FREEDOM
from
WANT...
(We do NOT need DEVELOPMENT that marginalizes the POOR who languish in the quagmire of DESTITUTION)
FREEDOM
from
F E A R !!!!
( We do NOT need PARENS PATRIAE who instill fear and wreak havoc in our homeland )
It is humiliating to be oppressed in your own territory....BUT...
being OPPRESSED by your own KITH and KINE
is WORST
than either humiliation or oppression itself!
O ye brethren, how do YOU define FREEDOM?!?
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"THE CORREGIDOR MASSACRE - 1968"
_________________ Paul F. Whitman                |
Corregidor
has this tendency to surprise the student of its history, even now. All of us
are well aware of the focus and significance which the
world placed upon its defence, loss and retaking during World War II, but
how many of us are aware of The Corregidor Massacre of 1968?
The what?
In the Philippine presidential
election of 1965, the Nacionalista candidate,
Ferdinand E. Marcos (1917-90), triumphed over Diosdado Macapagal.
Marcos dominated the political scene for the next two decades, first as an
elected president in 1965 and 1969, and then after his 1972 proclamation of
martial law, as a virtual
dictator. He had claimed to have served in the Battle of Bataan and later to
have led a guerrilla unit, the Maharlikas. Like many
other aspects of his life, Marcos's war record came under scrutiny during the
last years of his presidency. His stories of wartime gallantry, inflated by the
pro-Marcos media virtually into a personality cult during his years in power,
have been comprehensively debunked.
Under Marcos, the
Philippines became one of the
founding members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN),
established in 1967. Although on the surface, Marcos spruiked regional
stability, disputes with fellow ASEAN member Malaysia over
Sabah
in northeast Borneo, however, continued under the cover of plausible
diplomatic deniability.
What disputes?
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Historically, the
Bangsamoro people had settled the geographical
areas we now describe politically as
Mindanao and
Sabah.
How they lost their land of origin to foreign governments is a
peculiarly interesting saga of statecraft, with all its attendant aspects
of greed, power and colonialism. It is also a story of Oil. I will avoid
those issues here, for the direct relevance is that Sabah
was the intended prize, and Corregidor simply a means to that end.
Following the eviction of the
Japanese and the departure of the formal American influence, the
Philippine government had re-established primacy over the
Bangsamoro settled areas of
Mindanao,
Basilan, Sulu,
Tawi-Tawi and
Palawan
islands on July 4, 1946. During the administration of President
Diosdado Macapagal
in the early 1960s, the Philippines began
again to look towards re-establishing by diplomatic maneuver a more direct
control over
Sabah’s
wealth.
The basis of the Philippine
claim relied on the assertion of the heirs of the Sultan of
Sulu (the Kirams)
that the Sultan of Borneo had given
Sabah
to the Sultan of Sulu as a reward for helping
quell a rebellion in Borneo. Suspicions abounded at that time that the
Marcos Administration had wangled from the heirs of the Sultan of
Sulu an agreement of sorts whereby Marcos
would obtain part of resource-rich
Sabah
as "contingent fee."
Malaysia,
naturally, vigorously opposed the claim, arguing that
a certain Baron de Overbeck had "purchased"
Sabah
from the sultan of Sulu before later assigning
his rights to the British East India Company. Malaysia further argued
that
Sabah
had become part of Malaysian territory when Britain granted independence
to the Federated States of Malaysia. The Philippines, by reply,
argued a case of bad semantics, insisting
that in 1876 de Overbeck had only "leased"
Sabah
from the Sultan of Sulu. The alleged contract
between de Overbeck and the Sultan of
Sulu used, they argued, the word
padjak, a Malay term that could mean
either "lease" or "purchase."
When
Malaysia regained her
independence from British colonial rule, it had colonized
Sabah,
continuing the payment of “rental” to the family of the Sultanate
of Sulu.
By the device of a referendum, it ultimately annexed
Sabah
in the early 1960’s. The integrity of the referendum was a matter of
significant debate, for claims arose that Malaysia had stage-managed a
semblance referendum, utilizing and bribing some Moro leaders from
Sulu and Tawi-Tawi
to represent the “political” interest of
Sabah
and Mindanao.
Parallel with
diplomatic attempts, planners within the Philippine military associated
with Marcos conceived a plot sometime in 1967 of establishing a force of
commandos to destabilize Sabah, then
ultimately to take advantage of the instability by either
intervening in
the island on the pretext of protecting Filipinos living there, or by "the
residents themselves deciding to secede from Malaysia."
Marcos could
not have chosen a more auspicious time to try and reclaim
Sabah.
Malaysia was only a fledgling state at that point, made even more wobbly
by the secession of Singapore in 1965, two years after its independence
from Britain. Too, Malaysia was embroiled in a border dispute with
powerful Indonesia. And there was the Philippines'
Sabah
claim to boot. It was all that Malaysia could do to prevent itself from
coming apart at the seams.
OPERATION MERDEKA
The codename for the
destabilization plan was Operation Merdeka.
The plan involved the recruitment of nearly 200
Tausug and Sama Muslims aged 18 to 30
from Sulu and Tawi-Tawi
and their training in the island-town of Simunul
in Tawi-Tawi. Simunul
was where the first Arab missionary Makhdum
built the first mosque in the
Philippines in the 14th century. The recruits
felt giddy about the promise not only of a monthly allowance, but also
over the prospect of eventually becoming a member of an elite unit in the
Philippine Armed Forces. That meant, among other benefits, guns, which
Muslims regard as very precious possessions. So from August to December
1967, the young recruits underwent training in
Simunul. The name of the the commando
unit: Jabidah.
On December 30 that
year, from 135 to 180 recruits boarded a Philippine Navy vessel for the
island of
Corregidor in Luzon for "specialized training."
This second phase of the
training turned mutinous when the recruits discovered their true mission.
It struck the recruits that the plan would mean not only fighting their
brother Muslims in
Sabah,
but also possibly killing their own Tausug and
Sama relatives living there. Additionally, the
recruits had already begun to feel disgruntled over the non-payment of the
promised P50 monthly allowance. The recruits then demanded to be returned
home.
For the
Jabidah planners, it seemed that there was only one choice.
THE JABIDAH
MASSACRE
As the sole survivor
later recounted, the plotters led the trainees out of their Corregidor
barracks on the night of
March 18, 1968
in
batches of twelve. They were taken to a nearby airstrip. There, the
plotters mowed the trainees down with gunfire. Jibin
Arula, the survivor, said that he heard a
series of shots and saw his colleagues fall. He ran towards a mountain and
rolled off the edge on to the sea. He recalled clinging to a plank of wood
and stayed afloat. By morning, fishers from nearby Cavite rescued him.
The truth of
the massacre took some time to emerge. In March 1968 Moro students in
Manila held a
week long protest vigil over an empty coffin marked ‘Jabidah’
in front of the presidential palace. They claimed “at least 28” Moro
army recruits had been murdered. Court-martial
proceedings were brought against twenty-three military personnel involved.
There was a firestorm in the Philippine press, attacking not so much the
soldiers involved, but the culpability of a government administration that
would ferment such a plot, and then seek to cover it up by wholesale
murder. The matter even made its way to the Supreme Court in 1970, on a
preliminary issue.
Although the
exact number of deaths still continues to vary depending upon the source
of the reference, there is no denial of the fact that Corregidor was host
to a massacre on that night.
In a series of
articles smuggled from prison, and published in the Bangkok Post in 1973,
Benigno Aquino
wrote of the worsening rebellion by communist guerrillas in
Luzon and by
Muslims in the South seeking to avenge the execution of 25 of their “brothers.”
The Bangkok Post printed a caveat against taking the clandestine
Aquino Papers as
“gospel truth” though in the main those warnings were about other aspects
of the story. “In his clandestine writings, the Senator has been helped
by his journalistic training and his accounts of various important events
have a professional precision but the reader must keep in mind that he is
a politician with great rhetorical skill,” the Bangkok Post wrote.
The Centre for
Media Freedom and Responsibility, in referring to the
Jabidah Massacre speaks of those massacred “numbering from 28 to
64.” The Moro National Front, a less objective and more partial source,
claims a massacre of “more than two hundred Muslim trainees.”
Nonetheless,
sufficient evidence was amassed in time to lay court-martial charges
against twenty-three members of the Jabidah group, and in time honored
Philippine tradition, matters descended into the thickets of the
Philippine legal system until most everyone's attention became focused
elsewhere.
Whatever the figure, it is
clear that the rich tapestry of Corregidor's history did not cease to be
woven simply when the United States returned it to the Republic of the
Philippines.
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| THE AUTHOR IS A LAWYER IN BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA. |
Paul F. Whitman
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4The
predominant activity of the CHS is the publication of the Corregidor Then
and Now Website.
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| ONLINE REFERENCES* & FURTHER READING | |
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The Aquino Papers,
Southeast Asian Press Alliance, Miriam
Grace A. Go
Tagalog Resources - Chronology
* References were accurate when
accessed when published in 2002.
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