Sunday, June 8, 2014

Once Upon a WAR


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.

 

No comments:

Post a Comment