The statue of Capitan Valeriano Abanador in Balangiga.


U.S. double standard on war trophies


(Letter to the editor of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, published on May 17, 1998.)


In filing The Veterans Memorial Physical Integrity Act of 1998, Wyoming Sen. Craig Thomas effectively blocked any immediate prospect for the return of the bells of Balangiga to the Philippines. Thomas criticized US President Bill Clinton for considering the dismantling of a memorial to American soldiers, belittled as "parochial" the purposes of President Ramos' recent visit to the United States (including the return of the bells, pension payments to Filipino veterans, and the toxic waste issue), and perjured himself while presenting the Balangiga incident to the US Senate.

So the bells in Wyoming will not be returned soon. Perhaps because this involves Filipinos, America's maligned "little brown brothers," and not another people, like the Japanese, for instance.

I do not know how long Thomas has represented Wyoming in the US Senate. If he was already there in 1992, then he conveniently forgot that the US government returned to Japan that year a 16th-century Buddhist temple bell looted by US Marines from Okinawa in 1945. The US president then was George Bush, a Pacific War veteran himself, and not the "anti-military" Clinton. Did Thomas subject the Japanese to a similar display of American arrogance and self-righteousness as he recently did the Filipinos? Did he also criticize former President Bush for the return of the Okinawa bell?

The Battle of Okinawa in 1945 cost America some 12,000 casualties, dead or missing. Among them was Lt. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., the highest-ranking American official killed during the Pacific War. Of course, the Americans also left some 140,000 casualties on the Japanese side, half of whom were civilians.

Compared to the Balangiga bells, the Okinawa bell would have been a more fitting tribute to the thousands of fallen American soldiers in a different war. Yet it was returned.

In contrast, the attack of bolo-armed Filipinos on the American garrison in Balangiga town cost the lives of 48 members of Company "C" of the US Ninth Infantry. American retaliation resulted in the disappearance of about 50,000 Samareños, most of them civilian men, women, and children. The killing spree was aimed to reduce Samar into a "howling wilderness."

Compared to Okinawa, very few Americans were killed in Balangiga, and more Filipino civilians were exterminated during the retaliatory attacks. Yet the US government would not part with the bells that American soldiers looted from Balangiga.

What made the Japanese case so exceptional?


-- ROLANDO O. BORRINAGA, UP School of Health Sciences, Palo, Leyte



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