagsak, 25 kilometers
east of Jolo City, ended with the death of 340 Americans and of 2,000 (some say
3000) Moro defenders. Pershing was true to form. Earlier he had left a path of
destruction in Lanao, Samal Island, and other towns where local residents fought
his incursions. Anyone who resisted U.S. aggression was either a brigand or
seditious bandit. The carnage continued up to the anti-brigandage campaigns of
the first three decades which suppressed numerous peasant revolts and workers
strikes against the colonial state and its local agencies. With the help of the U.S. sugar-beet lobby,
the Philippine Commonwealth of 1935 was established. It was constituted with a
compromise mix of laws and regulations then being tried in Puerto Rico, Cuba,
and Hawaii. Eventually the islands became a model of a pacified neocolony.
Except perhaps for Miller’s aforementioned book and assorted studies, nothing
much about the revealing effects of that process of subjugation of Filipinos
have registered in the American Studies archive. This is usually explained by
the theory that the U.S. did not follow the old path of European colonialism,
and its war against Spain was pursued to liberate the natives from Spanish
tyranny. If so, that war now rescued from the dustbin of history signaled the
advent of a globalizing U.S. interventionism whose latest manifestation, in a
different historical register, is Bush’s National Security Strategy of
exercising self-defense [of the Homeland] by acting preemptively, assuming that
might is right. Revival of People’s War The revolutionary upsurge in the Philippines
against the Marcos dictatorship (1972-1986) stirred up dogmatic Cold War
complacency. With the inauguration of a new stage in Cultural Studies in the
nineties, the historical reality of U.S. imperialism (the genocide of Native
Americans is replayed in the subjugation of the inhabitants of the Philippines,
Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Cuba) is finally being excavated and re-appraised.
But this is, of course, a phenomenon brought
about by a confluence of multifarious events, among them: the demise of the
Soviet Union as a challenger to U.S. hegemony; the sublation of the Sixties in
both Fukuyama’s end of history and the interminable culture wars, the
Palestininan intifadas; the Zapatista revolt against NAFTA; the heralding of
current anti-terrorism by the Gulf War; and the fabled clash of civilizations.
Despite these changes, the old frames of
intelligibility have not been modified or reconfigured to understand how
nationalist revolutions in the colonized territories cannot be confused with the
nationalist patriotism of the dominant or hegemonic metropoles, or how the mode
of U.S. imperial rule in the twentieth century differs in form and content from
those of the British or French in the nineteenth century. The received consensus
of a progressive modernizing influence from the advanced industrial powers
remains deeply entrenched. Even postcolonial and postmodern thinkers commit
the mistake of censuring the decolonizing projects of the subalternized peoples
because these projects (in the superior gaze of these thinkers) have been
damaged, or are bound to become perverted into despotic postcolonial regimes,
like those in Ghana, Algeria, Vietnam, the Philippines, and elsewhere. The only
alternative, it seems, is to give assent to the process of globalization under
the aegis of the World Bank/IMF/WTO, and hope for a kind of benevolent
assimilation. What remains to be carefully considered,
above all, is the historical specificity or singularity of each of these
projects of national liberation, their class composition, historical roots,
programs, ideological tendencies, and political agendas within the context of
colonial/imperial domination. It is not possible to pronounce summary judgments
on the character and fate of nationalist movements in the peripheral formations
without focusing on the complex manifold relations between colonizer and
colonized, the dialectical interaction between their forces as well as others
caught in the conflict. Otherwise, the result would be a disingenuous ethical
utopianism such as that found in U.S. postnationalist and postcolonialist
discourse which, in the final analysis, functions as an apology for the
ascendancy of the transnational corporate powers embedded in the nation-states
of the North, and for the hegemonic rule of the only remaining superpower
claiming to act in the name of freedom and democracy. No Alternative to the National Democratic Revolution The case of the national-democratic struggle
in the Philippines may be taken as an example of one historic singularity.
Because of the historical specificity of the Philippines emergence as a
dependent nation-state controlled by the United States in the twentieth century,
nationalism as a mass movement has always been defined by events of
anti-imperialist rebellion. U.S. conquest entailed long and sustained violent
suppression of the Filipino revolutionary forces for decades. The central
founding event (as the philosopher Alain Badiou would define the term) is the
1896 revolution against Spain and its sequel, the Filipino-American war of
1899-1902, and the Moro resistance up to 1914 against U.S. colonization. Another
political sequence of events is the Sakdal uprising in the thirties during the
Commonwealth period followed by the Huk uprising in the forties and fifties in a
sequence that is renewed in the First Quarter Storm of 1970 against the
neocolonial state. While the feudal oligarchy and the comprador
class under U.S. patronage utilized elements of the nationalist tradition formed
in 1896-1898 as their ideological weapon for establishing moral-intellectual
leadership, their attempts have never been successful. Propped by the
Pentagon-supported military, the Arroyo administration today, for example, uses
the U.S. slogan of democracy against terrorism and the fantasies of the
neoliberal free market to legitimize its continued exploitation of workers,
peasants, women and ethnic minorities. Following a long and tested tradition of
grassroots mobilization, Filipino nationalism has always remained centered on
the peasantry’s demand for land closely tied to the popular-democratic demand
for equality and genuine sovereignty. For over a century now, U.S.-backed
developmentalism and modernization have utterly failed in the Philippines. The
resistance against globalized capital and its neoliberal extortions is
spearheaded today by a national-democratic mass movement of various ideological
persuasions. There is also a durable Marxist-led insurgency that seeks to
articulate the unfinished revolution of 1896 in its demand for national
independence against U.S. control and social justice for the majority of
citizens (80 million) ten percent of whom are now migrant workers abroad.
Meanwhile, the Muslim community in the southern part of the Philippines
initiated its armed struggle for self-determination during the Marcos
dictatorship (1972-1986) and continues today as a broadly based movement for
autonomy, despite the Islamic ideology of its teacher-militants. Recalling the genocidal U.S. campaigns cited
above, BangsaMoro nationalism cannot forget its Muslim singularity which is
universalized in the principles of equality, justice, and the right to
self-determination. In the wake of past defeats of peasant revolts, the Filipino
culture of nationalism constantly renews its anti-imperialist vocation by
mobilizing new forces (women and church people in the sixties, and the
indigenous or ethnic minorities in the seventies and eighties). It is
organically embedded in emancipatory social and political movements whose origin
evokes in part the Enlightenment narrative of sovereignty as mediated by
third-world nationalist movements (Gandhi, Ho Chi Minh, Mao) but whose sites of
actualization are the local events of mass insurgency against continued U.S.
hegemony. The Philippines as an imagined and actually
experienced ensemble of communities, or multiplicities in motion, remains in the
process of being constructed primarily through modes of political and social
resistance against corporate transnationalism (or globalization, in the trendy
parlance) and its technologically mediated ideologies, fashioning thereby the
appropriate cultural forms of dissent, resistance, and subversion worthy of its
people’s history and its collective vision. Bulatlat © 2004 Bulatlat
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