Revisiting the Balangiga conflict

BY THE time this column sees print, my book, The Balangiga Conflict Revisited, would be within days of its launching at the University of the Philippines Manila.

Published by New Day Publishers, it is based on my doctoral dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of Leyte Normal University in Tacloban City.

The book, reconstructed from basic facts and data, is the most comprehensive and definitive analytical account of the Balangiga Conflict in Samar Island. It provides an expanded context of the Balangiga attack on Company C of the 9th U.S. Infantry Regiment on Sept. 28, 1901.

I proposed the term "Balangiga Conflict" as the politically correct label for this incident that American official reports and publications had called the "Balangiga Massacre." After all, that event did not only involve the successful attack of bolo-armed native fighters on Company C.

The Balangiga Conflict was an entire social drama, a running conflict in beliefs and perceptions between two peoples from different races and cultures, with many related developments and cause-and-effect factors from within and outside the town in a war-torn broader context, the confluence of all of which culminated in the attack.

The preponderance of primary sources from both sides suggests that the attack was essentially an all-Balangigan plot fashioned by Valeriano Abanador, the local chief of police. It had little or nominal participation from Filipino guerrillas under Brig. Gen. Vicente R. Lukban, the military-political governor for Samar.

It was Maj. Gen. Adna R. Chaffee, the military governor for the "unpacified" areas of the Philippines, who singled out Capt. Eugenio Daza, the area commander for southeastern Samar under Lukban, as mastermind of the attack. But Chaffee's opinion was not shared by any of his field commanders in Samar, either after the event or in later decades.

Sadly, the alleged culpability of the Filipino guerrillas was the main justification for the brutal "kill and burn" campaign in southern Samar from October 1901 to January 1902. It was waged by the Sixth Separate Brigade under Brig. Gen. Jacob H. Smith through a battalion of U.S. Marines under the command of Maj. Littleton W.T. Waller.

Both officers were later subjected to courts-martial for their atrocious conduct in Samar.

The Balangiga Conflict symbolized the ultimate Filipino capacity to survive the most brutal forms of military adventurism, racial prejudice and ethnocentrism from the opposing sides of the Philippine-American War.

The Balangigans barely escaped punishment for such neutral human acts as cleaning up their town and being cordial with the Americans from Lukban and his ethnocentric non-Visayan officer corps, who were into their third year of Samar dictatorship under the banner of national independence.

Indeed, it was the very threat of punitive action from Lukban's guerrillas on the Balangiga officials and residents that apparently hastened the end of the peaceful coexistence between Company C and the local community. It triggered an unfortunate series of events that led to the forced detention of the male residents, the confiscation from their houses of all the sharp bolos, and the confiscation and destruction of the stored rice of the local population.

Any or all of these acts apparently caused the Balangiga community to be sufficiently shamed and insulted by the arrogance and insensitivity of Capt. Thomas W. Connell, the ill-fated commander of Company C. As a consequence, they collectively decided to fight for their sense of honor by plotting revenge and self-defense in the most public manner possible.

Despite Balangiga's apparently generous contribution to the revolutionary coffers, Lukban and his guerrillas were only nominally represented during the most critical days when the Balangigans had to get rid of the Americans in their midst.

As for the Americans, Chaffee quickly backtracked from and covered up the effects of his "bayonet rule" for Samar in late Jan. 1902.

Lukban's revolutionary government and Chaffee's "bayonet rule" eventually faded out of the Samar scene by the middle of 1902. Both were apparent failures, because the war raged on in the island for several more years without them.

The book put a human face to the Balangiga Conflict and reconstructed its various facets largely from eyewitness accounts of the ordinary participants, both Americans and Filipinos. The human and the local was almost deliberately separated from the abstract, political, strategic and geo-political contexts of this famous event in Samar.

By emphasizing the human and the local, it is hoped that the contentious issue of the Bells of Balangiga could be resolved amicably away from its abstract racial, political and national dimensions.

In the end, it is wished that these bells would ring in freedom again, back in Balangiga where they belong, to punctuate America's generosity of spirit and the gallantry of the Balangiga forebears, and to complete the healing.