War booty

(We yield this space to the statement of the Linganay ng Kalayaan, Kilos na Para sa Makabayang Edukasyon and Alliance of Concerned Teachers-Philippines due to its timeliness. – Ed.)

THE NEWS of the impending return of the bells of Balangiga is a welcome development towards correcting the centuries-old historical injustice committed by the United States against the Filipino people.  This is a victory of the Filipino people that should be considered as part of the long and arduous campaign in the assertion of Philippine sovereignty and independence.

The Balangiga bells form part of the large number of war booties that the American occupation troops stashed away from the Philippines in the long and bloody Filipino American War of 1898- 1913.  The war resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, the large-scale burning of villages and the pillaging of communities by American troops that annexed the archipelago and robbed them of the fruits of freedom that they already had after the Philippine Revolution against Spain.

In the pretext of “Benevolent Assimilation”, the American occupation transformed the islands into their Asian outpost as part of their colonial design to create an “American Lake” in the Pacific region.  This they did by creating a submissive colonial bureaucracy and political system, institutionalizing a Western-type of American educational system, and ensuring the continuous economic, political, and military dependence of the Philippines to the US even after the granting of ‘independence’.

In the half century of colonial occupation and in the ensuing long campaign to suppress Filipino resistance against American imperialism, the military campaigns of the US in the archipelago provided the perfect opportunity for the systematic, organized, and institutional plunder and pillaging of Filipino cultural and historical artifacts and objects that were brought to the US.  A great number of them are now deposited in museums, historical collections, archives, and government and military installations scattered in various American territories.

The Balangiga bells were the most notable of these artifacts symbolic of the tradition of collecting colonial war booty American aggression. These should be returned to the Filipino communities that legitimately owned them.  The collection of war booties should also be viewed as part of the historical injustice committed by the occupation troops and should be acknowledged as such.

The US should complete the correction of historical injustice committed against the Filipino people after the return of the bells, by ensuring that all the other war booties be properly returned to the Philippines.

Most importantly, historical injustice resulting from the war crimes committed by the US in the colonial occupation of the Philippines must finally be acknowledged by the American government by way of formally apologizing to the Filipino people.

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