The Insufficiency of Filipino Nationhood
by Niels Mulder
Showing posts with label About the Philippines. Show all posts
Showing posts with label About the Philippines. Show all posts
Jan 14, 2023
Feb 12, 2011
REALPOLITIK OF BUSH'S REVOLUTION Part 1: The Philippines revisited
By Henry C K Liu
Asian Time Online
Nov 19, 2003
On November 6, addressing the National Endowment for Democracy, a neo-conservative organization founded during the Reagan era, US President George W Bush sought to justify the predictably endless and unsustainably high cost in lives and money of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Bush set out the argument for America's war against Iraq no longer in terms ofdefense against a threat to US security, but as part of a proactive "global democratic revolution". Even if no weapons of mass destruction can be found in Iraq despite an exhaustive search, the blood and money Bush is expending in that troubled land is now justified by the noble-sounding aim of promoting Arab democracy.
The president was speaking in Washington on a theme that freedom is "worth dying for" at the same time that a memorial service was being held in Iraq for the 15 US soldiers killed in a Chinook helicopter shot down by guerrilla fighters four days earlier. The first half of this month saw 44 US occupation soldiers killed by hostile fire from unidentified sources in Iraq. As of last Friday, some 9,200 US soldiers had been wounded since the war started in April, with the bulk injured by guerrilla forces or evacuated for non-combat medical reasons associated with occupation after the war formally ended.
While ignoring press inquiries on why he has thus far avoided attending any funerals for soldiers killed in action, Bush predicted that successfully implanting a democratic government in Iraq would energize a democratic revolution that would sweep away alleged tyrannies from Cuba to North Korea. Specifically, Bush proclaimed a new "forward strategy" for advancing freedom in the Middle East, declaring that six decades of excusing and accommodating dictatorships there on the part of the United States "did nothing to make us safe, because stability cannot be purchased at liberty's expense".
Bush acknowledged that the United States has historically failed to support overseas the values that it claims to uphold at home. Yet the "war on terrorism" now threatens those same values even at home, as former vice president Al Gore pointed out in Constitution Hall in Washington on November 9, three days after Bush's speech.
Gore said: "In fact, in my opinion, it makes no more sense to launch an assault on our civil liberties as the best way to get at terrorists than it did to launch an invasion of Iraq as the best way to get at Osama bin Laden. In both cases, the administration has attacked the wrong target. In both cases, they have recklessly put our country in grave and unnecessary danger, while avoiding and neglecting obvious and much more important challenges that would actually help to protect the country. In both cases, the administration has fostered false impressions and misled the nation with superficial, emotional and manipulative presentations that are not worthy of American democracy. In both cases, they have exploited public fears for partisan political gain and postured themselves as bold defenders of our country while actually weakening, not strengthening, America. In both cases, they have used unprecedented secrecy and deception in order to avoid accountability to the Congress, the courts, the press and the people.
"Indeed, this administration has turned the fundamental presumption of our democracy on its head. A government of and for the people is supposed to be generally open to public scrutiny by the people - while the private information of the people themselves should be routinely protected from government intrusion. But instead this administration is seeking to conduct its work in secret even as it demands broad unfettered access to personal information about American citizens. Under the rubric of protecting national security, they have obtained new powers to gather information from citizens and to keep it secret. Yet at the same time they themselves refuse to disclose information that is highly relevant to the war against terrorism."
Gore went on to cite specific cases of abuse of the rights of US citizens: "In an even more brazen move, more than two years after they rounded up over 1,200 individuals of Arab descent, they still refuse to release the names of the individuals they detained, even though virtually every one of those arrested has been 'cleared' by the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] of any connection to terrorism and there is absolutely no national security justification for keeping the names secret. Yet at the same time, White House officials themselves leaked the name of a CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] operative serving the country, in clear violation of the law, in an effort to get at her husband, who had angered them by disclosing that the president had relied on forged evidence in his State of the Union address as part of his effort to convince the country that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of building nuclear weapons. And even as they claim the right to see the private bank records of every American, they are adopting a new policy on the Freedom of Information Act that actively encourages federal agencies to fully consider all potential reasons for non-disclosure regardless of whether the disclosure would be harmful. In other words, the federal government will now actively resist complying with any request for information." Gore pointed out that since the Bush administration has warned that the war on terrorism will last a lifetime, it follows that the suspension of civil liberties in the United States will be permanent.
Bush acknowledged that putting realpolitik ahead of freedom in the past has backfired. Yet it is doubtful that a preference for realpolitik is the sole cause of the current anti-US rage in the region and indeed worldwide. The detente policy of the late president Richard Nixon, a modern master of realpolitik, elevated the international image of the United States as a leader for world peace, mostly a result of his historic opening to China, a communist state. The problem was not realpolitik, but realpolitik in support of bogus democratic claims.
The main part of the blame for the recent rise of post-Cold War global antagonism toward the US has to go to neo-liberalism, which, through unregulated markets, has made a few select elites around the world rich, but left the masses in dire poverty and hopeless desperation, thus providing a fertile breeding ground for terrorism not just against the United States, but against many of its allies. Economic democracy has not been part of the values of the US democratic system in the past decade, if ever, as the disparity of wealth and income not only widened but was condoned by policy and ideology both at home and abroad. It is true that political terrorists tend to come from the well-educated middle class, not quite indigent members of society. But that is because of the poor lack the education, the wherewithal and, above all, the political consciousness to understand the geopolitical causes of their plight. It falls upon the educated among the exploited to develop the political consciousness, the intellectual awareness and the personal courage to make the supreme sacrifice in the struggle for national liberation. American terrorists against British tyranny before the War of Independence were no exception.
Bush is not the first president to promise to put democracy at the forefront of US policy. He cited Woodrow Wilson, who put forth his idealistic Fourteen Points proposal to a skeptical, war-torn Europe, but failed to save the world from another World War within a couple of decades. He also cited Franklin D Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, annunciated in a January 6, 1941, message to Congress proposing lend-lease legislation to support war allies. The Four Freedoms (of speech, of worship, from want and from fear), FDR proclaimed, should prevail everywhere in the world, but they were largely sidetracked by the postwar US fixation on anti-communism, particularly freedom from want.
Freedom of association has not always been an American heritage. The Alien and Registration Act of 1940 proposed by congressman Howard Smith of Virginia, generally referred to as the Smith Act, was signed into law by FDR on June 28, 1940, 16 months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. It was the first statute since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to make the mere advocacy of ideas a federal crime. So much for freedom of speech and freedom from fear in the Land of the Free.
FBI director J Edgar Hoover, proud of his leading role in the government's nationwide persecution and deportation of political radicals and left-inclined immigrants during the 1919 Palmer Raids, suggested to president Harry Truman in 1948 that the Smith Act be used against the US Communist Party and its sympathizers. Truman embraced the idea as a way to outflank Republican rivals who were accusing the Democrats of being "soft" on communism. Going after domestic communists also complemented Truman's international policy in subduing "subversion" in Greece, Italy and France, where communism was popular and Communist parties could conceivably win elections and share or take total control of national governments outside of the Soviet bloc through democratic means.
The Smith Act trials of the 1950s, the most significant political-heresy trials in US history, brought Cold War hysterics into US domestic politics. The 11 defendants were not charged with any overt acts, only that "they conspired ... to organize as the Communist Party and willfully to advocate and teach the principles of Marxism-Leninism", which the government alleged to mean "overthrowing and destroying the government of the United States by force and violence" at some unspecified future time. The defendants were also accused of conspiring to "publish and circulate ... books, articles, magazines and newspapers advocating the principles of Marxism-Leninism". The Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Lenin's State and Revolution, and Joseph Stalin's Foundation of Leninism were placed into evidence as books from which the defendants taught, which the prosecution, the judge and the jury all concluded to be criminal acts.
The defendants fought the thought-crime nature of the proceedings, claiming, to no avail, that they were for majority rule and against violence, except as a method of self-defense. They pointed out that Marxism-Leninism sees the collapse of capitalism as a dialectic inevitability of the inherent contradictions of capitalism, that revolution was only necessary when reactionary oppression of workers was unleashed against the tide of history by governments undemocratically captured by capitalist interests.
Given the climate of hysteria generated by controlled mass media, guilty verdicts for all were foreordained. Ten were sentenced to and served five years in federal prison as political prisoners in all but name, and had to also pay fines of US$10,000 each. The 11th defendant, Robert G Thompson, a bearer of the World War II Distinguished Service Cross for bravery, received his government's gratitude in the form of a slightly shorter sentence of only three years. While in prison, Thompson had his skull crushed by a group of Yugoslav fascists armed with a pipe, and another defendant, Harry Winston, denied essential medical care in prison, was left blinded. As if that were not enough, each of the defense lawyers was cited for contempt by the biased judge and had to serve a prison sentence. Among those who served six months was George C Crockett, a black lawyer who, later in his career, was elected as a judge in Detroit's criminal court and then as a Michigan congressman.
The convicted communists appealed their cases but, in 1951, the United States Supreme Court upheld the convictions by a vote of six (including four Truman appointees) to two. Chief justice Fred Vinson wrote the decision for the majority. Justices Hugo Black and William O Douglas dissented. Black noted that the government indictment was "a virulent form of prior censorship of speech and press", which is forbidden by the First Amendment and therefore unconstitutional. Douglas wrote of his belief that the Communist Party could not possibly represent a "clear and present danger" as required in the law to qualify as an outlawed organization. A true defender of democracy, he made clear the distinction between defending the party's legal rights and supporting its ideology.
Unlike George W Bush, Woodrow Wilson did not try to impose his version of democracy with smart bombs and cruise missiles, nor with invasions and occupation of small nations, or dead-or-alive cash bounties for enemy leaders. Still, the idealist Wilson did remain silent about US occupation of the Philippines, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, in clear violation of one of his Fourteen Points, the right of self-determination for colonies. FDR stood for the dismantling of European imperialism and for global decolonization, but deferred to Winston Churchill, who insisted that Britain did not fight the war to give up the empire and who found the perfect excuse for imperialism in anti-communism.
The Philippine failure
The Philippines is a living example of failed American democracy, which Bush understandably did not mention in his speech on world democratic revolution. The persecution of Muslims by Christians has been routinely condoned throughout the history of the Philippines and now as part of the US "war on terrorism" in that country. In the Moro Massacre in 1906, US troops led by General John Pershing slaughtered some 3,000 Muslim Filipino men, women and children on Mount Dajo during the Philippine-American War, a war of independence and resistance against US colonization. It was an atrocity not forgotten by Philippine Muslims. Among those Americans outraged by the massacre was Mark Twain, whose bitter satire about battle-glorifying oratory, "The War Prayer", was inspired by his opposition to US military policy. "The wounds over the massacre of our forefathers by the American colonializers have not been healed," said Temojin Tulawie, leader of a new group opposing the decision by the current Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to bring in US troops for combat duties against a militant faction of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).
The US government during the Cold War used the threat of communism as the pretext for tightening US hegemonic control over the Philippines. It sent military advisers and aid to strengthen the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos and to guarantee subservience to US economic and military control. Today, Washington is using the "war on terrorism" as a cover for a renewed attempt to tighten its hegemonic control globally in the name of democracy. It aims to re-establish US military domination of the Philippines and to undertake military intervention in other countries of Asia and the Middle East.
In the southern Philippines, Muslims have been fighting government forces for more than 30 years. While some Mindanao Muslim leaders want a separate Islamic state, their separatist aims have been motivated by centuries of government exclusionary neglect, military repression and endemic poverty. Arroyo is talking peace with the MILF while waging war on the Abu Sayyaf, a militant wing. In a blow to Arroyo's bid to achieve peace in Mindanao, another Muslim rebel group, the Moro National Liberation Front, recently staged an uprising on the southern island of Jolo. This Muslim faction had signed a 1996 peace pact with the Philippine government. Militants from neighboring Indonesia and Malaysia have also reportedly trained with the MILF. Historically, the United States has played a controversial role in the Philippines, where 100 years ago it waged a major war on Mindanao Muslim freedom fighters who fiercely resisted US colonial rule.
In the 1970s, a new generation of Muslim freedom fighters waged war against the Marcos regime, which received military aid from the United States. One of the young freedom fighters was Al Haj Murad, now commander-in-chief of the MILF. "This is a longtime problem," Murad said from Kuala Lumpur, where peace talks with Arroyo's government were being held. "If we trace our history, America has played a role in the making of this problem."
On October 18, Bush, during a whirlwind tour of Southeast Asia, told the Philippine Congress of this former US colony that Iraq, like the Philippines, could be transformed into a vibrant democracy. Bush seemed oblivious to the possibility that the people of Iraq, like the Moro Muslims of the Philippines, would find the avoidance of a fate like the Philippines' worth dying for. Bush also pledged his help in remaking the troubled and sometimes mutinous Philippine military into a force for fighting terrorism, not particularly a tool of democracy.
During an eight-hour visit, Bush for the first time drew explicit comparisons between the transition he is seeking in Iraq and the rough road to democracy that the Philippines traveled from the time the United States seized it from Spain in 1898 to the present day. "Some say the culture of the Middle East will not sustain the institutions of democracy," Bush said, taking on the critics of his goal to use Iraq as a laboratory for spreading democratic institutions in the Middle East. "The same doubts were once expressed about the culture of Asia. Those doubts were proven wrong nearly six decades ago." Few who are familiar with the history of Asia have any idea what Bush was referring to.
David E Sanger, reporting in the New York Times, wrote: "While the administration often speaks of the occupations of Japan and Germany after World War II as rough models for the effort to rebuild Iraq, Mr Bush used the visit to the former US colony to make a less explicit analogy to the American administration of the Philippines, which also led to the formation of a democracy. But the comparison has less power to reassure, given that the Philippine government did not gain full autonomy for five decades.
"Aides traveling with Mr Bush made it clear that he was worried about the stability of the Philippines. After meeting with President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her cabinet shortly after he landed, Mr Bush announced that the two governments had formalized a five-year plan 'to modernize and reform' the Philippine military, although his aides said it was unclear how much of the cost the United States would contribute. 'The numbers are still in flux,' a senior administration official told reporters, adding that the administration was still looking for roughly $20 million to provide the Philippines with used US military helicopters that Mr Bush promised a year ago to help root out Abu Sayyaf, the group that the US strongly suspected of being linked to al-Qaeda. The announcement was part of a broad plan to provide help to the Philippine military, which Mr Bush sees as the best hope of preventing the Philippines from becoming a terrorist haven."
Since Bush apparently thinks the Philippines already enjoys democracy, it begs the question why terrorism continues to flourish in a democracy and by extension, how a "world democratic revolution" would end terrorism.
The president was speaking in Washington on a theme that freedom is "worth dying for" at the same time that a memorial service was being held in Iraq for the 15 US soldiers killed in a Chinook helicopter shot down by guerrilla fighters four days earlier. The first half of this month saw 44 US occupation soldiers killed by hostile fire from unidentified sources in Iraq. As of last Friday, some 9,200 US soldiers had been wounded since the war started in April, with the bulk injured by guerrilla forces or evacuated for non-combat medical reasons associated with occupation after the war formally ended.
While ignoring press inquiries on why he has thus far avoided attending any funerals for soldiers killed in action, Bush predicted that successfully implanting a democratic government in Iraq would energize a democratic revolution that would sweep away alleged tyrannies from Cuba to North Korea. Specifically, Bush proclaimed a new "forward strategy" for advancing freedom in the Middle East, declaring that six decades of excusing and accommodating dictatorships there on the part of the United States "did nothing to make us safe, because stability cannot be purchased at liberty's expense".
Bush acknowledged that the United States has historically failed to support overseas the values that it claims to uphold at home. Yet the "war on terrorism" now threatens those same values even at home, as former vice president Al Gore pointed out in Constitution Hall in Washington on November 9, three days after Bush's speech.
Gore said: "In fact, in my opinion, it makes no more sense to launch an assault on our civil liberties as the best way to get at terrorists than it did to launch an invasion of Iraq as the best way to get at Osama bin Laden. In both cases, the administration has attacked the wrong target. In both cases, they have recklessly put our country in grave and unnecessary danger, while avoiding and neglecting obvious and much more important challenges that would actually help to protect the country. In both cases, the administration has fostered false impressions and misled the nation with superficial, emotional and manipulative presentations that are not worthy of American democracy. In both cases, they have exploited public fears for partisan political gain and postured themselves as bold defenders of our country while actually weakening, not strengthening, America. In both cases, they have used unprecedented secrecy and deception in order to avoid accountability to the Congress, the courts, the press and the people.
"Indeed, this administration has turned the fundamental presumption of our democracy on its head. A government of and for the people is supposed to be generally open to public scrutiny by the people - while the private information of the people themselves should be routinely protected from government intrusion. But instead this administration is seeking to conduct its work in secret even as it demands broad unfettered access to personal information about American citizens. Under the rubric of protecting national security, they have obtained new powers to gather information from citizens and to keep it secret. Yet at the same time they themselves refuse to disclose information that is highly relevant to the war against terrorism."
Gore went on to cite specific cases of abuse of the rights of US citizens: "In an even more brazen move, more than two years after they rounded up over 1,200 individuals of Arab descent, they still refuse to release the names of the individuals they detained, even though virtually every one of those arrested has been 'cleared' by the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] of any connection to terrorism and there is absolutely no national security justification for keeping the names secret. Yet at the same time, White House officials themselves leaked the name of a CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] operative serving the country, in clear violation of the law, in an effort to get at her husband, who had angered them by disclosing that the president had relied on forged evidence in his State of the Union address as part of his effort to convince the country that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of building nuclear weapons. And even as they claim the right to see the private bank records of every American, they are adopting a new policy on the Freedom of Information Act that actively encourages federal agencies to fully consider all potential reasons for non-disclosure regardless of whether the disclosure would be harmful. In other words, the federal government will now actively resist complying with any request for information." Gore pointed out that since the Bush administration has warned that the war on terrorism will last a lifetime, it follows that the suspension of civil liberties in the United States will be permanent.
Bush acknowledged that putting realpolitik ahead of freedom in the past has backfired. Yet it is doubtful that a preference for realpolitik is the sole cause of the current anti-US rage in the region and indeed worldwide. The detente policy of the late president Richard Nixon, a modern master of realpolitik, elevated the international image of the United States as a leader for world peace, mostly a result of his historic opening to China, a communist state. The problem was not realpolitik, but realpolitik in support of bogus democratic claims.
The main part of the blame for the recent rise of post-Cold War global antagonism toward the US has to go to neo-liberalism, which, through unregulated markets, has made a few select elites around the world rich, but left the masses in dire poverty and hopeless desperation, thus providing a fertile breeding ground for terrorism not just against the United States, but against many of its allies. Economic democracy has not been part of the values of the US democratic system in the past decade, if ever, as the disparity of wealth and income not only widened but was condoned by policy and ideology both at home and abroad. It is true that political terrorists tend to come from the well-educated middle class, not quite indigent members of society. But that is because of the poor lack the education, the wherewithal and, above all, the political consciousness to understand the geopolitical causes of their plight. It falls upon the educated among the exploited to develop the political consciousness, the intellectual awareness and the personal courage to make the supreme sacrifice in the struggle for national liberation. American terrorists against British tyranny before the War of Independence were no exception.
Bush is not the first president to promise to put democracy at the forefront of US policy. He cited Woodrow Wilson, who put forth his idealistic Fourteen Points proposal to a skeptical, war-torn Europe, but failed to save the world from another World War within a couple of decades. He also cited Franklin D Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, annunciated in a January 6, 1941, message to Congress proposing lend-lease legislation to support war allies. The Four Freedoms (of speech, of worship, from want and from fear), FDR proclaimed, should prevail everywhere in the world, but they were largely sidetracked by the postwar US fixation on anti-communism, particularly freedom from want.
Freedom of association has not always been an American heritage. The Alien and Registration Act of 1940 proposed by congressman Howard Smith of Virginia, generally referred to as the Smith Act, was signed into law by FDR on June 28, 1940, 16 months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. It was the first statute since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to make the mere advocacy of ideas a federal crime. So much for freedom of speech and freedom from fear in the Land of the Free.
FBI director J Edgar Hoover, proud of his leading role in the government's nationwide persecution and deportation of political radicals and left-inclined immigrants during the 1919 Palmer Raids, suggested to president Harry Truman in 1948 that the Smith Act be used against the US Communist Party and its sympathizers. Truman embraced the idea as a way to outflank Republican rivals who were accusing the Democrats of being "soft" on communism. Going after domestic communists also complemented Truman's international policy in subduing "subversion" in Greece, Italy and France, where communism was popular and Communist parties could conceivably win elections and share or take total control of national governments outside of the Soviet bloc through democratic means.
The Smith Act trials of the 1950s, the most significant political-heresy trials in US history, brought Cold War hysterics into US domestic politics. The 11 defendants were not charged with any overt acts, only that "they conspired ... to organize as the Communist Party and willfully to advocate and teach the principles of Marxism-Leninism", which the government alleged to mean "overthrowing and destroying the government of the United States by force and violence" at some unspecified future time. The defendants were also accused of conspiring to "publish and circulate ... books, articles, magazines and newspapers advocating the principles of Marxism-Leninism". The Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Lenin's State and Revolution, and Joseph Stalin's Foundation of Leninism were placed into evidence as books from which the defendants taught, which the prosecution, the judge and the jury all concluded to be criminal acts.
The defendants fought the thought-crime nature of the proceedings, claiming, to no avail, that they were for majority rule and against violence, except as a method of self-defense. They pointed out that Marxism-Leninism sees the collapse of capitalism as a dialectic inevitability of the inherent contradictions of capitalism, that revolution was only necessary when reactionary oppression of workers was unleashed against the tide of history by governments undemocratically captured by capitalist interests.
Given the climate of hysteria generated by controlled mass media, guilty verdicts for all were foreordained. Ten were sentenced to and served five years in federal prison as political prisoners in all but name, and had to also pay fines of US$10,000 each. The 11th defendant, Robert G Thompson, a bearer of the World War II Distinguished Service Cross for bravery, received his government's gratitude in the form of a slightly shorter sentence of only three years. While in prison, Thompson had his skull crushed by a group of Yugoslav fascists armed with a pipe, and another defendant, Harry Winston, denied essential medical care in prison, was left blinded. As if that were not enough, each of the defense lawyers was cited for contempt by the biased judge and had to serve a prison sentence. Among those who served six months was George C Crockett, a black lawyer who, later in his career, was elected as a judge in Detroit's criminal court and then as a Michigan congressman.
The convicted communists appealed their cases but, in 1951, the United States Supreme Court upheld the convictions by a vote of six (including four Truman appointees) to two. Chief justice Fred Vinson wrote the decision for the majority. Justices Hugo Black and William O Douglas dissented. Black noted that the government indictment was "a virulent form of prior censorship of speech and press", which is forbidden by the First Amendment and therefore unconstitutional. Douglas wrote of his belief that the Communist Party could not possibly represent a "clear and present danger" as required in the law to qualify as an outlawed organization. A true defender of democracy, he made clear the distinction between defending the party's legal rights and supporting its ideology.
Unlike George W Bush, Woodrow Wilson did not try to impose his version of democracy with smart bombs and cruise missiles, nor with invasions and occupation of small nations, or dead-or-alive cash bounties for enemy leaders. Still, the idealist Wilson did remain silent about US occupation of the Philippines, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, in clear violation of one of his Fourteen Points, the right of self-determination for colonies. FDR stood for the dismantling of European imperialism and for global decolonization, but deferred to Winston Churchill, who insisted that Britain did not fight the war to give up the empire and who found the perfect excuse for imperialism in anti-communism.
The Philippine failure
The Philippines is a living example of failed American democracy, which Bush understandably did not mention in his speech on world democratic revolution. The persecution of Muslims by Christians has been routinely condoned throughout the history of the Philippines and now as part of the US "war on terrorism" in that country. In the Moro Massacre in 1906, US troops led by General John Pershing slaughtered some 3,000 Muslim Filipino men, women and children on Mount Dajo during the Philippine-American War, a war of independence and resistance against US colonization. It was an atrocity not forgotten by Philippine Muslims. Among those Americans outraged by the massacre was Mark Twain, whose bitter satire about battle-glorifying oratory, "The War Prayer", was inspired by his opposition to US military policy. "The wounds over the massacre of our forefathers by the American colonializers have not been healed," said Temojin Tulawie, leader of a new group opposing the decision by the current Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to bring in US troops for combat duties against a militant faction of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).
The US government during the Cold War used the threat of communism as the pretext for tightening US hegemonic control over the Philippines. It sent military advisers and aid to strengthen the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos and to guarantee subservience to US economic and military control. Today, Washington is using the "war on terrorism" as a cover for a renewed attempt to tighten its hegemonic control globally in the name of democracy. It aims to re-establish US military domination of the Philippines and to undertake military intervention in other countries of Asia and the Middle East.
In the southern Philippines, Muslims have been fighting government forces for more than 30 years. While some Mindanao Muslim leaders want a separate Islamic state, their separatist aims have been motivated by centuries of government exclusionary neglect, military repression and endemic poverty. Arroyo is talking peace with the MILF while waging war on the Abu Sayyaf, a militant wing. In a blow to Arroyo's bid to achieve peace in Mindanao, another Muslim rebel group, the Moro National Liberation Front, recently staged an uprising on the southern island of Jolo. This Muslim faction had signed a 1996 peace pact with the Philippine government. Militants from neighboring Indonesia and Malaysia have also reportedly trained with the MILF. Historically, the United States has played a controversial role in the Philippines, where 100 years ago it waged a major war on Mindanao Muslim freedom fighters who fiercely resisted US colonial rule.
In the 1970s, a new generation of Muslim freedom fighters waged war against the Marcos regime, which received military aid from the United States. One of the young freedom fighters was Al Haj Murad, now commander-in-chief of the MILF. "This is a longtime problem," Murad said from Kuala Lumpur, where peace talks with Arroyo's government were being held. "If we trace our history, America has played a role in the making of this problem."
On October 18, Bush, during a whirlwind tour of Southeast Asia, told the Philippine Congress of this former US colony that Iraq, like the Philippines, could be transformed into a vibrant democracy. Bush seemed oblivious to the possibility that the people of Iraq, like the Moro Muslims of the Philippines, would find the avoidance of a fate like the Philippines' worth dying for. Bush also pledged his help in remaking the troubled and sometimes mutinous Philippine military into a force for fighting terrorism, not particularly a tool of democracy.
During an eight-hour visit, Bush for the first time drew explicit comparisons between the transition he is seeking in Iraq and the rough road to democracy that the Philippines traveled from the time the United States seized it from Spain in 1898 to the present day. "Some say the culture of the Middle East will not sustain the institutions of democracy," Bush said, taking on the critics of his goal to use Iraq as a laboratory for spreading democratic institutions in the Middle East. "The same doubts were once expressed about the culture of Asia. Those doubts were proven wrong nearly six decades ago." Few who are familiar with the history of Asia have any idea what Bush was referring to.
David E Sanger, reporting in the New York Times, wrote: "While the administration often speaks of the occupations of Japan and Germany after World War II as rough models for the effort to rebuild Iraq, Mr Bush used the visit to the former US colony to make a less explicit analogy to the American administration of the Philippines, which also led to the formation of a democracy. But the comparison has less power to reassure, given that the Philippine government did not gain full autonomy for five decades.
"Aides traveling with Mr Bush made it clear that he was worried about the stability of the Philippines. After meeting with President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her cabinet shortly after he landed, Mr Bush announced that the two governments had formalized a five-year plan 'to modernize and reform' the Philippine military, although his aides said it was unclear how much of the cost the United States would contribute. 'The numbers are still in flux,' a senior administration official told reporters, adding that the administration was still looking for roughly $20 million to provide the Philippines with used US military helicopters that Mr Bush promised a year ago to help root out Abu Sayyaf, the group that the US strongly suspected of being linked to al-Qaeda. The announcement was part of a broad plan to provide help to the Philippine military, which Mr Bush sees as the best hope of preventing the Philippines from becoming a terrorist haven."
Since Bush apparently thinks the Philippines already enjoys democracy, it begs the question why terrorism continues to flourish in a democracy and by extension, how a "world democratic revolution" would end terrorism.
Sanger continued: "The White House and Philippine officials made much of the fact that Mr Bush was the first president to address a joint session of the Philippine Congress since Dwight D Eisenhower came here in 1960, at the very end of his presidency. But in a taste of the anger that Mr Bush has generated around the world, several thousand protesters filled the streets near the Philippine Congress and forced an hour-long delay in the arrival of the president's motorcade while the Secret Service assessed whether it was safe to move him through the streets ...
"The extraordinary security around Mr Bush's visit here underscored Washington's continuing concerns about the stability of the Philippines. Mr Bush flew in with American F-15s off the wings of Air Force One. The Secret Service would not permit Mr Bush to stay overnight." Attending a state dinner at Malacanang Palace, "Bush used his toast to salute the Philippines as 'the oldest democracy in Asia', and to recall that 17,000 US soldiers are buried here, having fallen in bitter combat with the Japanese during World War II." The instability of the Philippines as the oldest democracy in Asia and 17,000 US deaths are sobering thoughts for his world democratic revolution.
There was no indication that talks between the two leaders touched on the ban by the Philippine constitution against foreign troops engaging in combat on Philippine soil. The Pentagon had announced nine months earlier, on February 20, that the United States would send 1,700 more troops to the Philippines to fight Muslim extremists in the southern part of the country, opening yet another new front in the "war on terrorism". A six-month training mission in the Philippines in 2002 was limited to 1,300 US troops, including 160 Special Forces soldiers, to an advisory role and permitted them to fire only in self-defense in the rare cases when they accompanied Philippine soldiers. But this new mission would be a combat operation with no such restrictions on US and Philippine troops serving side by side. Under the plan, about 750 ground troops, including 350 special-operations forces, would conduct or support combat patrols in the rugged jungles of Sulu province. In addition, about 1,000 marines, armed with Cobra attack helicopters and Harrier AV-8B attack planes, would stand ready aboard two ships offshore to act as a quick-response force and provide logistics and medical support.
The operation would last as long as necessary "to disrupt and destroy" the estimated 250 members of the extremist Abu Sayyaf group, a Pentagon official said in February, and would mark a sharp escalation in the "war on terror", as the United States was then building up for an imminent war against Iraq while continuing to hunt al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Negotiations between the two countries have been under way for months, but Abu Sayyaf's repeated attacks and the bombing death of an American Green Beret in October spurred Arroyo and US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to hammer out an aggressive plan in short order.
Dispatching US commandos to the jungles of the southern Philippines came at a convenient moment for Pentagon officials, who had sought to show that the US military could fight a war with Iraq and still carry out a global hunt for terrorists. The ratio of 3,000 US troops to root out a guerrilla force of 250 comes to 12:1, still inadequately low by conventional military standards on counter-guerrilla warfare. Arroyo has walked a political tightrope at home on the sensitive issue of welcoming US military help to defeat a deadly political foe, but careful not to aggravate domestic tensions tied to America's role as a former colonial ruler consumed with intense racism and religious intolerance.
By March, the plan to send 3,000 US troops to the Philippines to track down Muslim guerrillas was left in limbo after military leaders from both countries failed to find a way to reconcile Philippine constitutional law with the prospect of US combat operations in the island nation. Speaking after talks with his Philippine counterpart, Rumsfeld told the press that both countries remained interested in arranging for expanded US military assistance to Philippine forces combating the Abu Sayyaf group. But he offered no estimate of the size, timing or exact purpose of any US force that might eventually be dispatched. General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who appeared beside Rumsfeld at the Pentagon news conference, said the commander of US forces in the Pacific had been asked to prepare other options that would be more in accordance with the Philippine constitution, which prohibits combat activities by foreign troops except in self-defense. The freezing of the original plan, only a week after a Pentagon spokesman had detailed it to journalists, was an embarrassment for Manila and Washington and a setback for the Bush administration's effort to widen its global war on terrorism. Philippine Defense Minister Angelo Reyes, at a separate news conference, described the basic problem as essentially "one of definitions and semantics". It is also the basic problem of Bush's world democratic revolution.
The negotiations about the role of US troops came amid renewed violence on the main southern island of Mindanao, where government troops earlier in the year overran a stronghold of the larger Muslim separatist group, the MILF. The guerrillas responded with bombings and stepped-up attacks on military and civilian targets. In March, a bomb blast at Davao airport killed 21 people, including an American missionary, and injured more than 100 others. The government blamed the MILF, which denied involvement. A day before, suspected MILF rebels seized a bus near Pikit town, 925 kilometers southeast of Manila, and held 40 passengers hostage before fleeing, leaving one soldier and a government militiaman dead.
The Philippine Hukbalahap movement, known simply as the Huk, was the culmination of internal Philippine conditions rooted in the country's pre-colonial period. Economic, social and political inequities existed before the arrival of the Spanish in 1521, whose aversion toward modernization further coopted ancient inequities into their own variety of mercantilism. These inequities were perpetuated into the 20th century by US policy, which added racism to economic oppression. This social and political history divided the Philippines into classes of severe disparity of wealth and opportunity, with the majority of the population left with little but a desperate desire for change.
In 1920, the Third International, or Comintern, headquartered in Moscow, met in Canton (Guangzhou), China, under the sponsorship of the then decade-old Chinese Nationalist Republic. The worldwide growth of interest in communism coincided with a rising disaffection in the Philippines fanned by two decades of oppressive US colonial policies that promised no progressive future. Most Americans viewed the Philippine people as virtual slaves, on the level of blacks, who at least spoke better English. After the Third International, an American Comintern representative, Harrison George, joined with several Philippine socialists to form the base for the first Philippine communist party. In 1927, the Philippine Labor Congress officially associated itself with the Comintern and organized the nation's first legal communist political party, the Worker's Party. Within the year, Crisanto Evangelista, as head of the Worker's Party, visited Zhou Enlai and Stalin. Upon his return to Luzon, he organized four new socialist and communist organizations against the colonial Manila government in a revolutionary movement based on class struggle.
On the 34th anniversary of the 1896 Katipunan Revolt against Spain, on August 26, 1930, Evangelista announced the founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines (PKP). Less than three months later, on the 13th anniversary of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, he formally established the PKP and proclaimed its revolutionary objectives. In his November 7, 1930, address, he set forth five guiding principles for the Philippine communist movement: to mobilize for complete national independence; to establish communism for the masses; to defend the masses against capitalist exploitation; to overthrow US imperialism in the Philippines; and to overthrow capitalism. In 1932, two years after the birth of the PKP, the colonial Philippine Supreme Court declared the PKP illegal. Evangelista and several of his chief lieutenants were imprisoned as political prisoners, charged with plotting the overthrow of the colonial government and instigating riots in Manila. Other PKP members went underground to continue to fight against landlords on behalf of peasants.
Although not widespread, PKP attacks unsettled central Luzon. In reaction, president Manuel Quezon of the colonial government instituted several minor land-reform measures, including putting a 30 percent limit on the amount of a tenant's crop that could be demanded by the landlord, but they were ignored by landlords, the colonial courts and the colonial bureaucracy.
A side-effect of the 1932 Supreme Court decision was a dramatic rise in prestige and membership of the heretofore weak Philippine Socialist Party (formed in April 1932 in Pampanga) and the militant Worker and Peasant's Union (WPU). With the PKP in an outlaw status, the socialists and WPU became the legal foci for many law-binding PKP supporters. Both organizations gained considerable influence during the next six years as poor socio-economic conditions remained unchanged for Luzon's tenant farmers and urban poor.
In 1934, the US Congress, controlled by liberal New Dealers, passed Public Law 127, the Tydings-McDuffie Act. The act, ratified in May by the colonial Philippine Congress, promised full Philippine independence on July 4, 1946, after 48 years of colonial rule, and established conditions under which the islands would be governed until that time as the Philippine Commonwealth. In the name of freedom, the act cut Filipino immigration to the United States to a quota of 50 persons per year, and all Filipinos in the United States were reclassified as "aliens", instead of US persons or subjects, including those who had served in the US military, mostly in the navy as cooks and servants. The US racist exclusion of Filipino immigration was continually connected with the issue of Philippine independence from US colonization. The United States retained control of Philippine foreign relations, defense, monetary policy and major financial transactions but granted the Philippine president and legislature the power to administer internal affairs within the limits of US tolerance.
The Tydings-McDuffie Act created dissension within the colonial Philippine government, for it promised independence at the price of formalizing colonial economic ties with the United States for the next 12 years. Many critics in Manila, and in the growing Communist and Socialist parties as well, objected strongly to the near total disregard for Philippine nationalism that these strict controls mandated. After the establishment of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935, US economic and political policy did little to alleviate the basic Philippine problems of poverty and land tenure.
To moderate growing incidents of violent nationalist demonstrations in Manila in 1938, Quezon released PKP leaders Evangelista, Luis Taruc, the Huk supreme commander, and Isabelo de los Reyes, a PKP founder, after they pledged loyalty to the government and to US efforts against Japanese expansion.
"The extraordinary security around Mr Bush's visit here underscored Washington's continuing concerns about the stability of the Philippines. Mr Bush flew in with American F-15s off the wings of Air Force One. The Secret Service would not permit Mr Bush to stay overnight." Attending a state dinner at Malacanang Palace, "Bush used his toast to salute the Philippines as 'the oldest democracy in Asia', and to recall that 17,000 US soldiers are buried here, having fallen in bitter combat with the Japanese during World War II." The instability of the Philippines as the oldest democracy in Asia and 17,000 US deaths are sobering thoughts for his world democratic revolution.
There was no indication that talks between the two leaders touched on the ban by the Philippine constitution against foreign troops engaging in combat on Philippine soil. The Pentagon had announced nine months earlier, on February 20, that the United States would send 1,700 more troops to the Philippines to fight Muslim extremists in the southern part of the country, opening yet another new front in the "war on terrorism". A six-month training mission in the Philippines in 2002 was limited to 1,300 US troops, including 160 Special Forces soldiers, to an advisory role and permitted them to fire only in self-defense in the rare cases when they accompanied Philippine soldiers. But this new mission would be a combat operation with no such restrictions on US and Philippine troops serving side by side. Under the plan, about 750 ground troops, including 350 special-operations forces, would conduct or support combat patrols in the rugged jungles of Sulu province. In addition, about 1,000 marines, armed with Cobra attack helicopters and Harrier AV-8B attack planes, would stand ready aboard two ships offshore to act as a quick-response force and provide logistics and medical support.
The operation would last as long as necessary "to disrupt and destroy" the estimated 250 members of the extremist Abu Sayyaf group, a Pentagon official said in February, and would mark a sharp escalation in the "war on terror", as the United States was then building up for an imminent war against Iraq while continuing to hunt al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Negotiations between the two countries have been under way for months, but Abu Sayyaf's repeated attacks and the bombing death of an American Green Beret in October spurred Arroyo and US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to hammer out an aggressive plan in short order.
Dispatching US commandos to the jungles of the southern Philippines came at a convenient moment for Pentagon officials, who had sought to show that the US military could fight a war with Iraq and still carry out a global hunt for terrorists. The ratio of 3,000 US troops to root out a guerrilla force of 250 comes to 12:1, still inadequately low by conventional military standards on counter-guerrilla warfare. Arroyo has walked a political tightrope at home on the sensitive issue of welcoming US military help to defeat a deadly political foe, but careful not to aggravate domestic tensions tied to America's role as a former colonial ruler consumed with intense racism and religious intolerance.
By March, the plan to send 3,000 US troops to the Philippines to track down Muslim guerrillas was left in limbo after military leaders from both countries failed to find a way to reconcile Philippine constitutional law with the prospect of US combat operations in the island nation. Speaking after talks with his Philippine counterpart, Rumsfeld told the press that both countries remained interested in arranging for expanded US military assistance to Philippine forces combating the Abu Sayyaf group. But he offered no estimate of the size, timing or exact purpose of any US force that might eventually be dispatched. General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who appeared beside Rumsfeld at the Pentagon news conference, said the commander of US forces in the Pacific had been asked to prepare other options that would be more in accordance with the Philippine constitution, which prohibits combat activities by foreign troops except in self-defense. The freezing of the original plan, only a week after a Pentagon spokesman had detailed it to journalists, was an embarrassment for Manila and Washington and a setback for the Bush administration's effort to widen its global war on terrorism. Philippine Defense Minister Angelo Reyes, at a separate news conference, described the basic problem as essentially "one of definitions and semantics". It is also the basic problem of Bush's world democratic revolution.
The negotiations about the role of US troops came amid renewed violence on the main southern island of Mindanao, where government troops earlier in the year overran a stronghold of the larger Muslim separatist group, the MILF. The guerrillas responded with bombings and stepped-up attacks on military and civilian targets. In March, a bomb blast at Davao airport killed 21 people, including an American missionary, and injured more than 100 others. The government blamed the MILF, which denied involvement. A day before, suspected MILF rebels seized a bus near Pikit town, 925 kilometers southeast of Manila, and held 40 passengers hostage before fleeing, leaving one soldier and a government militiaman dead.
The Philippine Hukbalahap movement, known simply as the Huk, was the culmination of internal Philippine conditions rooted in the country's pre-colonial period. Economic, social and political inequities existed before the arrival of the Spanish in 1521, whose aversion toward modernization further coopted ancient inequities into their own variety of mercantilism. These inequities were perpetuated into the 20th century by US policy, which added racism to economic oppression. This social and political history divided the Philippines into classes of severe disparity of wealth and opportunity, with the majority of the population left with little but a desperate desire for change.
In 1920, the Third International, or Comintern, headquartered in Moscow, met in Canton (Guangzhou), China, under the sponsorship of the then decade-old Chinese Nationalist Republic. The worldwide growth of interest in communism coincided with a rising disaffection in the Philippines fanned by two decades of oppressive US colonial policies that promised no progressive future. Most Americans viewed the Philippine people as virtual slaves, on the level of blacks, who at least spoke better English. After the Third International, an American Comintern representative, Harrison George, joined with several Philippine socialists to form the base for the first Philippine communist party. In 1927, the Philippine Labor Congress officially associated itself with the Comintern and organized the nation's first legal communist political party, the Worker's Party. Within the year, Crisanto Evangelista, as head of the Worker's Party, visited Zhou Enlai and Stalin. Upon his return to Luzon, he organized four new socialist and communist organizations against the colonial Manila government in a revolutionary movement based on class struggle.
On the 34th anniversary of the 1896 Katipunan Revolt against Spain, on August 26, 1930, Evangelista announced the founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines (PKP). Less than three months later, on the 13th anniversary of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, he formally established the PKP and proclaimed its revolutionary objectives. In his November 7, 1930, address, he set forth five guiding principles for the Philippine communist movement: to mobilize for complete national independence; to establish communism for the masses; to defend the masses against capitalist exploitation; to overthrow US imperialism in the Philippines; and to overthrow capitalism. In 1932, two years after the birth of the PKP, the colonial Philippine Supreme Court declared the PKP illegal. Evangelista and several of his chief lieutenants were imprisoned as political prisoners, charged with plotting the overthrow of the colonial government and instigating riots in Manila. Other PKP members went underground to continue to fight against landlords on behalf of peasants.
Although not widespread, PKP attacks unsettled central Luzon. In reaction, president Manuel Quezon of the colonial government instituted several minor land-reform measures, including putting a 30 percent limit on the amount of a tenant's crop that could be demanded by the landlord, but they were ignored by landlords, the colonial courts and the colonial bureaucracy.
A side-effect of the 1932 Supreme Court decision was a dramatic rise in prestige and membership of the heretofore weak Philippine Socialist Party (formed in April 1932 in Pampanga) and the militant Worker and Peasant's Union (WPU). With the PKP in an outlaw status, the socialists and WPU became the legal foci for many law-binding PKP supporters. Both organizations gained considerable influence during the next six years as poor socio-economic conditions remained unchanged for Luzon's tenant farmers and urban poor.
In 1934, the US Congress, controlled by liberal New Dealers, passed Public Law 127, the Tydings-McDuffie Act. The act, ratified in May by the colonial Philippine Congress, promised full Philippine independence on July 4, 1946, after 48 years of colonial rule, and established conditions under which the islands would be governed until that time as the Philippine Commonwealth. In the name of freedom, the act cut Filipino immigration to the United States to a quota of 50 persons per year, and all Filipinos in the United States were reclassified as "aliens", instead of US persons or subjects, including those who had served in the US military, mostly in the navy as cooks and servants. The US racist exclusion of Filipino immigration was continually connected with the issue of Philippine independence from US colonization. The United States retained control of Philippine foreign relations, defense, monetary policy and major financial transactions but granted the Philippine president and legislature the power to administer internal affairs within the limits of US tolerance.
The Tydings-McDuffie Act created dissension within the colonial Philippine government, for it promised independence at the price of formalizing colonial economic ties with the United States for the next 12 years. Many critics in Manila, and in the growing Communist and Socialist parties as well, objected strongly to the near total disregard for Philippine nationalism that these strict controls mandated. After the establishment of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935, US economic and political policy did little to alleviate the basic Philippine problems of poverty and land tenure.
To moderate growing incidents of violent nationalist demonstrations in Manila in 1938, Quezon released PKP leaders Evangelista, Luis Taruc, the Huk supreme commander, and Isabelo de los Reyes, a PKP founder, after they pledged loyalty to the government and to US efforts against Japanese expansion.
Evangelista's bitter opposition to the Quezon administration continued until 1941, when the threat of imminent Japanese invasion brought a temporary truce and offers from the PKP to support the Commonwealth. With the approval of General Douglas MacArthur, commander of US forces in the Philippines, Quezon, who trusted neither Evangelista nor the coalition, refused the offer and refused to negotiate any cooperative agreements with them.
Philippine nationalism struggled for cultural, political and economic independence after years of colonial rule and foreign exploitation. In the Philippines, as in most of Asia, nationalism had no place to turn except to communism. The 1960s were the height of a renewed nationalism in the Philippines. More than a decade after gaining independence, many Philippine nationalists were reexamining their country's cultural, political and economic ties with the United States, their former colonizer. Facts were not supportive of US claims of freedom and democracy that promised to bring prosperity and equality and end racism. Attesting to these growing nationalistic sentiments was, for example, the move of the official date of the Philippine independence from July 4, 1946, the day the US granted the Philippines complete independence, to June 12, 1898, the day the Philippine Revolutionary Government under General Emilio Aguinaldo declared independence from Spain, the same year the US acquired the Philippines as a colony.
The Cold War solidified continuing US domination of the Philippines. On September 8, 1954, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) was organized in Manila by nine countries including the Philippines to deter communism in the region. Growing nationalism in the Philippines was again repressed when martial law was declared in September 21, 1972, by Marcos. Many Philippine nationalists, among them student activists, who could not afford to flee into exile, took up arms and were arrested by the Philippine Constabulary. They were summarily branded as communists and executed. Many others were "silenced" by wholesale violation of their constitutional rights, such as the freedom of press, of speech and of assembly as Marcos begun to rule by decrees until the evening hours of February 25, 1986, when Marcos, his wife Imelda, and their 60-member entourage fled the grounds of the presidential palace in Manila for exile in Hawaii.
The United States supported the Marcos regime, which lasted for 15 years, to combat the threat of communism in the Philippines and Southeast Asia and to secure US military presence in the region with military bases in the Philippines to maintain strategic advantages during the Vietnam War, as well as throughout the Cold War. Persistent Philippine nationalism finally forced the removal of US bases in 1992.
Two parties are better than one
The first Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) was formed in 1930 under the leadership of Crisanto Evangelista, a radical labor leader. This party was inspired by Soviet communism and it aimed to establish a Soviet-type government in the Philippines. The party was outlawed in 1932 but legalized by president Manuel Quezon in 1937 during the Commonwealth Period under the liberal Roosevelt administration.
Having acquired legal status, the CPP decided to participate in Commonwealth elections. In 1938, it merged with the Socialist Party of Pedro Abad Santos. The Socialist Party was also instrumental in the formation of the Popular Front, which participated in the congressional and local elections during the Commonwealth Period. During Japanese occupation, the Communist Party, the merger of the Communist and Socialist parties, went underground to fight the Japanese imperial forces after the imperious US Lieutenant-General Douglas MacArthur fled to Australia, leaving Lieutenant-General Jonathan Wainwright to surrender a combined US and Philippine force of 145,000 soldiers to the Japanese, despite MacArthur's parting order to hold at all cost. Some 16,000 US soldiers were taken as prisoners by the Japanese.
MacArthur, as head of the US military mission to the Philippines and field marshal of the Philippine Commonwealth Army since 1935, was responsible for the establishment of an effective training and defense plan, which even after five years of preparation, with a combined force of 145,000 under his command, failed to foil the Japanese invasion. MacArthur had badly underestimated Japanese capabilities and intentions. Yet, unlike the army and navy commanders at Pearl Harbor who were caught off guard and subsequently faced accusation of derelict of duty, MacArthur was not cashiered. Instead, his image took on heroic dimensions in the American public eye, made famous by his public vow: "I shall return."
In truth, MacArthur had mishandled the defense of the Philippines against the invasion, opting to meet Japanese amphibious assaults on the beaches, despite the grave qualitative deficiencies of the new Philippine army he was responsible for training and despite the decimation of his air force on the ground by Japanese bombers in the first three days of the campaign. The result was a military debacle.
MacArthur ordered a fallback of his battered troops to Bataan, abandoning supplies allocated forward, thus foreclosing any chance of a prolonged defense. The Japanese attack on the Philippines occurred nine hours after their attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Despite that nine-hour warning of the outbreak of hostilities with Japan, MacArthur was paralyzed by indecision during these crucial hours and failed to bring his forces to a state of readiness to meet an imminent Japanese attack. MacArthur's indecision, combined with poor military judgment and the slackness in his command structure, led to the destruction of half of his air force of 277 aircraft on the ground (the air force in Hawaii had 231 aircraft on December 1, 1941, one week before the Japanese attack) and his troops being denied adequate supplies to withstand a lengthy siege. One squadron of fighter planes, ordered to relocate to a secret airbase safe from Japanese attack, could not find their well-camouflaged destination, and had to return to their exposed old base. With the US surrender, the resistance fell entirely on the shoulders of the Philippine communists.
The Communist Party formed a military arm known by the historical name of Hukakahap, which kept up the resistance throughout Japanese occupation and contributed significantly to the successful return of the United States in 1944, with a force larger than any in the European theater except the Normandy invasion's Operation Overlord. The Japanese defense of the Philippines cost its army 500,000 deaths.
MacArthur, whose anti-communism fervor was legendary, acknowledged the courageous war efforts of the Philippine communists and awarded many of them medals of honors. After the war, the Huks participated in the formation of the independence government in 1946, and participated in the election. Its winning candidates, however, were not allowed seats in the legislature because they were communists. Hence, the Huks resumed their armed struggle and renamed themselves the HMB (Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan). During the administration of president Elpidio Quirino, the Huks were granted amnesty and Luis Taruc, the Huk leader, pledged loyalty to the Philippine government. But the amnesty program was not honored and the Huks returned to the mountains to wage armed struggle.
During the administration of president Ramon Magsaysay, the government conducted a vigorous campaign against the Huks and sent reporter Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino as a special emissary to negotiate for an amnesty for Taruc on February 17, 1954. The task launched Aquino's political career, which ended with his assassination on August 21, 1983, on the plane on which he was returning from exile, in full view of world television. His window, Corazon, assumed the presidency on February 25, 1986.
CCP secretary general Jesus Lava was arrested on May 21, 1964, during the administration of president Diosdado Macapagal. On September 11, 1968, Taruc was given executive clemency by the administration of president Ferdinand Marcos on the request of publisher Joaquin Roces of the Manila Times. During this period, the CPP internal ideological struggle reached its height. Jose Sison, leader of the Kabanataang Makabayan and a very active youth cadre of the old CPP, re-established the Communist Party of the Philippines following Maoist ideology.
The re-established CPP was launched on December 26, 1968, coinciding with the 75th birth anniversary of Mao Zedong. The new party used Maoist thought in analyzing the "chronic crisis" besetting Philippine society. Thus, two communist parties existed in the Philippines in the late 1960s, namely: the old Communist Party of Lava and Taruc and the new Communist Party of Sison. The former was a Soviet-inspired communist party while the latter was Maoist-inspired. Both claimed to uphold the ideology of Marxism-Leninist thought, with the new CPP adding Maoism as a central ideology.
The new CPP campaigned against Marcos' decision to send troops to Vietnam. It also campaigned against US intervention in Philippine politics and condemned landlord domination of the Philippine economy. Cynical of legal political processes out of experience, the new CPP waged an armed struggle against the dictatorial Marcos government. It was during the Marcos period that the membership of the new CPP started to increase, usually coming from university students and young professors. On March 29, 1969, the new CPP founded its military arm, the New People's Army (NPA). The NPA was headed by a former Huk commander in Central Luzon, Dante Buscayno. Of peasant origin, Buscayno was encouraged by Sison to head the NPA in its struggle against US imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratic capitalism. The NPA was able to strengthen its numbers by recruiting many peasant guerrillas in the countryside. The CPP and NPA worked together for the establishment of their vision: a national democratic government in the Philippines, which would serve as a transition stage toward socialism, much to the apprehension of the United States.
When Marcos declared martial law in 1972, he outlawed the CPP-NPA and conducted vigorous counterinsurgency operations against its members and sympathizers. Marcos banned student organizations and suspended the operation of student councils and publications in universities. Marcos also closed major radio and television stations and incarcerated many of his political rivals. He suppressed all political parties and suspended the holding of elections. Marcos' declaration of martial law was viewed by opposition forces as the "reign of terror" in the country's history.
Marcos signed the proclamation placing the Philippines under martial law on September 21, 1972. Under martial law, Marcos campaigned for his vision of a "New Philippine Society". Marcos consolidated his power by strengthening the military under his control and by conducting rigged referenda. He also changed the 1935 Philippine constitution, drafted a new one - the 1973 constitution - and abolished the bicameral Philippine Congress. To serve as the Philippine legislature during martial law, Marcos created a unicameral Interim National Assembly, but it never convened. Instead, the Interim Batasang Pambansa replaced the Interim National Assembly.
During the entire martial-law period, all political parties were proscribed. Political-party leaders including Benigno Aquino Jr, Sergio Osmena Jr, Raul Manglapus, Jose Diokno and Jovito Salonga, among others were arrested and detained immediately after the declaration of martial law. More than 30,000 people were reported detained during the early days of martial law and the total number of detainees swelled to more than 50,000 at its peak. By 1977, some 70,000 people had been imprisoned for their political beliefs at one time or another after martial law was declared.
During the martial-law period, the revolutionary activities of the old CPP waned considerably. It even entered into a "national unity agreement" with the Marcos administration in October 1974 and was granted legal status by the regime. Members of the old CPP imprisoned during the early phase of martial law were granted amnesty and were given an active role in some Marcos cooperatives and agrarian reform institutions. But the Maoist CPP intensified its revolutionary activities against what the new CPP members called a US-Marcos dictatorship.
The CPP increased its strength by recruiting more cadres and guerrilla fighters both from the universities and the countryside. In 1971, Sison claimed that the new CPP reached a mass base of 400,000 in 18 provinces in the country and stressed that the "problem is no longer how to start a revolution but how to extend and intensify it".
One of the most important events in the history of the re-established CPP during the martial-law period was the formation of the National Democratic Front on April 24, 1973. The NDF was the political arm and front organization of the re-established CPP. It was composed of underground associations of workers, the urban poor, youth, farmers, teachers and even religious leaders. On its founding day, the NDF issued a 10-point program, which was reaffirmed and elaborated on November 12, 1977. The top three points were:
1. Unite all anti-imperialist and democratic forces to overthrow the US-Marcos dictatorship and work for the establishment of a coalition government based on a truly democratic system of representation.
2. Expose and oppose US imperialism as the mastermind behind the setting-up of the fascist dictatorship, struggle for the nullification of all unequal treaties and arrangements with this imperialist power, and call for the nationalization of all its properties in the country.
3. Fight for the re-establishment of all democratic rights of the people, such as freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, movement, religious belief and the right to due process.
In 1976, NPA commander Dante Buscayno was captured by government agents, but it did not hinder the revolutionary activities of the re-established CPP. The party reported that from 1980 to 1981 alone, NPA operations expanded from 300 to more than 400 towns in 47 compared with 40 provinces. The NPA also claimed that in 1981, its military operations had moved from "early" to "advanced" strategic defensive.
The ratification of the amended Philippine constitution in April 1981 was followed by the holding of presidential elections on June 26, 1981. Marcos ran in this election to get a "fresh mandate" from the Philippine people. The election demonstrated the continued dominance of Marcos' Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (KBL, or New Society Movement) when he was re-elected. Marcos' re-election to the presidency was expected. Nobody wanted to challenge him, believing that he would just manipulate the election to maintain his legitimacy. All opposition parties except one boycotted the election. Of all the factors that obstructed the development of democracy in the Philippines, US policy occupied the top of the list.
Philippine nationalism struggled for cultural, political and economic independence after years of colonial rule and foreign exploitation. In the Philippines, as in most of Asia, nationalism had no place to turn except to communism. The 1960s were the height of a renewed nationalism in the Philippines. More than a decade after gaining independence, many Philippine nationalists were reexamining their country's cultural, political and economic ties with the United States, their former colonizer. Facts were not supportive of US claims of freedom and democracy that promised to bring prosperity and equality and end racism. Attesting to these growing nationalistic sentiments was, for example, the move of the official date of the Philippine independence from July 4, 1946, the day the US granted the Philippines complete independence, to June 12, 1898, the day the Philippine Revolutionary Government under General Emilio Aguinaldo declared independence from Spain, the same year the US acquired the Philippines as a colony.
The Cold War solidified continuing US domination of the Philippines. On September 8, 1954, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) was organized in Manila by nine countries including the Philippines to deter communism in the region. Growing nationalism in the Philippines was again repressed when martial law was declared in September 21, 1972, by Marcos. Many Philippine nationalists, among them student activists, who could not afford to flee into exile, took up arms and were arrested by the Philippine Constabulary. They were summarily branded as communists and executed. Many others were "silenced" by wholesale violation of their constitutional rights, such as the freedom of press, of speech and of assembly as Marcos begun to rule by decrees until the evening hours of February 25, 1986, when Marcos, his wife Imelda, and their 60-member entourage fled the grounds of the presidential palace in Manila for exile in Hawaii.
The United States supported the Marcos regime, which lasted for 15 years, to combat the threat of communism in the Philippines and Southeast Asia and to secure US military presence in the region with military bases in the Philippines to maintain strategic advantages during the Vietnam War, as well as throughout the Cold War. Persistent Philippine nationalism finally forced the removal of US bases in 1992.
Two parties are better than one
The first Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) was formed in 1930 under the leadership of Crisanto Evangelista, a radical labor leader. This party was inspired by Soviet communism and it aimed to establish a Soviet-type government in the Philippines. The party was outlawed in 1932 but legalized by president Manuel Quezon in 1937 during the Commonwealth Period under the liberal Roosevelt administration.
Having acquired legal status, the CPP decided to participate in Commonwealth elections. In 1938, it merged with the Socialist Party of Pedro Abad Santos. The Socialist Party was also instrumental in the formation of the Popular Front, which participated in the congressional and local elections during the Commonwealth Period. During Japanese occupation, the Communist Party, the merger of the Communist and Socialist parties, went underground to fight the Japanese imperial forces after the imperious US Lieutenant-General Douglas MacArthur fled to Australia, leaving Lieutenant-General Jonathan Wainwright to surrender a combined US and Philippine force of 145,000 soldiers to the Japanese, despite MacArthur's parting order to hold at all cost. Some 16,000 US soldiers were taken as prisoners by the Japanese.
MacArthur, as head of the US military mission to the Philippines and field marshal of the Philippine Commonwealth Army since 1935, was responsible for the establishment of an effective training and defense plan, which even after five years of preparation, with a combined force of 145,000 under his command, failed to foil the Japanese invasion. MacArthur had badly underestimated Japanese capabilities and intentions. Yet, unlike the army and navy commanders at Pearl Harbor who were caught off guard and subsequently faced accusation of derelict of duty, MacArthur was not cashiered. Instead, his image took on heroic dimensions in the American public eye, made famous by his public vow: "I shall return."
In truth, MacArthur had mishandled the defense of the Philippines against the invasion, opting to meet Japanese amphibious assaults on the beaches, despite the grave qualitative deficiencies of the new Philippine army he was responsible for training and despite the decimation of his air force on the ground by Japanese bombers in the first three days of the campaign. The result was a military debacle.
MacArthur ordered a fallback of his battered troops to Bataan, abandoning supplies allocated forward, thus foreclosing any chance of a prolonged defense. The Japanese attack on the Philippines occurred nine hours after their attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Despite that nine-hour warning of the outbreak of hostilities with Japan, MacArthur was paralyzed by indecision during these crucial hours and failed to bring his forces to a state of readiness to meet an imminent Japanese attack. MacArthur's indecision, combined with poor military judgment and the slackness in his command structure, led to the destruction of half of his air force of 277 aircraft on the ground (the air force in Hawaii had 231 aircraft on December 1, 1941, one week before the Japanese attack) and his troops being denied adequate supplies to withstand a lengthy siege. One squadron of fighter planes, ordered to relocate to a secret airbase safe from Japanese attack, could not find their well-camouflaged destination, and had to return to their exposed old base. With the US surrender, the resistance fell entirely on the shoulders of the Philippine communists.
The Communist Party formed a military arm known by the historical name of Hukakahap, which kept up the resistance throughout Japanese occupation and contributed significantly to the successful return of the United States in 1944, with a force larger than any in the European theater except the Normandy invasion's Operation Overlord. The Japanese defense of the Philippines cost its army 500,000 deaths.
MacArthur, whose anti-communism fervor was legendary, acknowledged the courageous war efforts of the Philippine communists and awarded many of them medals of honors. After the war, the Huks participated in the formation of the independence government in 1946, and participated in the election. Its winning candidates, however, were not allowed seats in the legislature because they were communists. Hence, the Huks resumed their armed struggle and renamed themselves the HMB (Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan). During the administration of president Elpidio Quirino, the Huks were granted amnesty and Luis Taruc, the Huk leader, pledged loyalty to the Philippine government. But the amnesty program was not honored and the Huks returned to the mountains to wage armed struggle.
During the administration of president Ramon Magsaysay, the government conducted a vigorous campaign against the Huks and sent reporter Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino as a special emissary to negotiate for an amnesty for Taruc on February 17, 1954. The task launched Aquino's political career, which ended with his assassination on August 21, 1983, on the plane on which he was returning from exile, in full view of world television. His window, Corazon, assumed the presidency on February 25, 1986.
CCP secretary general Jesus Lava was arrested on May 21, 1964, during the administration of president Diosdado Macapagal. On September 11, 1968, Taruc was given executive clemency by the administration of president Ferdinand Marcos on the request of publisher Joaquin Roces of the Manila Times. During this period, the CPP internal ideological struggle reached its height. Jose Sison, leader of the Kabanataang Makabayan and a very active youth cadre of the old CPP, re-established the Communist Party of the Philippines following Maoist ideology.
The re-established CPP was launched on December 26, 1968, coinciding with the 75th birth anniversary of Mao Zedong. The new party used Maoist thought in analyzing the "chronic crisis" besetting Philippine society. Thus, two communist parties existed in the Philippines in the late 1960s, namely: the old Communist Party of Lava and Taruc and the new Communist Party of Sison. The former was a Soviet-inspired communist party while the latter was Maoist-inspired. Both claimed to uphold the ideology of Marxism-Leninist thought, with the new CPP adding Maoism as a central ideology.
The new CPP campaigned against Marcos' decision to send troops to Vietnam. It also campaigned against US intervention in Philippine politics and condemned landlord domination of the Philippine economy. Cynical of legal political processes out of experience, the new CPP waged an armed struggle against the dictatorial Marcos government. It was during the Marcos period that the membership of the new CPP started to increase, usually coming from university students and young professors. On March 29, 1969, the new CPP founded its military arm, the New People's Army (NPA). The NPA was headed by a former Huk commander in Central Luzon, Dante Buscayno. Of peasant origin, Buscayno was encouraged by Sison to head the NPA in its struggle against US imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratic capitalism. The NPA was able to strengthen its numbers by recruiting many peasant guerrillas in the countryside. The CPP and NPA worked together for the establishment of their vision: a national democratic government in the Philippines, which would serve as a transition stage toward socialism, much to the apprehension of the United States.
When Marcos declared martial law in 1972, he outlawed the CPP-NPA and conducted vigorous counterinsurgency operations against its members and sympathizers. Marcos banned student organizations and suspended the operation of student councils and publications in universities. Marcos also closed major radio and television stations and incarcerated many of his political rivals. He suppressed all political parties and suspended the holding of elections. Marcos' declaration of martial law was viewed by opposition forces as the "reign of terror" in the country's history.
Marcos signed the proclamation placing the Philippines under martial law on September 21, 1972. Under martial law, Marcos campaigned for his vision of a "New Philippine Society". Marcos consolidated his power by strengthening the military under his control and by conducting rigged referenda. He also changed the 1935 Philippine constitution, drafted a new one - the 1973 constitution - and abolished the bicameral Philippine Congress. To serve as the Philippine legislature during martial law, Marcos created a unicameral Interim National Assembly, but it never convened. Instead, the Interim Batasang Pambansa replaced the Interim National Assembly.
During the entire martial-law period, all political parties were proscribed. Political-party leaders including Benigno Aquino Jr, Sergio Osmena Jr, Raul Manglapus, Jose Diokno and Jovito Salonga, among others were arrested and detained immediately after the declaration of martial law. More than 30,000 people were reported detained during the early days of martial law and the total number of detainees swelled to more than 50,000 at its peak. By 1977, some 70,000 people had been imprisoned for their political beliefs at one time or another after martial law was declared.
During the martial-law period, the revolutionary activities of the old CPP waned considerably. It even entered into a "national unity agreement" with the Marcos administration in October 1974 and was granted legal status by the regime. Members of the old CPP imprisoned during the early phase of martial law were granted amnesty and were given an active role in some Marcos cooperatives and agrarian reform institutions. But the Maoist CPP intensified its revolutionary activities against what the new CPP members called a US-Marcos dictatorship.
The CPP increased its strength by recruiting more cadres and guerrilla fighters both from the universities and the countryside. In 1971, Sison claimed that the new CPP reached a mass base of 400,000 in 18 provinces in the country and stressed that the "problem is no longer how to start a revolution but how to extend and intensify it".
One of the most important events in the history of the re-established CPP during the martial-law period was the formation of the National Democratic Front on April 24, 1973. The NDF was the political arm and front organization of the re-established CPP. It was composed of underground associations of workers, the urban poor, youth, farmers, teachers and even religious leaders. On its founding day, the NDF issued a 10-point program, which was reaffirmed and elaborated on November 12, 1977. The top three points were:
1. Unite all anti-imperialist and democratic forces to overthrow the US-Marcos dictatorship and work for the establishment of a coalition government based on a truly democratic system of representation.
2. Expose and oppose US imperialism as the mastermind behind the setting-up of the fascist dictatorship, struggle for the nullification of all unequal treaties and arrangements with this imperialist power, and call for the nationalization of all its properties in the country.
3. Fight for the re-establishment of all democratic rights of the people, such as freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, movement, religious belief and the right to due process.
In 1976, NPA commander Dante Buscayno was captured by government agents, but it did not hinder the revolutionary activities of the re-established CPP. The party reported that from 1980 to 1981 alone, NPA operations expanded from 300 to more than 400 towns in 47 compared with 40 provinces. The NPA also claimed that in 1981, its military operations had moved from "early" to "advanced" strategic defensive.
The ratification of the amended Philippine constitution in April 1981 was followed by the holding of presidential elections on June 26, 1981. Marcos ran in this election to get a "fresh mandate" from the Philippine people. The election demonstrated the continued dominance of Marcos' Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (KBL, or New Society Movement) when he was re-elected. Marcos' re-election to the presidency was expected. Nobody wanted to challenge him, believing that he would just manipulate the election to maintain his legitimacy. All opposition parties except one boycotted the election. Of all the factors that obstructed the development of democracy in the Philippines, US policy occupied the top of the list.
Henry C K Liu is chairman of the New York-based Liu Investment Group.
Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved
Feb 8, 2011
CATALOGUE OF VIOLENT AND DESTRUCTIVE EARTHQUAKES IN THE PHILIPPINES
WITH AN APPENDIX
EARTHQUAKES IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS
1599-1909
BY Rev. MIGUEL SADERRA MASÓ, S. J.
See link below.
Filipino flotilla ends 14th-month voyage Monday
Manila Bulletin, 12 December 2010
The Filipino flotilla that journeyed the entire South East Asian region for more than a year on board ancient plank boats will formally end its journey as it docks Monday at Harbor Square, CCP Complex in Pasay City.
It had 39 crew members, headed by former Transportation and Communication Undersecretary Arturo Valdez.
Throughout their 14-month voyage, Valdez said they were able to visit seven countries in the region, including Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Indonesia and the Coast of Vietnam.
Karen Ramos of San Miguel Properties, major sponsor of the voyage, said Valdez’s group would be welcomed by several personalities including former President Fidel Ramos, Vice President Jejomar Binay, Senators Alan Peter Cayetano and Teofisto Guingona III.
The voyage marks a significant part of history as it is the first time that a plank boat replicated from what was used by the first Philippine inhabitants from the Southern Coast of mainland Asia during the 4th century, was used anew during these modern times.
Source: http://www.mb.com.ph/articles/292454/filipino-flotilla-ends-14month-voyage-monday
Church and State
Church and state were officially separate in the 1990s, but religious instruction could, at the option of parents, be provided in public schools. The Catholic Church's influence on the government was quite evident in the lack of resources devoted to family planning and the prohibition of divorce.
The Catholic Church and, to a lesser extent, the Protestant churches engaged in a variety of community welfare efforts. These efforts went beyond giving relief and involved attempts to alter the economic position of the poor. Increasingly in the 1970s, these attempts led the armed forces of President Marcos to suspect that church agencies were aiding the communist guerrillas. In spite of reconciliation efforts, the estrangement between the churches and Marcos grew; it culminated in the call by Cardinal Jaime Sin for the people to go to the streets to block efforts of Marcos to remain in office after the questionable election of 1986. The resulting nonviolent uprising was known variously as People's Power and as the EDSA Revolution.
The good feeling that initially existed between the church and the government of President Aquino lasted only a short time after her inauguration. Deep-seated divisions over the need for revolutionary changes again led to tension between the government and some elements in the churches.
Catholics fell into three general groups: conservatives who were suspicious of social action and held that Christian love could best be expressed through existing structures; moderates, probably the largest group, in favor of social action but inclined to cooperate with government programs; and progressives, who did not trust the government programs, were critical both of Philippine business and of American influence, and felt that drastic change was needed. Progressives were especially disturbed at atrocities accompanying the use of vigilantes. They denied that they were communists, but some of their leaders supported communist fronts, and a few priests actually joined armed guerrilla bands. There appeared to be more progressives among religious-order priests than among diocesan priests.
The major Protestant churches reflected the same three-way division as the Catholics. The majority of clergy and missionaries probably were moderates. A significant number, however, sided with the Catholic progressives in deploring the use of vigilante groups against the guerrillas, asking for drastic land reform, and opposing American retention of military bases. They tended to doubt that a rising economy would lessen social ills and often opposed the type of deflationary reform urged by the IMF (International Monetary Fund).
Ecumenical Developments
The coming of Protestant missionaries was not welcomed by Catholic clergy, and, for several years, representatives of Catholic and Protestant churches engaged in mutual recrimination. Catholics were warned against involvement in Protestant activities, even in groups like the Young Men's Christian Association and the Young Women's Christian Association. Since the 1970s, hostility between Catholics and many Protestant churches had lessened; churches emphasized the virtues rather than the alleged defects of other churches; and priests and pastors occasionally cooperated. Although the ecumenical emphasis did not eliminate competition and gained far more hold among older Protestant churches than among groups that had entered the Philippines more recently, the trend had significantly moderated religious tensions.
Some tentative efforts toward ecumenical understanding also were made in relations between Christians and Muslims, delineating common ground in the mutual acceptance of much of the Old Testament and New Testament of the Bible. Occasional conferences were held in an attempt to expand understanding. Their success by the early 1990s was limited but might indicate that, even in this tense area, improvement was possible.
Islam
In the early 1990s, Filipino Muslims were firmly rooted in their Islamic faith. Every year many went on the hajj (pilgrimage) to the holy city of Mecca; on return men would be addressed by the honoritic "hajj" and women the honorific "hajji". In most Muslim communities, there was at least one mosque from which the muezzin called the faithful to prayer five times a day. Those who responded to the call to public prayer removed their shoes before entering the mosque, aligned themselves in straight rows before the minrab(niche), and offered prayers in the direction of Mecca. An imam, or prayer leader, led the recitation in Arabic verses from the Quran, following the practices of the Sunni sect of Islam common to most of the Muslim world. It was sometimes said that the Moros often neglected to perform the ritual prayer and did not strictly abide by the fast (no food or drink in daylight hours) during Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim calendar, or perform the duty of almsgiving. They did, however, scrupulously observe other rituals and practices and celebrate great festivals of Islam such as the end of Ramadan; Muhammad's birthday; the night of his ascension to heaven; and the start of the Muslim New Year, the first day of the month of Muharram.
Islam in the Philippines has absorbed indigenous elements, much as has Catholicism. Moros thus make offerings to spirits (diwatas), malevolent or benign, believing that such spirits can and will have an effect on one's health, family, and crops. They also include pre-Islamic customs in ceremonies marking rites of passage--birth, marriage, and death. Moros share the essentials of Islam, but specific practices vary from one Moro group to another. Although Muslim Filipino women are required to stay at the back of the mosque for prayers (out of the sight of men), they are much freer in daily life than are women in many other Islamic societies.
Because of the world resurgence of Islam since World War II, Muslims in the Philippines have a stronger sense of their unity as a religious community than they had in the past. Since the early 1970s, more Muslim teachers have visited the nation and more Philippine Muslims have gone abroad--either on the hajj or on scholarships--to Islamic centers than ever before. They have returned revitalized in their faith and determined to strengthen the ties of their fellow Moros with the international Islamic community. As a result, Muslims have built many new mosques and religious schools, where students (male and female) learn the basic rituals and principles of Islam and learn to read the Quran in Arabic. A number of Muslim institutions of higher learning, such as the Jamiatul Philippine al-Islamia in Marawi, also offer advanced courses in Islamic studies.
Divisions along generational lines have emerged among Moros since the 1960s. Many young Muslims, dissatisfied with the old leaders, asserted that datu and sultans were unnecessary in modern Islamic society. Among themselves, these young reformers were divided between moderates, working within the system for their political goals, and militants, engaging in guerrilla-style warfare. To some degree, the government managed to isolate the militants, but Muslim reformers, whether moderates or militants, were united in their strong religious adherence. This bond was significant, because the Moros felt threatened by the continued expansion of Christians into southern Mindanao and by the prolonged presence of Philippine army troops in their homeland.
Protestantism
From the start, Protestant churches in the Philippines were plagued by disunity and schisms. At one point after World War II, there were more than 200 denominations representing less than 3 percent of the populace. Successful mergers of some denominations into the United Church of Christ in the Philippines and the formation of the National Council of Churches in the Philippines (NCCP) brought a degree of order. In the 1990s, there remained a deep gulf and considerable antagonism, however, between middleclass -oriented NCCP churches and the scores of more evangelical denominations sprinkled throughout the islands.
Protestantism has always been associated with United States influence in the Philippines. All major denominations in the United States, and some minor ones, sent missions to the Philippines, where they found the most fertile ground for conversions among some of the upland tribes not yet reached by Catholic priests and among the urban middle class. Most American school teachers who pioneered in the new Philippine public school system also were Protestants, and they laid the groundwork for Protestant churches in many lowland barrios. Filipinos who converted to Protestantism often experienced significant upward social mobility in the American colonial period. Most were middle-level bureaucrats, servants, lawyers, or small entrepreneurs, and some became nationally prominent despite their minority religious adherence.
Protestant missionaries made major contributions in the fields of education and medicine. Throughout the islands, Protestant churches set up clinics and hospitals. They also constructed private schools, including such outstanding institutions of higher education as Central Philippine University, Silliman University, Philippine Christian College, and Dansalan Junior College in Marawi.
The denominations planted by the early missionaries numbered among their adherents about 2 percent of the population in the late 1980s. Their influence was supplemented, if not overshadowed, by a number of evangelical and charismatic churches and para-religious groups, such as New Tribes Mission, World Vision, and Campus Crusade for Christ, which became active after World War II. Increased activity by these religious groups did not mean that the country had ceased to be primarily Catholic or that the older Protestant churches had lost their influence. It did indicate that nominal Catholics might be less involved in parish activities than ever, that the older Protestant churches had new rivals, and that, in general, religious competition had increased.
An indication of this trend is seen in the change in the affiliation of missionaries coming to the Philippines. In 1986 there were 1,931 non-Roman Catholic missionaries, not counting those identified with the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints. Of these, only sixty-three were from the denominations that sent missionaries in the early 1900s. The rest were from fundamentalist churches or para-church groups (the terms are not necessarily exclusive).
Indigenous Christian Churches
Iglesia Filipina Independiente
The Iglesia Filipina Independiente (Independent Philippine Church), founded by Gregorio Aglipay (1860-1940), received the support of revolutionary leader Emilio Aguinaldo during the revolt against Spain and subsequent conflicts with American forces. It rode the tide of antifriar nationalism in absorbing Filipino Roman Catholic clergy and forcibly seizing church property at the beginning of the twentieth century. One out of every sixteen diocesan priests and one out of four Philippine Catholics followed Aglipay into the Iglesia Filipina Independiente in those years of violent national and religious catharsis. The Iglesia Filipina Independiente, formally organized in 1902, thus enjoyed approximately five years of rapid growth, before a temporary decline in Philippine nationalism sent its fortunes into precipitous decline.
Many followers returned to Catholicism, especially after Americans and then Filipinos replaced Spanish priests. Among those who remained in the new church, a crippling schism emerged over doctrinal interpretation, especially after 1919 when members were suddenly instructed to discard earlier church statements concerning the divinity of Christ. To some extent, the schism was caused by Aglipay himself, who shifted his theological views between 1902 and 1919. At first, he deemphasized doctrinal differences between his church and Roman Catholicism, and most of the independent church's priests followed Roman Catholic ritual-- saying Mass, hearing confession, and presiding over folk religious-Catholic ceremonies just as always. Later, Aglipay moved closer to Unitarianism.
In 1938 the church formally split. The faction opposing Aglipay later won a court decision giving it the right to both the name and property of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente. Followers of Aglipay, however, continued to argue that they represented true Aglipayanism. In the early l990s, those Aglipayans who rejected the Unitarian stance and adhered to the concept of the Trinity were associated with the Protestant Episcopal church of the United States.
Iglesia ni Kristo
In the 1990s, all over Luzon, the Visayan Islands, and even northern Mindanao, unmistakable Iglesia ni Kristo (Church of Christ) places of worship, all similar in design and architecture, were being constructed for a rapidly growing membership. Founded by Felix Manalo Ysagun in 1914, the Iglesia ni Kristo did not attract much notice until after World War II, when its highly authoritarian organization and evangelical style began to fill a need for urban and rural families displaced by rapid changes in Philippine society. The church, led by clergy with little formal education, requires attendance at twice-weekly services conducted in local Philippine languages, where guards take attendance and forbid entrance to nonmembers. Membership dues, based on ability to pay, are mandatory. Members are expected to be "disciplined, clean, and God-fearing." Gamblers and drunks face the possibility of being expelled. The church forbids (on penalty of expulsion) marriage to someone of another faith and membership in a labor union. The Iglesia ni Kristo also tells its members how to vote and is even respected for its ability to get out the vote for candidates of its choice.
There are a number of reasons why so many Filipinos have joined such an authoritarian church, not the least of which is the institution's ability to stay the decline of traditional Philippine vertical patron-client relationships, especially in urban areas. The church also has been successful in attracting potential converts through its use of mass rallies similar to Protestant revival meetings. The message is always simple and straightforward--listeners are told that the Iglesia ni Kristo is the mystical body of Christ, outside of which there can be no salvation. Roman Catholicism and Protestant churches are denounced--only through membership in the Iglesia ni Kristo can there be hope for redemption.
Although the original appeal of the Iglesia ni Kristo was to members of the lower socioeconomic class, its puritanical precepts encouraged social mobility; and many of its members were climbing the economic ladder. Whether the church would be able to maintain its puritanical, authoritarian stance when more of its members reached middle-class status was difficult to predict. The church gave neither a count nor an estimate of its membership, but the rapid construction of elaborate buildings, including a campus for an Iglesia ni Kristo college adjacent to the University of the Philippines, would indicate that it was expanding.
Roman Catholicism
The Catholic Church made a remarkable comeback in the Philippines in the twentieth century, primarily because the Vatican agreed to divest itself of massive church estates and to encourage Filipinos to join in the clergy. This resurgence was so successful that Protestant mission efforts, led by large numbers of American missionaries during the period of American colonial rule, made little headway. In the early 1990s, the clergy were predominantly Filipino, all of the diocesan hierarchy were Filipino, and the church was supported by an extensive network of parochial schools.
Catholicism, as practiced in the Philippines in the 1990s, blended official doctrine with folk observance. In an intensely personal way, God the Father was worshiped as a father figure and Jesus as the loving son who died for the sins of each individual, and the Virgin was venerated as a compassionate mother. In the words of scholar David J. Steinberg, "This framework established a cosmic compadrazgo, and an utang na loob to Christ, for his sacrifice transcended any possible repayment . . . . To the devout Filipino, Christ died to save him; there could be no limit to an individual's thanksgiving." As in other Catholic countries, Filipinos attended official church services (men usually not as regularly as women) such as Masses, novenas, baptisms, weddings, and funerals. They supplemented these official services with a number of folk-religious ceremonies basic to the community's social and religious calendar and involving just about everyone in the community.
Perhaps the single event most conducive to community solidarity each year is the fiesta. Celebrated on the special day of the patron saint of a town or barangay, the fiesta is a time for general feasting. Houses are opened to guests, and food is served in abundance. The fiesta always includes a Mass, but its purpose is unabashedly social. The biggest events include a parade, dance, basketball tournament, cockfights, and other contests, and perhaps a carnival, in addition to much visiting and feasting.
Christmas is celebrated in a manner that blends Catholic, Chinese, Philippine, and American customs. For nine days, people attend misas de gallo (early morning Christmas Mass). They hang elaborate lanterns (originally patterned after the Chinese lanterns) and other decorations in their homes and join with friends in caroling. On Christmas Eve, everyone attends midnight Mass, the climax of the misas de gallo and the year's high point of church attendance. After the service, it is traditional to return home for a grand family meal. The remaining days of the Christmas season are spent visiting kin, especially on New Year's Day and Epiphany, January 6. The Christmas season is a time of visiting and receiving guests. It is also a time for reunion with all types of kin--blood, affinal, and ceremonial. Children especially are urged to visit godparents.
During the Lenten season, most communities do a reading of the Passion narrative and a performance of a popular Passion play. The custom of reading or chanting of the Passion could be an adaptation of a pre-Spanish practice of chanting lengthy epics, but its continuing importance in Philippine life probably reflects the popular conception of personal indebtedness to Christ for His supreme sacrifice. At least one observer has suggested that Filipinos have, through the Passion, experienced a feeling of redemption that has been the basis for both millennial dreams and historical revolutionary movements for independence.
Historical Background
Spanish colonialism had, from its formal inception in 1565 with the arrival of Miguel López de Legazpi, as its principal raison d'être the conversion of the inhabitants to Christianity. When Legazpi embarked on his conversion efforts, most Filipinos were still practicing a form of polytheism, although some as far north as Manila had converted to Islam. For the majority, religion still consisted of sacrifices and incantations to spirits believed to be inhabiting field and sky, home and garden, and other dwelling places both human and natural. Malevolent spirits could bring harm in the form of illness or accident, whereas benevolent spirits, such as those of one's ancestors, could bring prosperity in the form of good weather and bountiful crops. Shamans were called upon to communicate with these spirits on behalf of village and family, and propitiation ceremonies were a common part of village life and ritual. Such beliefs continued to influence the religious practices of many upland tribal groups in the modern period.
The religious system that conquistadors and priests imported in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was superimposed on this polytheistic base. Filipinos who converted to Catholicism did not shed their earlier beliefs but superimposed the new on the old. Saints took primacy over spirits, the Mass over propitiation ceremonies, and priests over shamans. This mixing of different religious beliefs and practices marked Philippine Catholicism from the start.
From its inception, Catholicism was deeply influenced by the prejudices, strategies, and policies of the Catholic religious orders. Known collectively as friars, the orders of the Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans, and others, and the Jesuits turned out to be just about the only Caucasians willing to dedicate their lives to converting and ministering to Spain's subject population in the Philippines. They divided the archipelago into distinct territories, learned the vernaculars appropriate to each region, and put down roots in the rural Philippines where they quickly became founts of wisdom for uneducated and unsophisticated local inhabitants. Because most secular colonial officials had no intention of living so far from home any longer than it took to turn a handsome profit, friars took on the roles of the crown's representatives and interpreters of government policies in the countryside.
The close relationship between church and state proved to be a liability when the Philippines was swept by nationalistic revolt in the late nineteenth century and Filipino priests seized churches and proclaimed the Independent Philippine Church (Iglesia Filipina Independiente). After the American occupation, Protestant missionaries came and established churches and helped to spread American culture.
Religion
Religion holds a central place in the life of most Filipinos, including Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, Protestants, and animists. It is central not as an abstract belief system, but rather as a host of experiences, rituals, ceremonies, and adjurations that provide continuity in life, cohesion in the community, and moral purpose for existence. Religious associations are part of the system of kinship ties, patronclient bonds, and other linkages outside the nuclear family.
Christianity and Islam have been superimposed on ancient traditions and acculturated. The unique religious blends that have resulted, when combined with the strong personal faith of Filipinos, have given rise to numerous and diverse revivalist movements. Generally characterized by millenarian goals, antimodern bias, supernaturalism, and authoritarianism in the person of a charismatic messiah figure, these movements have attracted thousands of Filipinos, especially in areas like Mindanao, which have been subjected to extreme pressure of change over a short period of time. Many have been swept up in these movements, out of a renewed sense of fraternity and community. Like the highly visible examples of flagellation and reenacted crucifixion in the Philippines, these movements may seem to have little in common with organized Christianity or Islam. But in the intensely personalistic Philippine religious context, they have not been aberrations so much as extreme examples of how religion retains its central role in society.
The religious composition of the Philippines remained predominantly Catholic in the late 1980s. In 1989 approximately 82 percent of the population was Roman Catholic; Muslims accounted for only 5 percent. The remaining population was mostly affiliated with other Christian churches, although there were also a small number of Buddhists, Daoists (or Taoists), and tribal animists. Christians were to be found throughout the archipelago. Muslims remained largely in the south and were less integrated than other religious minorities into the mainstream of Philippine culture. Although most Chinese were members of Christian churches, a minority of Chinese worshipped in Daoist or in Buddhist temples, the most spectacular of which was an elaborate Daoist temple on the outskirts of Cebu.
The Chinese
In 1990 the approximately 600,000 ethnic Chinese made up less than 1 percent of the population. Because Manila is close to Taiwan and the mainland of China, the Philippines has for centuries attracted both Chinese traders and semipermanent residents. The Chinese have been viewed as a source of cheap labor and of capital and business enterprise. Government policy toward the Chinese has been inconsistent. Spanish, American, and Filipino regimes alternately welcomed and restricted the entry and activities of the Chinese. Most early Chinese migrants were male, resulting in a sex ratio, at one time, as high as 113 to 1, although in the 1990s it was more nearly equal, reflecting a population based more on natural increase than on immigration.
There has been a good deal of intermarriage between the Chinese and lowland Christians, although the exact amount is impossible to determine. Although many prominent Filipinos, including José Rizal, President Corazon Aquino, and Cardinal Jaime Sin have mixed Chinese ancestry, intermarriage has not necessarily led to ethnic understanding. Mestizos, over a period of years, tended to deprecate their Chinese ancestry and to identify as Filipino. The Chinese tended to regard their culture as superior and sought to maintain it by establishing a separate school system in which about half the curriculum consisted of Chinese literature, history, and language.
Intermarriage and changing governmental policies made it difficult to define who was Chinese. The popular usage of "Chinese" included Chinese aliens, both legal and illegal, as well as those of Chinese ancestry who had become citizens. "Ethnic Chinese" was another term often used but hard to define. Mestizos could be considered either Chinese or Filipino, depending on the group with which they associated to the greatest extent.
Research indicates that Chinese were one of the least accepted ethnic groups. The common Filipino perception of the Chinese was of rich businessmen backed by Chinese cartels who stamped out competition from other groups. There was, however, a sizable Chinese working class in the Philippines, and there was a sharp gap between rich and poor Chinese.
Upland Tribal Groups
Another minority, the more than 100 upland tribal groups, in 1990 constituted approximately 3 percent of the population. As lowland Filipinos, both Muslim and Christian, grew in numbers and expanded into the interiors of Luzon, Mindoro, Mindanao, and other islands, they isolated upland tribal communities in pockets. Over the centuries, these isolated tribes developed their own special identities. The folk art of these groups was, in a sense, the last remnant of an indigenous tradition that flourished everywhere before Islamic and Spanish contact.
Technically, the upland tribal groups were a blend in ethnic origin like other Filipinos, although they did not, as a rule, have as much contact with the outside world. They displayed great variety in social organization, cultural expression, and artistic skills that showed a high degree of creativity, usually employed to embellish utilitarian objects, such as bowls, baskets, clothing, weapons, and even spoons. Technologically, these groups ranged from the highly sophisticated Bontocs and Ifugaos, who engineered the extraordinary rice terraces, to more primitive groups. They also covered a wide spectrum in terms of their integration and acculturation with lowland Christian Filipinos. Some, like the Bukidnons of Mindanao, had intermarried with lowlanders for almost a century, whereas others, like the Kalingas on Luzon, remained more isolated from lowland influences.
There were ten principal cultural groups living in the Cordillera Central of Luzon in 1990. The name Igorot, the Tagalog word for mountaineer, was often used with reference to all groups. At one time it was employed by lowland Filipinos in a pejorative sense, but in recent years it came to be used with pride by youths in the mountains as a positive expression of their separate ethnic identity vis-à-vis lowlanders. Of the ten groups, the Ifugaos of Ifugao Province, the Bontocs of Mountain and Kalinga-Apayao provinces, and the Kankanays and Ibalois of Benguet Province were all wet-rice farmers who worked the elaborate rice terraces they had constructed over the centuries. The Kankanays and Ibalois were the most influenced by Spanish and American colonialism and lowland Filipino culture because of the extensive gold mines in Benguet, the proximity of Baguio, good roads and schools, and a consumer industry in search of folk art. Other mountain peoples of Luzon were the Kalingas of KalingaApayao Province and the Tinguians of Abra Province, who employed both wet-rice and dry-rice growing techniques. The Isnegs of northern Kalinga-Apayao Province, the Gaddangs of the border between Kalinga-Apayao and Isabela provinces, and the Ilongots of Nueva Vizcaya Province all practiced shifting cultivation. Negritos completed the picture for Luzon. Although Negritos formerly dominated the highlands, by the early 1980s they were reduced to small groups living in widely scattered locations, primarily along the eastern ranges of the mountains.
South of Luzon, upland tribal groups were concentrated on Mindanao, although there was an important population of mountain peoples with the generic name Mangyan living on Mindoro. Among the most important groups on Mindanao were the Manobos (a general name for many tribal groups in southern Bukidnon and Agusan del Sur provinces); the Bukidnons of Bukidnon Province; the Bagobos, Mandayas, Atas, and Mansakas, who inhabited mountains bordering the Davao Gulf; the Subanuns of upland areas in the Zamboanga provinces; the Mamanuas of the Agusan-Surigao border region; and the Bila-ans, Tirurays, and T-Bolis of the area of the Cotabato provinces. Tribal groups on Luzon were widely known for their carved wooden figures, baskets, and weaving; Mindanao tribes were renowned for their elaborate embroidery, appliqué, and bead work.
The Office of Muslim Affairs and Cultural Communities succeeded in establishing a number of protected reservations for tribal groups. Residents were expected to speak their tribal language, dress in their traditional tribal clothing, live in houses constructed of natural materials using traditional architectural designs, and celebrate their traditional ceremonies of propitiation of spirits believed to be inhabiting their environment. They also were encouraged to reestablish their traditional authority structure in which, as in Moro society, tribal datu were the key figures. These men, chosen on the basis of their bravery and their ability to settle disputes, were usually, but not always, the sons of former datu. Often they were also the ones who remembered the ancient oral epics of their people. Thedatu sang these epics to reawaken in tribal youth an appreciation for the unique and semisacred history of the tribal group.
Contact between primitive and modern groups usually resulted in weakening or destroying tribal culture without assimilating the tribal groups into modern society. It seemed doubtful that the shift of government policy from assimilation to cultural pluralism could reverse the process. James Eder, an anthropologist who has studied several Filipino tribes, maintains that even the protection of tribal land rights tends to lead to the abandonment of traditional culture because land security makes it easier for tribal members to adopt the economic practices of the larger society and facilitates marriage with outsiders. Government bureaus could not preserve tribes as social museum exhibits, but with the aid of various private organizations, they hoped to be able to help the tribes adapt to modern society without completely losing their ethnic identity.
Muslim Filipinos
Muslims, about 5 percent of the total population, were the most significant minority in the Philippines. Although undifferentiated racially from other Filipinos, in the 1990s they remained outside the mainstream of national life, set apart by their religion and way of life. In the 1970s, in reaction to consolidation of central government power under martial law, which began in 1972, the Muslim Filipino, or Moro population increasingly identified with the worldwide Islamic community, particularly in Malaysia, Indonesia, Libya, and Middle Eastern countries. Longstanding economic grievances stemming from years of governmental neglect and from resentment of popular prejudice against them contributed to the roots of Muslim insurgency.
Moros were confined almost entirely to the southern part of the country--southern and western Mindanao, southern Palawan, and the Sulu Archipelago. Ten subgroups could be identified on the basis of language. Three of these groups made up the great majority of Moros. They were the Maguindanaos of North Cotabato, Sultan Kudarat, and Maguindanao provinces; the Maranaos of the two Lanao provinces; and the Tausugs, principally from Jolo Island. Smaller groups were the Samals and Bajaus, principally of the Sulu Archipelago; the Yakans of Zamboanga del Sur Province; the Ilanons and Sangirs of Southern Mindanao Region; the Melabugnans of southern Palawan; and the Jama Mapuns of the tiny Cagayan Islands.
Muslim Filipinos traditionally have not been a closely knit or even allied group. They were fiercely proud of their separate identities, and conflict between them was endemic for centuries. In addition to being divided by different languages and political structures, the separate groups also differed in their degree of Islamic orthodoxy. For example, the Tausugs, the first group to adopt Islam, criticized the more recently Islamicized Yakan and Bajau peoples for being less zealous in observing Islamic tenets and practices. Internal differences among Moros in the 1980s, however, were outweighed by commonalities of historical experience vis-à-vis non-Muslims and by shared cultural, social, and legal traditions.
The traditional structure of Moro society focused on a sultan who was both a secular and a religious leader and whose authority was sanctioned by the Quran. The datu were communal leaders who measured power not by their holdings in landed wealth but by the numbers of their followers. In return for tribute and labor, the datu provided aid in emergencies and advocacy in disputes with followers of another chief. Thus, through hisagama (court--actually an informal dispute-settling session), a datu became basic to the smooth function of Moro society. He was a powerful authority figure who might have as many as four wives and who might enslave other Muslims in raids on their villages or in debt bondage. He might also demand revenge (maratabat) for the death of a follower or upon injury to his pride or honor.
The datu continued to play a central role in Moro society in the 1980s. In many parts of Muslim Mindanao, they still administered the sharia (sacred Islamic law) through theagama. They could no longer expand their circle of followers by raiding other villages, but they achieved the same end by accumulating wealth and then using it to provide aid, employment, and protection for less fortunate neighbors. Datu support was essential for government programs in a Muslim barangay. Although a datu in modern times rarely had more than one wife, polygamy was permitted so long as his wealth was sufficient to provide for more than one. Moro society was still basically hierarchical and familial, at least in rural areas.
The national government policies instituted immediately after independence in 1946 abolished the Bureau for Non-Christian Tribes used by the United States to deal with minorities and encouraged migration of Filipinos from densely settled areas such as Central Luzon to the "open" frontier of Mindanao. By the l950s, hundreds of thousands of Ilongos, Ilocanos, Tagalogs, and others were settling in North Cotabato and South Cotabato and Lanao del Norte and Lanao del Sur provinces, where their influx inflamed Moro hostility. The crux of the problem lay in land disputes. Christian migrants to the Cotabatos, for example, complained that they bought land from one Muslim only to have his relatives refuse to recognize the sale and demand more money. Muslims claimed that Christians would title land through government agencies unknown to Muslim residents, for whom land titling was a new institution. Distrust and resentment spread to the public school system, regarded by most Muslims as an agency for the propagation of Christian teachings. By 1970, a terrorist organization of Christians called the Ilagas (Rats) began operating in the Cotabatos, and Muslim armed bands, called Blackshirts, appeared in response. The same thing happened in the Lanaos, where the Muslim Barracudas began fighting the Ilagas. Philippine army troops sent in to restore peace and order were accused by Muslims of siding with the Christians. When martial law was declared in 1972, Muslim Mindanao was in turmoil.
The Philippine government discovered shortly after independence that there was a need for some kind of specialized agency to deal with the Muslim minority and so set up the Commission for National Integration in 1957, which was later replaced by the Office of Muslim Affairs and Cultural Communities. Filipino nationalists envisioned a united country in which Christians and Muslims would be offered economic advantages and the Muslims would be assimilated into the dominant culture. They would simply be Filipinos who had their own mode of worship and who refused to eat pork. This vision, less than ideal to many Christians, was generally rejected by Muslims who feared that it was a euphemistic equivalent of assimilation. Concessions were made to Muslim religion and customs. Muslims were exempted from Philippine laws prohibiting polygamy and divorce, and in 1977 the government attempted to codify Muslim law on personal relationships and to harmonize Muslim customary law with Philippine law. A significant break from past practice was the 1990 establishment of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, which gave Muslims in the region control over some aspects of government, but not over national security and foreign affairs.
There were social factors in the early 1990s that militated against the cultural autonomy sought by Muslim leaders. Industrial development and increased migration outside the region brought new educational demands and new roles for women. These changes in turn led to greater assimilation and, in some cases, even intermarriage. Nevertheless, Muslims and Christians generally remained distinct societies often at odds with one another.
The Lowland Christian Population
Although lowland Christians maintained stylistic differences in dress until the twentieth century and had always taken pride in their unique culinary specialties, they continued to be a remarkably homogeneous core population of the Philippines. In 1990 lowland Christians, also known as Christian Malays, made up 91.5 percent of the population and were divided into several regional groups. Because of their regional base in Metro Manila and adjacent provinces to the north, east, and south, Tagalogs tended to be more visible than other groups. Cebuanos, whose language was the principal one in the Visayan Island area, inhabited Cebu, Bohol, Siquijor, Negros Oriental, Leyte, and Southern Leyte provinces, and parts of Mindanao. Ilocanos had a reputation for being ready migrants, leaving their rocky northern Luzon homeland not just for more fertile parts of the archipelago but for the United States as well. The home region of the Ilongos (speakers of Hiligaynon) included most of Panay, Negros Occidental Province, and the southern end of Mindoro. Their migration in large numbers to the Cotabato and Lanao areas of Mindanao led to intense friction between them and the local Muslim inhabitants and the outbreak of fighting between the two groups in the 1970s. The homeland of the Bicolanos, or "Bicolandia" was the southeastern portion of Luzon together with the islands of Catanduanes, Burias, and Ticao, and adjacent parts of Masbate. The Waray-Warays lived mostly in eastern Leyte and Samar in the Eastern Visayas. The Pampangan homeland was the Central Luzon Plain and especially Pampanga Province. Speakers of Pangasinan were especially numerous in the Lingayen Gulf region of Luzon, but they also had spread to the Central Luzon Plain where they were interspersed with Tagalogs, Ilocanos, and Pampangans.
As migrants to the city, these lowland Christians clustered together in neighborhoods made up primarily of people from their own regions. Multilingualism generally characterized these neighborhoods; the language of the local area was used, as a rule, for communicating with those native to the area, and English or Pilipino was used as a supplement. Migrants to cities and to agricultural frontiers were remarkably ready and willing to learn the language of their new location while retaining use of their mother tongue within the home.
Language Diversity and Uniformity
Some eleven languages and eighty-seven dialects were spoken in the Philippines in the late 1980s. Eight of these--Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, Bicolano, Waray-Waray, Pampangan, and Pangasinan--were native tongues for about 90 percent of the population. All eight belong to the Malay-Polynesian language family and are related to Indonesian and Malay, but no two are mutually comprehensible. Each has a number of dialects and all have impressive literary traditions, especially Tagalog, Cebuano, and Ilocano. Some of the languages have closer affinity than others. It is easier for Ilocanos and Pangasinans to learn each other's language than to learn any of the other six. Likewise, speakers of major Visayan Island languages--Cebuano, Ilongo, and Waray-Waray--find it easier to communicate with each other than with Tagalogs, Ilocanos, or others.
Language divisions were nowhere more apparent than in the continuing public debate over national language. The government in 1974 initiated a policy of gradually phasing out English in schools, business, and government, and replacing it with Pilipino, based on the Tagalog language of central and southern Luzon. Pilipino had spread throughout the nation, the mass media, and the school system. In 1990 President Corazon Aquino ordered that all government offices use Pilipino as a medium of communication, and 200 college executives asked that Pilipino be the main medium of college instruction rather than English. Government and educational leaders hoped that Pilipino would be in general use throughout the archipelago by the end of the century. By that time, it might have enough grass-roots support in non-Tagalog-speaking regions to become a national language. In the early l990s, however, Filipinos had not accepted a national language at the expense of their regional languages. Nor was there complete agreement that regional languages should be subordinated to a national language based on Tagalog.
The role of English was also debated. Some argued that English was essential to economic progress because it opened the Philippines to communication with the rest of the world, facilitated foreign commerce, and made Filipinos desirable employees for international firms both in the Philippines and abroad. Despite census reports that nearly 65 percent of the populace claimed some understanding of English, as of the early 1990s competence in English appeared to have deteriorated. Groups also debated whether "Filipinization" and the resulting shifting of the language toward "Taglish" (a mixture of Tagalog and English) had made the language less useful as a medium of international communication. Major newspapers in the early 1990s, however, were in English, English language movies were popular, and English was often used in advertisements.
Successful Filipinos were likely to continue to be competent in Pilipino and English. Speakers of another regional language would most likely continue to use that language at home, Pilipino in ordinary conversation in the cities, and English for commerce, government, and international relations. Both Pilipino, gaining use in the media, and English continued in the 1990s to be the languages of education.
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