Side By Side: U.S. Lies And Broken Promises

Side By Side: U.S. Lies And Broken Promises
Emil Guillermo, Special to SF Gate
Tuesday, February 5, 2002
©2002 SF Gate

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2002/02/05/eguillermo.DTL

There are two big lies in Filipino-American history worth noting as American troops are being dispatched to the Philippines.

The first involves the Philippine-American War, which marks its 103rd anniversary this week.

For the record, the war began on February 4, 1899. The first shots came in a Manila suburb, when American soldiers shot at "niggers," the term they used for the Filipinos. The nationalists returned fire, and the new war was under way.

If you don't know much about the war, you're not alone. Many Americans don't even know that the sequel to the Spanish-American War ever happened. The Philippine Insurrection, as U.S. history has named it, cast American troops as the heroes in a guerrilla war against "villainous" Filipino nationalists.

But make no mistake, it was a full-fledged war lasting three years, with more than 100,000 Americans involved -- and, depending on the accounts you read, a Filipino civilian death toll that ranges from 250,000 to as high as 1 million casualties from disease or starvation during the conflict.

No wonder we don't want to know.

To many Filipinos, the war was an American betrayal. The nationalists, under Emilio Aguinaldo, had broken off from Spain and, relying heavily on a promise of U.S. support during the Spanish-American War, started their own independent republic in 1898 -- the first in Asia.

That promise was broken when the McKinley administration found value in the Philippines as a colony and tapped into a new patriotic fervor for American involvement overseas.

Some historians believe McKinley actually instigated the Philippine-American war to gain support in Congress to ratify the Treaty of Paris. That's where the U.S. dealt with Spain directly, cutting out the new Philippine leadership. Instead of becoming the independent country it had hoped to be, the Philippines was ceded by Spain to the U.S. for $20 million. And Aguinaldo went from president to insurrectionist, just like that.

The memory of that betrayal is not lost on present-day Filipino nationalists, who uneasily observed the first units of some 600 U.S. Special Forces troops arriving in the Philippines to help fight against a Muslim insurgent group, the Abu Sayyaf, said to be an al-Qaida cell.

Nationalists, questioning the constitutionality of such an arrangement, wonder why the U.S. is even there -- the Philippines is a sovereign nation, after all. Protestors are now carrying signs calling President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo a puppet of the U.S.

Arroyo has said the U.S. troops will be there for six months solely to train Filipino military personnel. Although the U.S. troops won't be fighting side by side with Filipinos, they will be armed and will be allowed to fire in self-defense -- and, considering the combat areas they'll be patrolling, that's a minute distinction.

In his State of the Union Address, President Bush mentioned the troops as "helping." But he also whipped up a little patriotic fervor of his own when he said, "Some governments will be timid in the face of terror. And make no mistake about it: If they do not act, America will."

For President Bush, war is becoming. Is he reaching for a little McKinley-like grandeur?

Naturally, there's some nervousness in the Philippines over any escalation of hostilities. It wouldn't take much for that to happen, either. The Abu Sayyaf gains its notoriety from its suspected link to Osama bin Laden. Before 9/11, it had been considered relatively insignificant compared to the biggest group of Muslim insurgents in the Philippines, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which has been fighting for an independent Muslim state in the Philippines since 1978.

But things have changed. Over the weekend, the MILF announced that it will shoot Americans who stray into their areas on Basilan Island. The presence of U.S. troops will merely turn the jungle into a tinderbox.

Such is the volatile situation in the Philippines, made even more so by a distrust of American intentions. Said Teodoro Casino, secretary general of the Philippine nationalist political party Bayan in a media statement, "One hundred three years ago, our people were misled into thinking that the U.S. would help speed up the downfall of the Spanish colonizers. Today, the U.S. is doing the same thing with the connivance of the Arroyo regime."

Whom can you trust? History would seem to back Casino.

If anything positive can come out of this whole thing, it may be a move by Filipino-Americans to force the U.S.'s hand in rectifying Filipino-American Lie #2.

That would be the failure of the U.S. to give GI benefits to the thousands of Filipinos who fought alongside American troops in World War II.

On July 26, 1941, President Roosevelt signed an order that conscripted Filipino soldiers to fight side by side with U.S. troops in the Far East. The payoff came in 1944, when GI benefits and eligibility for American citizenship were promised.

The valor of Filipinos has never been in question. But the integrity of the U.S. has. In 1946, Congress passed the Rescission Act, which took back all the promises made and deemed Filipino veterans ineligible for benefits.

Two hundred thousand Filipino veterans, many of whom marched with Americans in the historic Bataan Death March, were suddenly left in the lurch. For their service, for their war injuries, they were entitled to nothing.

Many of those veterans immigrated to America, and 12,900 Filipino vets live in the States (another 35,000 remain in the Philippines). Most are in their late 70s and 80s, though, and it's estimated that every day, two veterans die waiting for equity. For many of them, "equity" means decent VA medical care and a larger stipend to live on. Some now live on less than $600 a month.

For the last 12 years, legislation to provide benefits has been stalled in the House and the Senate, although two bills ask for merely $60 million. "It's just to get the ball rolling," said Eric Lachica, executive director of the American Coalition for Filipino Veterans. He recognizes the betrayals of the past, but he said he feels the presence of U.S. forces in the Philippines could give leverage to get the veterans a line item in Bush's new, defense-heavy budget.

This weekend, Lachica met with President Arroyo while she attended the World Economic Forum. "She promised to work on the issue," he said. "She has to be assertive and follow up with Bush. She has some political capital with him now."

Addressing a 61-year-old betrayal won't make up for everything in the past. But it could help restore some of America's lost credibility among Filipinos here and abroad.

Emil Guillermo can be seen on NCM-TV: New California Media most Friday nights in the San Francisco Bay Area at 7:30p.m. on KCSM-TV (PBS) Ch.60/Cable 17. And in Los Angeles on KLCS-TV 58. E-mail: emil [at] amok.com