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... ...Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948 -- "A Cause for Celebration" ... 'Demands of Dignity' 'Demands of Dignity' <DEVELOPING THE DISCOURSE ON OUR DECEMBER 1Oth DECLARATION>
On-Line Edition of the Book by Ed Aurelio C. Reyes Chapter 3-- Decade-old Document Dissected |
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CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK: Our
Decade-old 1998 Declaration Demanding
Apologies from the US (10 reasons) Demanding
Apologies from Spain (2 reasons) Appendix 3-A: Text of A Philippine Declaration
of Felicitation and Protest, 1998 App
3-B: List of 300+ signatories App 3-C: Unreal Estate: Map of Fraud- ulent Sale Response
to the Spanish Response Response to the American Non-Response Demands of Dignity EXCERPTS: -o0o- "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed Dec. 10, 1948, has been a cause of celebration, and the Treaty of Paris, signed Dec. 10, 1898, has been a cause for indignation... on the part of ALL HUMANS." -o0o- "The HUMANITY of ALL is ONE! Assaults on the Rights of a human anywhere are assaults on the rights of all humans everywhere." -o0o- "The current Human Evolutionary Imperative is attaining Synergy in Conscious Oneness." -o0o- "We demand apologies not to uphold our national dignity, but to give the offenders the opportunity to uphold theirs." -o0o- "Demands for Human Dignity come from within Human Dignity itself." -o0o- "We seek redress, closure and healing... Since the governments involved and the international organizations that depend on the consent of governments cannot be expected to support these calls or accord them any serious attention, we are calling upon the citizens of these and other nations, on the citizenry of the world." -o0o- "One of the factors underpinning the habit of trying to hide or mangle the truth is the illusion that facts hidden well enough as secrets can stay as such forever. Another is the illusion that you can harm your fellow-humans without harming yourself." -o0o- "Inevitably, eventually and ultimately, all wrongs cry out to be fully acknowledged, regretted, and set aright. Your peace of mind now and in the future demands it. Your very dignity demands it." -o0o- "Smile for Synergy! Seek One Humanity!"
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LINKS TO THE MAIN PARTS OF THE Demands of Dignity BOOK:
GENERAL FEEDBACK SPECIFIC FEEDBACK FEEDBACK BOX
Chapter Three ------------------------ Decade-old Document Dissected THE
1998 Philippine Declaration of Felicitation and
Protest1 was issued a decade ago. It was timed for official release and delivery
on December 10, 1998, the Golden Anniversary of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, which Chapter One of this book
presents as a universal “Cause for Celebration,” for no less than
universal human celebration. And that same date was also no less than
the exact Centennial of the Treaty of Paris between Spain
and the United States, which Chapter Two takes pains, across some
40 pages, to explain as a historical “Cause for Indignation,” for no
less than universal human indignation. The
1998 Declaration states no claim to officiality (read:
upon state authority), but it is asserting the identity of its source
territory – the Philippines – and also of its authorship.
This was done “in the performance of our historic duty to
our ancestors, to our descendants, as well as to our fellow-nations who
all had had their respective ways of upholding the universal human
rights…” It
was signed by over three hundred Filipino signatories composed mostly of
academicians attending an annual history-oriented conference and human
rights workers participating in various human rights-oriented functions
held about the same time toward the end of that year.2
The
1998 Declaration expresses reasons why both the
felicitation and the indignation ought to be universally felt.
With no space in a three-page document to elaborate on the items
covered, but only enough space to merely enumerate them (at least subtly
inviting all receiving minds to get interested and make some inquiries
with search engines serving the world-wide web), the text of that
document is now explained in the present chapter of this humble volume.
It is here and in succeeding chapters that room for substantial
explanations gets to be afforded. The
end in view is to get more and more people to realize that the
sentiments expressed here deserve to be deeply studied, deeply
understood and deeply shared by all human beings of all countries, or at
least in the countries involved in the Treaty of Paris:
the buyer country; the seller country; and the victims -- the
merchandise -- of that sale. And
we are not hurrying anyone on this because we are conscious that the
march of real, comprehensive, and deeply significant human evolution
cannot impatiently be hurried. That
the two international instruments were signed on the very same date
exactly half a century apart should not by itself attract so much
attention – for really there may be thousands of pairs of dates
involved in such coincidences across the millennia of history – if not
for what can plainly be seen as diametrically-opposed trajectories
of human thinking these two documents respectively carried.
We start this Chapter Three by focusing on the relationship between the respective contents of the two international documents both dated December 10 but half a century apart. Relating
the Two Documents
The
crucial aspects to take into account in relating the 1948 and 1898
papers are the matters of chronology and mutual
relevance. On
the aspect of chronology, it has been argued that one ought to refrain
from judging a past act or practice, a set of acts or a pattern of
practices, applying as standard what had not yet been adopted then as
codes and rules of ethics and proper behavior. For this reason, as this writer has been told, one may not
judge the Treaty of Paris on the basis of the UDHR,
which was then still to come much later, exactly five full decades later
to be precise about it. But
as early as 1789, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and
of the Citizen in 1789 had laid down, among all the others, in
its first three articles the reasons for the illegitimacy of the sale
that was officialized by the historic signing that was hosted in the
capital city of precisely that same nation 109 years later.
Moreover,
“closer to home” on the part of the Treaty’s
American authors and promoters, that French Declaration
was chronologically flanked by a pair of basic pronouncements in the
proud heritage of U.S. history, like the American Declaration
of Independence of 1776 and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
of 1863. The broad historical contexts of these were the desired
abolition of colonialism and of slavery, both recognized by the
Americans of that time as violations of the self-evident
proposition that “all men are created equal.”
It
was due to these classic and official American pronouncements that our
hero Jose Rizal, seeing that the United States might possibly seek to
colonize the Philippine islands, dismissed the likelihood of that
particular scenario because such would be “contrary to her
traditions.”3 Rizal was proven to be overly generous with giving his benefit of the doubt and trusting that the U.S. government would keep a decent measure of fidelity to those American classic pronouncements. He had unfortunately died many years before Sen. Alfred Beveridge could say publicly, with bigoted arrogance, that: “The
American Declaration of Independence applies only to the people capable
of self-government, not to a race of Malay children of barbarism
schooled by Spaniards in the latter’s worst estate.”4 One
should note well that none of the human rights declarations
mentioned limits in any way the enjoyment of the basic right to self-determination
only to people deemed by biased foreign eyes to be “capable of
self-government.” Ironically
on this specific “requirement” another American, George Dewey, who
had commanded the US Asiatic fleet and “fought and won” the grossly
lopsided Battle of Manila Bay, had also reported under oath that he
considered the Filipinos more capable of self-government than the Cubans
whom the Americans wanted to help gain their in-dependence.5 Moreover,
the Iloilo incident that perplexed President McKinley just before the US
Senate’s ratification vote on the Treaty was showing all
observers that contrary to American preferences and propaganda, the
Filipino revolutionary forces were governing that liberated city fairly
well.6 One
should note well, further, that not one of all these documents even
claims to legislate rights into existence but only set out to articulate
categorically and for the record of history the recognition
of them as “self-evident,” “sacred,” “natural and
imprescriptible” rights of man, i.e., not requiring any
authority or effectivity date or prerequisites to establish their valid
applicability. It can therefore be proclaimed validly that these human
rights, including the affirmation of equality, were born to apply on the
day the first of the homo sapiens species emerged on
earth. If
this were not the righteous doctrine to be appropriately applied, how
come the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals punished war criminals for acts
committed during the Second World War, long before these tribunals were
created? The Rwandan and
Yugoslavian Tribunals also tried crimes committed before the
establishment of these courts. That the officials and officers
responsible for the nuclear-bombing of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
not prosecuted was due to some other factor of unfairness. The
more crucial aspect in relating these two international instruments is
mutual relevance. On the
one hand, the UDHR, represented the worldwide consensus on
underpinning premises why people cannot be bought and sold and should be
respected in the exercise of their self-determination as humans; and the
other, the signing of the Treaty of Paris, in clear
violation of the spirit eventually articulated in the UDHR
and its consequent documents, constituted the largest-scale
human rights violation ever perpetrated in the Philippines.
It was a direct assault on the basic rights of entire population then of
the Philippines archipelago7
and of all the incoming generations until the conditions caused by such
signing are ended, if ever they can still ever be!8 The Philippine experience
with the Treaty of Paris and its aftermath constitutes a
very rich and multifaceted treasure trove of lessons that can help
present-day human rights workers do their work better or at least
prepare to do their work better. Violation
of the rights of any human anywhere and anywhen deserves to be viewed as
violating the rights of all humans everywhere and everywhen!
As Nobel Peace Prize laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa
once said, as quoted in an earlier chapter, “We can only be human
together.” Human rights are a matter of collective enjoyment and
universal recognition, where no discrimination of any kind – like year
of birth before or after the documented articulation of these rights –
can be invoked or even tolerated. Violations
of human rights can be mutual, as often in cases of war, but there is no
such thing as “half a violation.”
And in any human rights violation, the entire of Humanity is
ultimately the aggrieved party. And all these rights can be validly invoked even by people who, not knowing essence of humans and the homo sapiens species, violate the rights of other humans with cruelty and with thrilled satisfaction for any reason, including ignorance, and including greed and brutality, which would also be underpinned by ignorance.9 Our Decade-old DeclarationNoting the exact half-century time span between the two documents of historical consequence, two distinct circles of Filipinos (that both had this author in their respective rosters, namely the Philippine Alliance of Human Rights Advocates or PAHRA, and the Campaign Network for Sense of History, more widely known as Kamalaysayan)10 decided to highlight the double-significance of the then fast-approaching date: December 10, 1998. For
this occasion, these two groups – the human rights workers, on the one
hand, and history-oriented academicians and students, on the other,
joined their energies to produce A Philippine
Declaration of Felicitation and Protest, and to have it signed
by hundreds of people from all over the country, who were mainly members
of the spheres of influence of the two organizations, by conducting a
signature drive during history-oriented and human rights-oriented
functions at the national capital shortly before the big day.11
The three-page 1998 Declaration, which conveys felicitations with the rest of Humankind for the Golden Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, lists three basic demands and a number of expectations and calls in relation to the Treaty of Paris. As formulated and signed, the Declaration seeks— 1) that people involved in preparing for the establishment of the UN International Criminal Court seriously consider the possibility of comprehensively studying “war crimes perpetrated by entire states”; 2) that both the United States and Spain apologize to the government and the people of the Philippines for acts pertinent to the signing and implementation of the Treaty of Paris; and 3) that there be a full unearthing and full and wide and signing of the Treaty of Paris and the conduct of the Filipino-American War. On December 10, 1998, Golden Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Centenary of the Treaty of Paris, copies of our 1998 Declaration were delivered to the following: 1) the office of the Resident Representative of the United Nations; 2) the embassies of the United States and of Spain, these countries being the parties to the Treaty, for transmittal to their respective principals; and 3) the embassy of France, the host country of that Treaty’s signing, also for transmittal to its principal. The
offices of the mass media in Manila were also sent copies accompanied by
a covering press release. Some of these media offices were transmitting
via the Internet. As delivered to all these offices, the cover letter accompanying that Declaration was signed jointly by leading representatives of the two groups, the Philippine Alliance of Human Rights Advocates (PAHRA) and the Kampanya para sa Kamalayan sa Kasaysayan (Kamalaysayan). Then PAHRA Chairman Bishop Julio Xavier Labayen and this writer (as Kamalaysayan lead founder and executive director) were the signatories on this cover letter. That letter said in part: “Please find enclosed a copy of the Pahayag ng mga Pilipino: Bati at Tuligsa, A Philippine Declaration of Felicitation and Protest (in its English translation of the Filipino original). “This is a declaration of felicitous greeting to Humankind on the occasion of the Golden Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a statement of protest and demand for justice on the centennial of what we earnestly view as the broadest violation of human rights ever recorded in Philippine history. “We are coursing this Declaration through the good offices of your respective representatives in Manila, our national capital, with the faith that these good offices would be the most effective channels to reach you. We are also availing ourselves of such other channels as the international mass media and the Internet.” Prudent in its expectation that the governments concerned would likely choose to simply ignore our 1998 Declaration, the latter issues a call to the peoples of all countries: “(S)ince the governments involved, and the international organizations that depend on the agreement of governments, cannot be expected to actively support these calls or even just accord these any attention, the people, as citizens of various states, who support the spirit and content of this Declaration (are asked to) initiate actions, close ranks, synergize efforts and coordinate closely in order to have this Declaration disseminated and explained to the widest achievable extent.” The
1998 Declaration also expresses the spirit of human unity
where people of various nationalities, including both the offenders and
the offended in acts perpetrated in the course of human history, are
likewise addressed: “(The Declaration also seeks) that the American, Filipino and Spanish peoples, as well as the other peoples of the world, learn well the lessons from these historical events on the basis of all the information to be unearthed and disseminated, and henceforth relate to one another more firmly on the basis of equality, mutual respect, and the promotion of peace and justice.” Given
what is described above as “prudent expectation,” that the 1998
Declaration would likely be completely ignored by the official
addressees, we were so very pleasantly surprised when we actually got a
response early the following month.
It came from the Embassy of Spain. (see Chapter 4)
And we have reason to be confident that the 1998 Declaration has had some effect as well on other people who have read it. But we choose to make a follow up now, a full decade after, through the writing and dissemination of this book, to increase that likelihood. Dissecting
the Demands
The
1998 Declaration seeks closer study of facts and disclosures
of well-thought-out opinions from “people preparing for the
establishment of the International Criminal Court: We
ask "people involved in preparing for the establishment of the UN
International Criminal Court seriously consider the possibility of
comprehensively studying 'war crimes perpetrated by entire states'.” At
the time of issuance of our 1998 Declaration, the Rome
Statute was even less than just half a year old, with an
inadequate number of signatories and inadequate number of ratifying
member-states of the United Nations, for the ICC to start operating.
So, all that was there, for all practical purposes, were
“people involved in preparing” for the actual setting up of the
Court. So, all we could do
at that time was to make a polite request of these people to seriously
consider the possibility of comprehensively studying “war crimes
perpetrated by entire states” and, by implication, consider the
Philippine experience as a lessons-laden case study from which to learn
well. What
our 1998 Declaration seeks official apologies for, from
both the United States and Spain, are clear violations of our individual
and collective rights as human persons and as a nation, violations that
have not been subjected to scrutiny for clear and impartial judgment by
the bigger human community, and these, therefore, are grievances still
awaiting redress and closure. As
early as ten years ago, we were aware of the five-month-old Rome
Statute’s provision of non-retroactivity, of inappropriateness
for the ICC to take up crimes committed before the Court became
actually operational. Still,
we remembered the logic of the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals prosecuting
and deciding cases on crimes that obviously took place before these
tribunals could take shape. It
is just possible that some leaders and workers involved in the work of
the ICC, while fully aware of, and firmly predisposed to observe,
the non-retroactivity technicality of this particular international
mechanism, may just privately (and later on, even officially) ask “Why
not?” And they can then
decide to learn from the Philippine historic experience with the Treaty
of Paris as a rich and useful case study and source of baseline
premises for the work of the ICC. Or others in the sidelines, like the Academe and the civil society organizations’ communities in various countries may devise and suggest ways to really optimize on the Philippine experience without violating any of the ICC’s inborn technical limitations. Demanding
Apologies from the US
Our 1998 Declaration seeks apologies from the United States, and enumerates the reasons for this demand, covering acts relevant and subsequent to signing the act. (References for these items are indicated right under the items’ respective descriptions, separate from the entire chapter’s set of endnotes.) (A)
Deception of the Filipino revolutionaries by pretending to be their ally
in their struggle for liberation. Item I-A-1: Visit by Captain Wood, commander of USS Petrel, as ordered by Commodore George Dewey, who urged him to return to the Philippines to renew hostilities against the Spaniards with the object of gaining Philippine independence See
<http://www.authorama.com/true-version-of-the-philippine-revolution.html>
(search word: “Petrel”); and also Daniel Boone Schirmer, Republic
or Empire (Cambridge: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1972), p.
68, citing Nathan Sargent, Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign (Naval
Historical Foundation, 1947), p. 16; L. H. Healey and L. Kutner, The
Admiral (Chicago & New York: Ziff-Davis publishing company,
1944), pp. 157-158. Item
I-A-2: Non-correction of
statements publicly made by Spanish Consul Spencer Pratt, for which he
was even reprimanded, and later removed as consul, by the US Department
of State. See
http://www.authorama.com/true-version-of-the-philippine-revolution.html Item I-A-3: Dewey’s testimony on the obedience of Aguinaldo and his eventually being dropped, where the only evident reason for such obedience sustained over a long period was the illusion of Filipino-American collaboration that had been created and maintained by Dewey himself and other US officials and officers. See
Constantino, Ibid., p. 75. quoting (US) Senate Document
331, Pt 3, p. 2928 as cited by Blount, Ibid., p. 20. Item I-A-4: Dewey’s act of ordering that Aguinaldo be brought back to the Philippines, an act implying the Americans’ long-term earnestness in collaborating with Filipino forces against the Spanish forces. See Howard Zinn, “The Empire and the People,” <http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinnempire12.html> (search words: “brought back from China by U.S. warships to lead soldiers against Spain”) Item I-A-5: Dewey’s act of telling Aguinaldo to have a flag made for the Philippines, his act of showing appreciation of it, and his promise to have this flag known by ships of other nationalities then anchored in Manila Bay. This was another act of implying the Americans’ long-term earnestness in collaborating with Filipino forces against the Spanish forces. See
Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy, The True Version of the Philippine
Revolution, <http://www.authorama.com/true-version-of-the-philippine-revolution.html>
(search words: “How pretty your flag is!” and “he would recognize
and protect”) (B)
Deception of the Filipinos and collusion with Spain to have the latter
surrender to the US and not to the Filipino forces that had actually
defeated Spain in the two-year uninterrupted armed struggle across the
length and breadth of the archipelago. Item I-B-1: Non-consideration of the full knowledge that the walled capital city of Intramuros was practically all that was still left under Spanish control before the Americans came, and therefore of the full knowledge of which force actually weakened and defeated the Spanish occupation force in the Philippines. See Constantino, Ibid., p. 78, quoting Annual Reports of the War Department, 1899, Vol. I, Pt. 4, p. 13; and quoting Blount, Ibid., p. 70. Item I-B-2: Scripting and execution of plan to keep out the Filipino forces from Intramuros after the US troops had taken possession of the walled capital city. See
David Trask, “The Spanish-American
War,” (part of the series, titled, The World of 1898: The
Spanish-American War, Website of Library of Congress,
<http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/trask.html>. (C)
Purchase of the land, population and natural resources of the
Philippines from Spain through the instrument that was the Treaty of
Paris signed on December 10, 1898, which violated the human rights of
all Filipinos, including the right to be free, to be equal to all other
peoples of the world, as well as the right to self determination and
patrimony, and violated the very principles upon which the United States
herself was established. Item I-C-1: Excerpt from American Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal….” See
Michael Palumbo, Human Rights: Meaning and History
(Florida: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, 1982), p. 145. Item I-C-2: Excerpt from Gettysburg Address: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” See
<http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/gettysburg.htm>. Item I-C-3: Sen. Hoar’s paraphrase of Lincoln: “No nation was ever created good enough to own another.” See
Schirmer, Ibid, p. 116.
Lincoln’s original: “No man was ever created good enough to
own another.” Item I-C-4: Purchase of the Philippines, as manifested in this pertinent clause of the Treaty of Paris: “ARTICLE III
“Spain
cedes to the United States the archipelago known as the
Philippines Islands, and comprehending the islands lying within
the following line: “A line running from west to
east along or near the twentieth parallel of north latitude, and through
the middle of the navigable channel of Bacchi, from the one hundred and
eighteenth to the one hundred and eighteenth to the one hundred and
twenty-seventh degree meridian of longitude east of Greenwich, thence
along the parallel and forty-five minutes north latitude to its
intersection with the meridian of longitude one hundred and nineteen
degrees and thirty-five minutes east of Greenwich to the parallel of
latitude seven degrees and forty minutes north to its intersection with
the one hundred and sixteenth degree meridian of longitude east of
Greenwich, and thence along the one hundred and eighteenth degree
meridian of longitude east of Greenwich to the point of beginning. “The
United States will pay to Spain the sum of twenty million dollars,
within three months after the exchange of the ratifications of the
present treaty. See
Appendix 2-A in Chapter 2 of this book (Underscoring
supplied.) Item I-C-5: President McKinley’s lie about having to Christianize the Philippines, an order that was supposed to have come from God who was omniscient but, as implied by McKinley, did not know about earlier Spanish colonial achievement of putting entire villages in the Philippines “under the bell” of the parish churches. Several religious orders sent out missions and established and administered parishes and the diocese bishops started ordaining and training native clergy, who later rebelled against racial discrimination within the powerful Catholic Church and insisted on replacing the foreign priests in the religious orders in the administration of parishes. See
Teodoro A. Agoncilio History of the Filipino People,
eighth edition, (R. P. Garcia Publishing Co., Quezon City, 1990), p.
122-123. Item I-C-5: Accepting or even insisting to include in the sale almost the entirety of the island of Mindanao that never even fell into Spanish control. See “States and Regents of the World: An
Alphabetical Listing of States and Territories and Their Regents in the
19th and 20th Centuries,” <http://www.geocities.com/beerke_beer/Moro.html> Item I-C-6: Accepting or even insisting to include in the sale the Cordillera mountain region that never fell into Spanish control “In 1620, Captain Garcia de Aldana Cabrera offered the resisting Igorot tribal leaders clemency if they were willing to accept Catholic religion, obey the Spanish government and pay a fifth of all their mined gold to the Spanish King. They refused and the Spanish conquerors built forts and organized military troops to start the exploitation of the gold mines. During the years that followed, the Spanish managed to trade gold despite setbacks from the Igorots, who because of their resistance remained relatively independent from Spanish rule. The price that the Igorots had to pay for this independence was that they became different from their colonized brothers. The Philippines staged Asia’s first nationalistic revolution in 1896, and declared its independence on June 12, 1898. The newly founded country was soon taken over by the United States of America. The US was the first foreign nation to fully invade the highlands of the Gran Cordillera to push the mining operations in the territory.” (Underscoring supplied.) See
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordillera_Mountains> Item I-C-7: Accepting or even insisting to include in the sale large areas (practically the entirety of the main island of Luzon and the Visayas islands that were no longer held by Spain even before the Spanish-American War. See
Constantino, Ibid., p. 78, quoting Annual
Reports of the War Department, 1899, Vol. I, Pt. 4, p. 13; and
quoting Blount, Ibid., p. 70. Item I-C-8: Non-inclusion of involving the principal stakeholders in the process of negotiating, finalizing and signing the Treaty of Paris, and not even hearing out Felipe Agoncillo, the diplomatic envoy of the Filipino government who was sent to Paris to protest. See Article 5, Section II, Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples (Appendix 1-B in Chapter 1 of this book); see also Centennial Site designed by MSC Communications Technologies, Inc. Hosted by MSC Computer Training Center. <http://www. msc.edu.ph/centennial/ag9812xx.html> (search words: “Agoncillo’s Protest”) (D) waging of a bloody and brutal war of aggression and occupation, perpetrating killings, torture and other forms of physical abuse, arson and other forms of wanton destruction, and plunder as in the case of the Bells of Balangiga. Item I-D-1: General scale and conduct of the undeclared war, including duration and budget and size of forces and comparison to a declared war like that against Spain: See: Centennial Site designed by Management Systems Consultants (MSC) Communications Technologies, Inc. Hosted by MSC Computer Training Center. <http://www.msc.edu.ph/centennial/philam.html>; Veltisezar Bautista, The Filipino Americans (From 1763 to the Present) Their History, Culture, and Traditions, <http://www.filipino-americans.com/filipino_am.html>; The World of 1898: The Spanish-American War, website of Library of Congress Hispanic Division. <http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/intro.html>. Item
I-D-2: Provoking war by drawing first blood at the San Juan
Bridge and covering up with outright lies, including that of Gen. Arthur
MacArthur; See Schirmer, Ibid., pp. 127-132, quoting the Report of Major General E. S. Otis, 1899; quoting from Report of the War Department, 1899, pp. 462, 464; quoting from Charles Edward Russel, The Outlook for the Philippines (New York: The Century Co., 1922), p. 93; citing the 57th Congress, 1st Sess., Senate Document No. 331, Part 2, Senate Hearings on the Philippines, MacArthur’s Testimony, p. 900; quoting Boston Evening Transcript, February 11, May 8, 1899; and citing Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Filipino Martyrs (London and New York: J. Lane, 1900), p. 169; Compilation of Philippine Insurgent Records (later retitled Philippine Revolutionary Records), pp. 42-43; Speech of Lieutenant Hall at Fanueil Hall, March 19, 1903, as printed in Mass Meetings of Protest (Boston: New England Anti-Imperialist League, 1903); 57th Congress, 1st sess., Senate Document No. 331, , Part 2, Hearings on the Philippines, MacArthur’s Testimony, pp. 898-899; Philippine Insurgent Records (later retitled Philippine Revolutionary Records), pp. 42-43, Teodoro A. Agoncilio and Oscar M. Alfonso, A Short History of the Filipino People (Quezon City: University of the Philippines, 1960), p. 266. Item I-D-3: Summary of Filipino war casualties; with the respective figures accounted for by Gen. Jacob Smith in Samar and Gen. Franklin Bell in Batangas. See Chapter 2, Appendix 2-B, p. 76. Item I-D-4: Documented atrocities as narrated by US soldiers to their respective parents and to the committee members during congressional inquiries; blanket denials of reported incidents and official denials of admitted acts as carrying out of policies and orders. See Chapter 2, Appendix 2-B, pp. 76-79 Item I-D-5: Poor handling of the US military’s debacle at Balangiga, Samar, including slander (‘massacre’ tag) and plunder (looting of church bells as “booty” in an undeclared war). See Chapter 2, Appendix 2-B, p. 78 (E) Decades of occupation, and in furtherance of this act, suppressing the right of the Filipinos to enjoy freedom of expression as in displaying the Philippine flag, staging pro-Filipino plays, and publishing pro-Filipino editorials and other works. Item I-E-1: Direct colonial occupation from February 1899 to July 1946, interrupted only by 2.5 yrs of Japanese occupation from January 1942 to October 1944. Item I-E-2: Flag banned from public display. According to historian Agoncilio, the "Flag Law" of 1907 prohibited the display of the Filipino flag, Only when the American authorities became sure of the peace and order conditions did they scrap this law and the Sedition law of 1901. See Agoncilio Ibid., p. 378. Item I-E-3: Nationalist plays were prohibited and their artists were punished for “sedition.” Agoncilio also says: “Nationalistic plays were staged to remind the people of their (quest for) freedom and independence. Aurelio Tolentino’s Kahapon, Ngayon at Bukas (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow), Juan Matapang Cruz’s Hindi Ako Patay (I Am Not Dead), Juan Abad’s Tanikalang Ginto (Gold Chain), and Severino Reyes’s Walang Sugat (Not Wounded), were banned by the authorities. Tolentino, in particular, was arrested and jailed for advocating independence in his play. See Agoncilio History of the Filipino People, p. 379. Item I-E-4: Libel case against El Renacimiento, and the subsequent U.S. Supreme Court ruling convicting the newspaper and its editors, resulting in its closure. El Renacimiento was suppressed with the unusual decision of the US Supreme Court in a libel suit filed against the paper by the Secretary of the Interior, Dean Worcester. The newspaper had published commentary in an editorial written by Fidel Reyes and titled “Aves the Rapiña” (Birds of Prey) against the activities of a certain unnamed official using the powers of his office to get his hands on the country’s natural resources. Worcester felt alluded to and on the basis of his assertion of this feeling, the Court found the paper and its publisher and editors guilty of libel, fined them P60,000 in damages, and auctioned off the paper, including the printing machines. See Ed Aurelio C. Reyes, Press Freedom: The People’s Right – Repression and Assertion in the Philippines (Manila: Philippine Movement for Press Freedom, 1992), p. 71; (F) Slandering and insulting the Filipinos before the eyes of the American people and of the other peoples of the world. Item I-F-1: All the lies portraying the Filipinos in the negative light, especially our supposed lack of capability for self-governance, a capability that had been established long before the arrival of the Spanish colonizers. The Banawe Rice Terraces could not have possibly been built to the extent that it was, and managed productively across thousand of years, without the self-governance capability. The reformative justice system of the typical barangay communities were far superior to the Western penal system, the economic systems founded on synergetic "Bayanihan," conservation of natural resources and the well-known honesty in trade were all proofs of effective self-government. Fr. Pedro Salgado, quoting Spanish personalities like Miguel Lopez de Loarca, Pigafetta and Antonio Morga, described our people as productive and healthy when the Spaniards came. And by that time the Americans attacked the Filipinos, we had already established our third constitutional government complete with Cabinet members. Even Dewey acknowledged that Filipinos were much more capable of self-governance than the Cubans, for whom the US government wanted immediate independence. Still, President McKinley stubbornly said "(The Filipinos) were unfit for self-government, and would soon have anarchy and misrule worse than Spain's was.. if left to themselves." Sen. Alfred Beveridge gave his own insulting and libelous public remarks: “The American Declaration of Independence applies only to the people capable of self-government, not to a race of Malay children of barbarism schooled by Spaniards in the latter’s worst estate.” For his part, Sen. Arthur Gorman opposed the Treaty of Paris, warning of white-brown intermarriages that it can facilitate in big numbers. He said assimilation of the Filipinos, a colored people, would “degrade” the white Americans. See
Pedro V. Salgado, O.P., The Philippine Economy: History and
Analysis (Legazpi City: P. Salgado, 1987), pp. 3-5; (US)
Congressional Record, 56th
Congress. Text at <http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad.intrel/ajb72.htm>;
and Schirmer,
Ibid., p. 119, citing
Boston Evening Transcript, Feb. 6, 1899; and Review
of Reviews, March 1899, p. 267. Item I-F-2: Proliferation of cartoons in US media illustrating Filipinos as primitive in clothing and general behavior, promoting, and taking full advantage of, Americans’ disdain for black races (like Negroes, and Aborigines). See Abe Ignacio, Enrique de la Cruz, Jorge Emmanuel and Helen Toribio, The Forbidden Book (San Francisco, California: T'boli Publishing, 2005). (The book features eighty–eight colored cartoons taken from the pages of popular magazines, along with 133 black–and–white political cartoons reprinted from newspapers including San Francisco Evening Post, New York World, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, New Orleans Times–Democrat, Minnesota Journal, St. Louis Republic, Detroit News, Denver Evening Post, Los Angeles Times, etc. as well as Life, Harper’s and Collier’s Weekly. Twenty–seven historical photographs are added to compare with the cartoons’ stereotypical depictions.) Item I-F-3: A certain Captain S. P. Meek, who had served in the Zamboanga peninsula in Mindanao during the war, published a book,The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga, clearly alluding to the Filipinos, and with that title coming from a ditty popular among the American troops during that war. See Felice P. Sta. Maria, "Brown Man's Burden," Turn of the Century (Makati:GFC Books, 1990), p. 155. (G) Undertaking to control the Filipinos through the latter’s consciousness, which destroyed the native culture, by systematic education that distorted Philippine history and degraded the Filipino language and by various forms of entertainment that lowered the Filipinos’ self-image and created a culture of blind veneration of American culture. Item I-G-1: Taft Commission and Phil. history-writing. William Howard Taft, head of the second Philippine Commission and first American civil governor of the Philippines, told President McKinley that given ten years he could effect the pacification of the Philippines with his two programs—the education program and the history rewriting program. See Dr. Ernesto R. Gonzales, Ph.D., Dapitan: Himay-Malay sa Paglaya (unpublished monograph in Filipino, 2007), p. 13. Item I-G-2: The Thomasites, 530 volunteer teachers who came aboard USS Thomas in 1901 set up a self-alienating education system, where English was the medium of instruction which made Filipinos, especially those who were having difficulty understanding this foreign language and expressing themselves in it were made to feel inferior, thus implying that the Americans’ language, ways and lifestyle were the ones that were to be admired and emulated as a sign of “real civilization.” Thus the Americans, through the public school system established with the Thomasites, made the natives deride their own languages, culture, and practices as inferior, and also drove deep wedges among those who could be “modernized” fast (read: Americanized) and those who were “slow learners” and “stupid.” The most insidious insults were the ones that began to be accepted as valid by the ones being insulted. This violates the spirit of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples, specifically its Article 13, which states: “Every people has the right to speak its own language and preserve and develop its own culture, thereby contributing to the enrichment of the culture of mankind.” See < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomasites >; and Appendix 1-B at the end of Chapter 1 Item I-G-3: Long-lasting divisive order to choose one national hero and over-projecting the resulting choice which was also their own. Citing authors Connaughton, Pimlott and Anderson, Battle for Manila, columnist William Esposo writes: “America’s own envoy to the Philippines admitted that the choice of national hero was an American machination. Former ambassador to the Philippines Charles Bohlen recounts in 1957: ‘(William H. Taft, the Philippine governor in 1901,) quickly decided it would be extremely useful for the Filipinos to have a national hero of their revolution against the Spanish in order to channel their feelings and focus their resentment backward on Spain. But he told his advisers that he wanted it to be someone who really wasn’t much of a revolutionary that, if his life was examined too closely or his works read too carefully, this could not cause us any trouble.’ According to Bohlen, Taft preferred Rizal as the national hero because he suited his pacifist model. It is not surprising when a colonizer like the United States of America does these historical manipulations to suit their objectives’.” By insisting only on one national hero for the Philippines, and maligning the principal hero of the Philippine Revolution, the Americans drove a long-lasting wedge among sections of the population that have identified themselves only with either of these two. See
William M. Esposo, “Philippine History is Rewritten Before it is
Learned,” Inq7.net, August 30, 2004. <http://www.chairwrecker.com/column.php?col=195> (H) Continued domination of the Philippine economy, culture and military through numerous one-sided agreements. Item I-H-1: Return to previous Spanish owners of landholdings that had been recovered by the Filipino forces in two-year armed revolutionary war. See text of the Treaty of Paris, Article IX, in Appendix 2-A, p. 72 Item I-H-2: Carpet-bombing of Manila well beyond necessity, for the prostrate Philippine economy to urgently need the war reparations funds from the US and become vulnerable to the latter’s independence-negating dictates: Citing authors Connaughton, Pimlott and Anderson, Battle for Manila, William Esposo writes: “The Filipinos became sacrificial lambs when Gen. Douglas MacArthur chose to violate the rules of war by razing the city to rubble with cannons and bombs instead of sending troops to secure what was already a sure victory. The risks of war are supposed to be taken by soldiers not civilians. The Japanese did commit atrocities during the retaking of Manila. But these atrocities, while they make dramatic and blood curdling reading, do not account for the enormous civilian casualty count which made the 1945 Battle of Manila one of the most vicious during the Second World War.” See Esposo, Ibid., <http://www.chairwrecker.com/column.php?col=195> Item I-H-3: Treaties on general relations, free trade, military bases, military assistance, mutual defense, etc. were practically imposed on the newly-"independent" republic to negate such formal independence, some of which were pre-conditions to the very grant of "independence" or to the release of war damage reparations. See
Salgado, Ibid., pp. 34-36, ; and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, The
United States and the Philippines: A Study of Neo-Colonialism (Quezon
City: New Day Publishers, 1986), pp. 43, 64-66, (I) Repeated meddling in Philippine politics and Philippine national sovereignty. Item I-I-1: Instigating the unseating of Central Luzon solons to insure the passage of the pro-US Parity Amendment vote (amending the Philippine Constitution of 1935 needed a three-votes vote of Congress). American author Stephen Rosskamm Shalom narrates: “(A)s a US official noted, ‘it is evident that the opposition can block acceptance of this measure if it remains unified...’ Accordingly, (President Manuel) Roxas and his supporters in Congress had to resort to more drastic measures: the ousting of some of their opponents from the legislature.’ Shalom’s book gives the following as ousted with a single resolution from a Roxas’s majority Liberal party: Nine representatives from Central Luzon (six members of the Democratic Alliance, two Nacionalistas, and one Liberal) allegedly because there had been fraud and terrorism in that region. Actually, both the DA and the NP had gone on record as opposing the Bell Trade Act which necessitated a Constitutional amendment to be implemented in the Philippines. After the Parity vote, the resolution unseating nine legislators was amended and the lone un-seated partymate of Roxas was reinstated. Writing on another period, Shalom tells us in his aforecited work: “In 1954 the head of the (Central Intelligence Agency) in Manila and the American ambassador discussed the possibility of assassinating (then Defense Secretary) Ramon Mag-saysay’s political rival, Claro M. Recto. Ultimately this option was re-jected on pragmatic grounds, and the vial of poison that was to have been used was tossed into the Manila Bay. In the 1959 election, CIA mo-ney flowed to favored candidates, and an agency operative played a key backstage role in determining the electoral alignments. Asked whe-ther the CIA stayed out of the 1961 Philippine elections, Ambassador William Stevenson replied, “I would be surprised they’ve got to do some-thing with all that money and that staff, and what else they got to do.” See Shalom, Ibid., pp. 52-53, citing FL Worcester, Report No. 45, May 16, 1946, DSNA 811B.00/5-2346, p. 8; Shalom, Ibid., pp. 103-104, citing the interview by Thomas B. Buell with Ralph B. Lovett, p. 3 of transcript, TBB Papers; Shalom, Ibid., p. 104, citing J.L. Vellut, the Asian Policy of the Philippines, 1954-61, Working Paper No. 6 (Canberra: Australian National University, Department of International Relations, 1965), p. 5, citing, in turn, Manila Chronicle, 6 and 7, October 1959; Milton Meyer, A Diplomatic History of the Philippine Republic (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1965), p. 12, citing Phil Cong. Rec., Sen., 15, August, 1946. xxx Item I-I-2: Effective control of Philippine Presidents. Policy dictations of the US come invoking one or a number of treaties and loan conditionalities, directly or through international bodies effectively controlled by the American financial leaders, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (WB-IMF). A description of this is offered by Emmanuel Q. Yap, who was adviser to Presidents Carlos P. Garcia and Ferdinand Marcos: “(W)ithin the presidency, there exist two enclaves of power, which are: one, the power which the president can enjoy and exercise largely out of his own initiatives, wishes and caprices; and, two, the power which originates or is generated from what might be called international geo-political strategies. Two sets of public officials emerge out of these two power structures that make up the presidency: which are, first, the president’s personal choices who are usually his friends, cronies or family acquaintances; and, second, those who have to safeguard and implement the objectives of certain globalized interests. … The differences and contradictions between the two power structures take place on vital issues involving foreign policy, foreign investments and foreign loans, directions of international trade, monetary and fiscal policies, military and security affairs, labor policies, education and jurisprudence; because it is usually in these areas where the nation’s basic interests often collide with organized international geo-political interests.” Economist Alejandro Lichauco shows how even a president who had declared martial law could not insist on implementing a program for industrialization because the WB-IMF opposed it through the powerful technocrats in the government led by Cesar Virata. Lichauco quotes Virata as saying that the 11 major industrial projects already announced by Marcos will be produced by the government “only when they are viable, they have ready financing and they have appropriate investors.” Marcos countered, saying a delay in pushing through a major industrial project always results in cost increases. However, the WB-IMF-directed Virata and the technocrats had their way. See Emmanuel Q. Yap, “Hapless Story of the Presidency,” Philippine Journal, Com-ment, July 23, 1989, as reprinted in Let Us All Build A Strong Nation (Manila: Peo-ple’s Patriotic Movement, 2002), pp.64-65;and Alejandro Lichauco, Towards a New EconomicOrder and the Conquest of Mass Poverty (Lichauco, 1986), pp. 78-79. Item I-I-5: Support for Marcos & Military against the people; US Bases; and VFA. Shalom gives us the facts: “US military assistance to the Philippines went from $80.8 million in the four fiscal years 1969-1972 to P166.3 million in the succeeding four fiscal years, 1973-1976 – a huge leap even if one takes inflation into account. Military grant aid increased about 12 percent in this period, but excess defense articles more than tripled, ship transfers (especially useful for combating the Muslims in the Sulu archipelago) increased more than tenfold, and foreign military sales credits went from zero to $39.6 million. Moreover, during the first year of martial law, US military aid already in the pipeline (i.e., authorized but not yet delivered) was speeded up. See Walden Bello and Severina Rivera, editors, The Logistics of Repression and Other Essays (Washington DC: Friends of the Filipino People, 1977, citing US government sources), p. 8, as quoted in Shalom, Ibid., p. 179; see also Interview with Richard E. Usher, Philippine desk officer of the US Department of State, Washington DC, November 23, 1973; Brian Phelan, “Spectre of Jihad,” Far Eastern Economic Review, May 14, 1973, p. 29; Benedict J. Kerkvliet testimony, US Cong. Record, June 4, 1974, pp. S9568-69, citing Hearings, FY 1974 Authorization for Military Procurement, Research and Development Construction Authorization for Safeguard ABM, and Active Duty and Selected Reserve Strengths, Senate Armed Services Committee, 93rd Cong., 1st sess., 1973, pt. 1, p. 163. US official and unofficial support for the Marcos martial law regime was also established in the case presented before the Permanent People’s Tribunal (1st session on the Philippines) at the Hague in 1980 <http://www.bulatlat.com/news/6-38/6-38-ppt.htm> (search words: “United States”); see also Daniel B. Schirmer, Intervention: US Bases in the Philippines, as carried in Ed Aurelio C. Reyes, Tiwakal: Dying for Dollars (Manila: EduCar Enterprises, 1991), pp. 42-45. About the VFA, see Prof. Roland G. Simbulan. Pagsusuri ng mga Kritikal na Isyu sa Patakarang Panlabas at Panseguridad ng Pilipinas: Tungo sa Paghusga sa Visiting Forces Agreement (Analysis of Critical Issues on Philippine Foreign and Security Policies: Towards Assessing the VFA) (Quezon City: Focus on the Global South Philippines Programme, Development Roundtable Series Papers, 2008). Item I-I-6: American embassy operative lobbying in 1986 Con-Com: Former Assemblyman Homobono Adaza revealed to the media a taped long distance telephone conversation between then President Corazon Aquino and her then executive secretary, wherein the former indicates her knowledge of the presence of US Embassy Minister Philip Kaplan and associates doing active lobby work during sessions of the Constitutional Commission of 1986. See Reyes, Ibid., p. 47 (J) continued exploitation of the Philippine natural and human resources, including Filipino ingenuity and indigenous knowledge systems. Item I-J-1: Dean Worcester, Secretary of the Interior of the American colonial government in the Philippines, undertook wide-scale gold prospecting, especially in Baguio. On September 27, 1927, the Benguet Consolidated Mining Company discovered one of the richest veins of gold ever, at a time when the US was entering the Great Depression. This was the start of a real gold rush into Cordillera region: in 1929, there were 94 mining companies, in 1933 there were 17,812. Mining operations continued to grow and by 1939 the Philippines ranked among the world’s leading gold producers, and second to the state of California “among US producers.” See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordillera_Mountains> (search words: “Benguet Consolidated”); Item I-J-2: The Philippine economy has continued to be in the hands of the foreign and local elite through their possession of banks and investment houses. Like other banks, the transnational banks (TNBs) have needed not to operate on their capital alone but on the wealth and savings of Filipino depositors. As TNBs they are able to generate and control these funds on a global scale. As to the measures of the US-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the WB-IMF loans have been focused not on industry, much less heavy industry, but for agriculture to keep the Philippines a net exporter of agricultural goods and cheap labor. See Salgado, Ibid., p. 135, citing IBON Databank Philippines, Philippine Financial System, p. 136; and Salgado, Ibid., p. 137. Additional
Item: We demand
clarification as to the real legal basis of the mysterious rider on the
1946 rescission law, where the US Congress ruled that the Filipino
soldiers, who had been officially mobilized and commanded by the US
Armed Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) for service during World War II,
were not to be given the pay given to other USAFFE troops of other
nationalities. We have reason to suspect that the rider, totally
unexplained in Public Law 79-301, dated February 8, 1946, or in its
legislative rider, was a practical consequence of the Treaty of
Paris of 1898, which stipulated until the Declaration of
Philippine Independence on July 4, 1946 that the Filipino people were
still duly-purchased properties of the United States of America (read:
slaves!) who deserved no payment for any servitude to the latter.
No amount of promises or even granted alms can redress such an
injustice still hidden from formal admission and rectification as of the
writing of this book. Source of documentary reference: Veterans Federation of the Philippines, "An Appeal for Justice and Fair Play," (undated pamphlet). Demanding Apologies from SpainOur
1998 Declaration seeks apologies from Spain, and enume-rates
the reasons for this demand: (A) Refusal to acknowledge the Filipino revolutionaries as the forces that actually defeated Spanish rule throughout the archipe-lago, and on the basis of this, her surrender instead to the United States forces after a face-saving mock battle at Manila. Item
II-A-1: Ignoring and denying actual balance of forces in
terms of territories actually held at the start of the Spanish-American
War about which the Treaty was negotiated and signed. See About having lost earlier control over large areas in Luzon and the Visayas, see Constantino, Ibid., p. 78, quoting Annual Reports of the War Department, 1899, Vol. I, Pt. 4, p. 13; and quoting Blount, Ibid., p. 70. about never having had control over the highlands of Cordillera in northern Luzon, see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordillera_Mountains>, (search words: “US was the first”); about never having had control over areas of most of Mindanao except for a toehold in Zamboanga City, see Thomas M. McKenna, "Muslim Rulers and Rebels" <http://books.google.com.ph/books?id=wYvwWcL0_DIC&pg=PA77&lpg=PA77&dq=Spa nish+colonial+control+Zamboanga&source=bl&ots=9-qeXwtZXi&sig=HsGLTn7tVdI9eiLlis x8OdLsGQU&hl=tl&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=10&ct=result#PPA75,M1> Item II-A-2: About having lost earlier control over large areas in Luzon and the Visayas, See
Constantino, Ibid., p. 78, quoting Annual
Reports of the War Department, 1899,
Vol.
I,
Pt.
4,
p.
13;
and quoting Blount,
Ibid.,
p. 70
about never having had control over the highlands of Cordillera in
northern Luzon, see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordillera_Mountains>,
(search words: “US was the first”); about
never having had control over areas of most of Mindanao except for a
toehold in Zamboanga City, see McKenna. Item
II-A-3: Colluding with US to pre-arrange mock
battle for Manila, insisting
on keeping out the Filipino troops from the entire scenario. See David Trask, “The
Spanish-American War,” (part of the series, titled, The
World of 1898: The Spanish-American War, Website of Library of
Congress, <http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/trask.html>. (B)
Illegal, immoral and illegitimate sale of the Philippines to the United
States almost four months after losing the last areas under its
significant possession of the Philippines. Item
II-B-1: Selling the people of the Philippines like slaves,
horses or houses, in violation of basic human rights of about seven
million human persons, along with endless generations of their
descendants. See
Michael
Palumbo, Human Rights: Meaning and History (Florida:
Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, 1982), p. 145; and see Appendix
1-A at the end of Chapter 1. Item
II-B-2: Selling territories that they never held or did not
substantially control anymore. (See map in Appendix 3-C) Note relevance
of this item on the initialed draft Memorandum of Agreement-Ancestral
Domain (MoA-AD) controversy (involving the Government of the Republic of
the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.) About
Mindanao, see See
“States and Regents of the World: An Alphabetical Listing of States
and Territories and Their Regents in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” http://www.geocities.com/beerke_beer/Moro.html;
about the Cordillera, see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordillera_Mountains>
(search words: “The US was the first”). Item
II-B-3: Selling territories that they no longer held.
Note: Like Britain hypothetically selling the 13 colonies after
1776. See
map in Appendix 3-C Item
II-B-4: Absolute non-involvement of the principal
stakeholders in the process of negotiating, finalizing and signing of
the Treaty of Paris, including the refusal even just to
hear out the diplomatic envoy of the Filipino government who went to
Paris. See
Article 5, Section II, Universal Declaration of the Rights of
Peoples (Appendix 1-B in Chapter 1 of this book); see also
Centennial Site designed by MSC Communications Technologies, Inc.
Hosted by MSC Computer Training Center. <http://www.
msc.edu.ph/centennial/ag9812xx.html> (search words: “Agoncillo’s
Protest”) Please take note that the Two-Point Demand for Apology from Spain is limited only to points directly relevant to the Treaty of Paris and does not cover many other acts of Spain in these islands over a span of 333 years, some of which are discussed or at least mentioned in Chapter Four, specifically in Appendix 4-B with appropriate citations. back to top suggested next
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APPENDICES: Appendix 3-A: Text of 1998 Philippine Declaration
'FOOTNOTES': 1
See its full text in Appendix 3-A, p. 105 2Every year, on November 30 (celebrated in the Philippines as Bonifacio
Day, a legal holiday) and a few days before and after such date, the
ADHIKA ng Pilipinas, Inc., a member-organization of Kamalaysayan which
was then a campaign network, convenes the Philippine history-oriented
ADHIKA Annual National Conference in partnership with the government’s
Department of Education (Dep-Ed. formerly called Department of
Education, Culture and Sports or DECS). This has been attended every
year largely by college professors and public high school teachers
handling history and related subjects, from all regions of the country.
The venue of the conference in 1998 was the Bulacan State
University in Malolos, Bulacan. After
adequate explanations on the project the conference participants,
including paper readers and reactors, were invited to sign, and they
did. Meanwhile, in
preparation for Human Rights Day that year, member-organizations of the
Philippine Alliance of Human Rights Advocates (PAHRA) held their
regional and provincial/city conferences leading to the national
conference on or about December 10.
The Kamalaysayan-PAHRA joint project was explained to the human
rights workers attending these gatherings, they were likewise invited to
sign, and almost all of them did. The
number of signatories to the 1998 Philippine Declaration is
quite small, but the profile is appropriate and covering nationwide
representation. 3
Jose Rizal, “The Philippines Within A Century,” La Solidaridad,
1889, as carried in Ed Aurelio C. Reyes, The Philippines, A
Century Thence (An Open Letter to Rizal), (Manila: Kamalaysayan,
2007), p. 64. 4 (US)
Congressional Record, 56th
Congress. Full text at <http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad .intrel/ajb72.htm> 5Daniel
Boone Schirmer, Republic or Empire (Cambridge: Schenkman
Publishing Company, 1972), p. 71. 6Schirmer, Ibid., pp. 112-114, 125, citing the Boston
Evening Transcript, January 3 and January 5, 1899 7Rizal had estimated the Philippine population circa 1890s at six million;
Mabini’s figure a decade later was eight million. 8This is a rhetorical expression used by the author to emphasize the point
that they can never be. Some of the reasons: no one can bring back to
life the heroic dead who would have had a greater contributions to the
quality of the average character of the succeeding generations; the
natural resources extracted mainly through mining in gold and other
precious minerals can never be returned and the hollowed out grounds
around Baguio City proved very vulnerable to earthquakes as we witnessed
in the big earthquake in Northern Luzon in 1990; and the effects on our
people of American schools through the educational system instituted by
the Thomasites and their Filipino successors have resulted in the
inferiority complex and self-alienation and deep cultural divisions
among many of our people. 9Even the most brutal of human rights violators cannot waive, by
committing their heinous crimes against humanity, their own innate,
inalienable and indivisible human rights as members of the human race.
An attempt to waive it is an assault against the dignity of the human
race itself and cannot in any way be successful.
The race evolves (develops in the most substantial way –
intellectual comprehension within the context of spiritual discernment)
as the number of such ignorant humans dwindles inexorably, as the
universe keeps on “unfolding as it should.” 100Since 2003, Kamalaysayan has acquired a new full name – Kaisahan sa
Kamayayan sa Kasaysayan (Solidarity for Sense of History). 11See endnote no. 2.
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