Explainer 84: Jabidah Journey

Explainer 84:  Jabidah Journey

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;

Or close the wall up with our English dead!

In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility:

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

Then imitate the action of the tiger;

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,

Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage;

Then lend the eye a terrible aspect.

KENNETH Branagh as Henry V orating Shakespeare’s famous lines. From neighbors to municipalities, cities to provinces, to nation-states, the question of territory and borders can be so heated, it leads to bloodshed.

If you will kill to protect your private property, think of what it means for nations that claim property, too. And think of what it means when those propriety claims overlap with still others, involving not just land, but ethnic and religious concerns.

Forty years ago, it all came to a head with what’s come to be known as the Jabidah Massacre.

So in commemoration of that event, tonight is Map Night on the Explainer.

We’ll look at how what constitutes the Philippines may not be as permanent and as clear-cut as you think.

I’m Manolo Quezon.

I. An evolving Philippines

THIS photograph, taken in 1948, shows Diosdado Macapagal raising the Philippine flag in the Turtle Islands. It was his first claim to national fame.

This photo is significant, because it reminds us that what we consider to be the Philippines, has been evolving –and more recently than we think.

In this article, published in the Philippines Free Press Centennial Book in 2000, historian Patricio Abinales argued that we owe two things to America: the integration of the Cordilleras and Mindanao into what we know as the Philippines.

This article led me to ask a visiting Spanish historian what the Spaniards considered the Philippines during the colonial era. His answer, which he sketched on a map, would surprise you.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mlq3/3706556176/

Here it is, a vast area extending from what we Filipinos consider the Philippines, but stretching as far as Guam and Saipan in the Marianas and the Caroline Islands.

This territory is commemorated to this day by one of the obscure titles of the King of Spain, Rey de las Islas del Poniente.

Up to 1815, we were considered, essentially, an extension of the Viceroyalty of Mexico, and after Mexican independence from Spain, we were a province directly governed from Madrid.

Manila, in turn, after 1815 had jurisdiction over the Marianas and the Carolines. Guam, in the Marianas, was the place that Spain exiled troublesome Filipinos, for example, like Tandang Sora.

According to the Spanish historian, the Northern Marianas had, as its last governor, a Filipino born Spaniard, Eugenio Blanco, who suppressed a local rebellion by means of volunteer troops from Macabebe, Pampanga, in a ferocious campaign called “El Tiempo del Macabebe” in the literature of the era.

What seems to have happened, when Spain was defeated by the USA in the Spanish-American War, was that the Americans only expressed interest in only part of the colonial real estate of Spain.

And so, in the Treaty of Paris in 1898, what Spain ceded to America was the Philippines and the Marianas, while America allowed Spain to retain the Carolines. The Carolines, in turn, were sold by Spain to Germany in 1899.

The Spanish historian said that the sale was contested in the Spanish Cortes by a friend of Rizal.

Now as for us Filipinos, our own conception of what constituted the Philippines was limited compared to the Spanish view. It’s commemorated in our flag: the rays of the sun representing the nucleus of our independent state, the eight provinces placed under martial law when our revolution began in August, 1896.

And the three stars representing the territorial aspirations of our founding fathers: Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao. The efforts of our first Republic in 1898 were to assert the sovereignty of the First Republic over these areas.

And they ranged from successfully encouraging the Federal Republic of the Visayas based in Iloilo to recognize the Republic, which it did, and the Sultan of Sulu to incorporate his realm into our Republic, which was less successful.

But aside from the Sulu Sultanate, from the start our Republic claimed the rest of Mindanao, over which Spain had already asserted its sovereignty.

Going back to the Treaty of Paris, the territory ceded by Spain became the working definition for our country, as it prepared for the restoration of independence by 1946. However, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention that drafted our 1935 Constitution noticed some problems.

This slim volume, part of the Constitutional Convention’s published records, includes a report signed by Nicolas Buendia, former Senator (and yes, of Buendia Avenue fame), who was Chairman of the Committee on Territorial Delimitation. He said that if you look at the Batanes Islands, the limit of our territory in that area should be the Bashi Channel.

But the Treaty of Paris, according to Buendia’s committee report, was based on erroneous Spanish maps used in an 1895 agreement between Spain and Japan, which then owned Tiawan, and so the quoted lines of latitude and longitude in Spain’s agreement with the USA  placed the border at the Balintang Channel.

Here’s a nifty old map from Wikepedia, to show you what Buendia meant:

Buendia recommended that the Philippines, in its new Constitution, fix the error so as to remove all room for doubt.

But it seems the report wasn’t adopted in full, because instead of adopting the technically-complete list of revised latitudes and longitudes, the 1935 Constitution was quite brief:

ARTICLE I

The National Territory

    Section 1. The Philippines comprises all the territory ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Paris concluded between the United States and Spain on the tenth day of December, eighteen hundred and ninety-eight, the limits which are set forth in Article III of said treaty, together with all the islands embraced in the treaty concluded at Washington between the United States and Spain on the seventh day of November, nineteen hundred, and the treaty concluded between the United States and Great Britain on the second day of January, nineteen hundred and thirty, and all territory over which the present Government of the Philippine Islands exercises jurisdiction.

The result is that, to this day, Taiwan questions our border with it in the Bashi Channel, as this article from the Taipei Times in 2004 shows:

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2004/09/23/2003204030

However, to their credit, what the Taiwanese want is an international agreement to settle the border question.

At least the question of the Turtle Islands was explicitly referred to in the 1935 Charter.

Which brings us back to Diosdado Macapagal and his finally raising our flag on the Turtle Islands in 1948, or eighteen years after the treaty signed by the USA and Great Britain recognizing them as part of our territory. But as for other territory, dealing with a new country and not the USA, the British would be quite cunning, indeed.

When we return, how Ferdinand Marcos dreamed of conquest and instead, unleashed a domestic war.

II. Savaged over Sabah

Robert the Bruce: [Robert the Bruce is visiting his leper father] Father?

Robert’s Father: Ah, come in. Come in.

Robert the Bruce: A rebellion has begun.

Robert’s Father: [pause] Under whom?

Robert the Bruce: A commoner… named William Wallace.

Robert’s Father: [another pause] You will embrace this rebellion. Support it from our lands in the north. I will gain English favor by condemning it and ordering opposed from our lands in the south. Sit down. Stay awhile.

[both men sit]

Robert the Bruce: This Wallace… he doesn’t even have a knighthood. But he *fights*, with *passion*, and he *inspires*.

Robert’s Father: [laughing] And you wish to charge off and fight as he did, eh?

[Robert nods slightly]

Robert’s Father: So would I, eh?

[he laughs again]

Robert the Bruce: Well, maybe it’s time.

Robert’s Father: [the elder man stops laughing] It is time… to *survive*. You’re the seventeenth Robert Bruce. The sixteen before you passed you land and title because they *didn’t* charge in. Call a meeting of the nobles.

Robert the Bruce: They do nothing but talk.

Robert’s Father: Rightly so. They’re as rich in English titles and lands as they are in Scottish, just as we are. You admire this man, this William Wallace. Uncompromising men are easy to admire. He has courage; so does a dog. But it is exactly the ability to *compromise* that makes a man noble. And understand this: Edward Longshanks is the most ruthless king ever to sit on the throne of England. And none of us, and nothing of Scotland will remain, unless *we* are as ruthless.

[he leans forward]

Robert’s Father: Give ear to our nobles. Knowing their minds is the key to the throne.

THIS insight into statescraft’s courtesy of Tobert the Bruce talking to his father in “Braveheart.” Is it better to fight, or to wheel and deal? The public likes a fighter; politicians prefer to wheel and deal.

[PhilAdminMap.jpg]

Here is an official administrative map of the Philippines, published by the National Mapping and Resource Information Agency.

Note, over here, the Kalayaan Island Group, our claimed part of the Spratleys, which will be our topic next week.

And here, the Turtle Islands, our border with Malaysia.

And note the blank where Borneo is. Filipinos of an older generation will insist part of it is rightfully ours.

Our prehispanic rulers had blood ties to the royal families in Brunei and Malaysia, and to this day people like the President, who claim descent from prehispanic royalty claim affinity to Brunei’s ruling family; and this is also why, this day, the various Malaysian royal families recognize our Muslim royalty in Mindanao as part of their family of royal families.

Before the West subdivided our part of the world, they were all part and parcel of a web of interrelated kingdoms.

During World War II, Manuel L. Quezon actually proposed the union of Indonesia and the Philippines.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mlq3/2763128952/

In the 1960s in principle, leaders in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia proposed a loose union known as Maphilindo; this was at the core of what has evolved to become ASEAN.

But the problem was that the Philippines and Indonesia became independent first, in 1946 and 1949 respectively, and Malaysia much later; and in the meanwhile, an old colonial power, Great Britain, maneuvered to marginalize both country’s claims on Malayan territory.

This led to the Philippines and Indonesia, who enjoyed warm ties among their leaders in the prewar independence struggle, to unite against Malaysia.

As we prepared to rejoin the family of independent nations in 1946, Great Britain made moves to take the North Borneo territory leased by the Sultan of Sulu to a private company in 1878, under its own authority.

What was land leased to the British North Borneo Company was declared crown territory instead. This was done

If the Philippines could claim to be the successor, as sovereign, of territories once owned by the Sulu Sultanate, by the late 1950s the future Malaysia was preparing to assert sovereignty over territories once ruled by Great Britain in its colony of Malaya.

Sabah has a total land area of 74,398 square kilometres and is only 10 miles from Sulu.

To be sure, we’d first asserted our claims to North Borneo in 1946, under the advice of former governor-general Francis Burton Harrison, working as an adviser to our new Department of Foreign Affairs. A Foreign Office spokesman said it was rather cheeky of the newly-independent Philippines to do this.

In this book, “A Diplomatic History of the Philippine Republic,” by Milton Walter Meyer, we learn that the House of Representatives not once, but twice, in 1950 and 1952, passed resolutions authorizing President Quirino to negotiate with the British for the recognition of the Sultan of Sulu’s rights.

When the Governor of British North Borneo visited Manila in January 1957, a 500 man strong delegation of Muslim Filipinos presented a petition to President Magsaysay for him to directly negotiate with the British to return North Borneo, not to the Sultan of Sulu, but to the Republic of the Philippines. The British government swiftly responded by saying it would not take Moro claims on North Borneo seriously.

But it was Diosdado Macapagal of Turtle Islands fame, who most vigorously asserted our claim to North Borneo, or Sabah as we call it, to the extent that he broke off diplomatic relations with newly-independent Malaysia and formed an alliance with Indonesia, pursuing its own quarrels at the time with Malaysia.

President Marcos went beyond asserting the claim. He wanted to become the Filipino Caesar. He came up with a cunning plan to earn martial glory.

http://corregidor.org/Heritage_Battalion/jabidah.html

A military force composed of up to 180 Tausug and Sama Muslims was secretly trained on Corregidor, with the objective of infiltrating Sabah and triggering a revolt that would cause Sabah to secede from Malaysia and allow the Philippines to annex it.

But they weren’t paid; and when they sent a petition to President Marcos asking to be paid, the response they got was: they were deemed resigned from the service.

Another version goes beyond the trainees complaining of poor living conditions and no pay.

The other, more romantic, version has it that forty years ago –ton his very day!- on March 18, 1968, the recruits discovered the purpose of their training and objected to being trained to fight not only fellow Muslims, but possibly their own relatives living in Sabah.

Faced with the demands of the recruits to go home, their military superiors proceeded to herd them to an airstrip and then liquidated them. Only one person, Jibin  Arula, survived and escaped by diving into the sea and making his way to Cavite.

Army Special Forces, led by Army Chief General Romeo Espino, then engaged in a cover-up. Burned bodies tied to trees near the airstrip was cleaned up and cleared of all debris, even bullet shells were picked. Bodies were wrapped in dark colored ponchos and were thrown into Manila Bay the next day.

But Ninoy Aquino exposed the coverup in a Senate speech; the armed forces subjected 8 officers and 16 enlisted men to a court martial; by 1971 they were acquitted.

The Jabidah Massacre, as it became known, helped fuel Muslim secession in Mindanao, with the backing of Malaysia.

There’s an interesting article freely available on line, which looks at the issues concerning the integration of Muslim Mindanao, into our Republic:

http://morolaw.blogspot.com/2007/10/examining-nexus-between-philippine.html

Atty. Zainudin S. Malang’s “The Nexus between Philippine Constitutionalism and the Mindanao Conflict” points to a precise time, when all these issues came to a head.

Christian colonization had become outright land-grabbing of Muslim lands by the 1960s, with the armed forces of our Republic taking sides against Muslims and for Christian settlers.

This is the background to Muslim Filipinos questioning their allegiance to the Republic, and to a war of secession in the 1970s. The Jabida Massacre was the last straw in a situation that had been rapidly deteriorating during the 1960s, where Muslim Filipinos saw little good faith on the part of their Christian countrymen, or a Republic that was supposed to protect Muslim and Christian rights equally.

When we return, we’ll meet two individuals who want every Filipino to reflect on the Jabidah massacre.

III. Interview

TIMELINE:  JABIDAH MASSACRE

* Dates and events are taken from Under the Crescent Moon unless indicated otherwise.

IV. My view

Our Sabah claim was enshrined in the bastardized 1973 Constitution but not as explicitly asserted in our present Constitution.

Despite President Marcos announcing, in 1977 in Kaula Lumpur that we’d do so, we’ve never dropped that claim, only shelved it, for the sake of peace with Malaysia.

Malaysia, on the other hand, pays rent to the heirs of the last Sultan of Sulu, recognizing it as their private property as a, in a sense, Malaysian royal family, but never recognizing our Republic’s claims.

We can only hope that Asean will find a way to reconcile the Philippine and Malaysian positions.

But of greater urgency is the need to reconcile Muslim Filipinos with their citizenship in our present Republic. This requires our recognizing their perspectives based on history, on ideology, and religion: perspectives that are still, sadly, alien to the minds of most Western-oriented Filipinos.

But never have so many Christian Filipinos been so exposed to their Muslim countrymen; and never has there been a corresponding opportunity for all of us to realize we aren’t so different from each other, as we once thought.