On 12 June 1898, 106 years ago this week, the first Asian republic was
born in Cavit el Viejo (now Kawit), Philippines, with Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy
as founding president. The new Filipino state called itself a dictatorship but
subsequent decrees showed its unmistakable republican streak, culminating with
the adoption of the Malolos Constitution a few months later.
The
proclamation of independence brimmed with faith in the avowals of the rising
global power at the time, the United States, to protect the fledgling state. An
American colonel witnessed the proclamation. By then, Philippine forces
controlled all of Spanish Philippines except Manila, which was surrounded by
12,000 Filipino troops waiting for Aguinaldo’s signal to seize the capital.
But
while Admiral Dewey, commander of the US Navy in the Pacific, was encouraging
Filipinos to fight the Spanish colonizers, the US and Spain were negotiating
peace at the expense of Filipinos.
Finally,
for an indemnity, Spain ceded to the United States a Philippines it had already
lost to a revolution. The Spaniards surrendered Manila to the Americans after a
mock battle in which one ceremonial shot was fired, denying the Filipinos a
triumphant march into their own capital.
For the
Filipinos it was a bitter awakening. While Dewey lulled them with assurances
that they were fighting a common enemy, he was really buying time for regiments
of American volunteers to cross the Pacific Ocean for a blatant invasion.
Naturally, war broke out.
The
volunteers thought they’d amuse themselves shooting down “savages” for a couple
of weeks. But the conflict would last a bloody decade and a half, with the
Filipinos resorting to guerilla tactics and the Americans scorching the earth.
And committing atrocities. It was the prototype of the Vietnam war.
In the
US, the war was opposed by eminences like the presidential candidate William
Jennings Bryan, Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie — but Bryan lost to William
McKinley and the hawks controlled the media.
Once a
detachment of bolo men sneaked into a US military hospital in Vigan, Ilocos Sur
and slaughtered all the wounded Americans lying helpless there. If there had
been television at that time and the mangled bodies were dumped electronically
into the living rooms of America, who knows how the war would have moved on?
Since
then, times have changed. In 1901, even as war raged, some 500 American
teachers on board the USS Thomas landed in the Philippines and brought the boon
of the US public system even to far-flung barrios. In the following years,
thousands more of those “Thomasites” came and won hearts and minds of a whole
nation forever. They were the first Peace Corps. And since then Filipinos have
fought fiercely alongside their American buddies in the Pacific War. They have
hosted American military bases and retrieved those bases when the relevant
agreement expired in 1991.
Today
the Philippines and the US have just concluded an Enhanced Defense Cooperation
Agreement (EDCA) that’s supposed to be in implementation of the Mutual Defense
Treaty of 1951 and the Visiting Forces Agreement of 1999. These agreements are
a far cry from the informal unwritten deals between President Aguinaldo and
Admiral Dewey more than a hundred years ago. The character of the US Navy has
also changed since then.
Docked
in Jakarta recently, the USS Blue Ridge, flagship of the US Seventh Fleet,
hosted a reception. I was surprised to find out during the merry event that one
of every five persons on the ship was either a Filipino at birth or of Filipino
parentage. I imagine that’s the case all over the US Navy. If only for that,
I’m sure I won’t wake up one morning to realize that the US has made a secret
deal with China against the Philippines. Aguinaldo can rest in peace.
Jamil
Maidan Flores is a Jakarta-based writer whose interests include philosophy and
foreign policy. He is also an English-language consultant for the Indonesian
government.
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