The PHILLIPPINES

Korero (AEWS), Volume 3, Issue 8, 21 May 1945, Page 12

The PHILLIPPINES

>aA KIR E R o r e FOR

In less than nine months United States Forces of General MacArthur’s Command regained the Philippines from Japan. Their task was not easy. From the fall of the island fortress of Corregidor in Manila Bay, and with the end of organized American and Filipino resistance on May 7, 1942, until the American landing in October of 1944, the islands were in Japanese hands. The enemy had therefore almost two and a half years in which to dig in. Still, the Americans made good progress. The campaign on Leyte Island, begun in October, ended in December, and in February of this year, Manila, capital of the islands, was recaptured. On July 4 General MacArthur was able to report: “ The Philippines are now liberated and the campaign can be regarded as virtually closed.” This is an important gain. The Philippines are the geographical centre of the Far East. From them more conven-

iently than from any other one place the Allies may thrust towards the Japaneseheld China coast, the Netherlands East Indies, or Japan. The most northerly island is 65 miles from the most southern island in the Japanese group ; northern Luzon is only 225 miles from Formosa ; and the Philippines contain nearly two hundred airfields, two naval bases, and several natural harbours. The islands have, in fact, often been described as a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan. It is easy to understand why the Japanese kept in them an army of about 250,000 men. The 7,000 islands of the Philippines lie sprawling between Japan and the Netherlands East Indies for 1,150 miles from north to south, as far as from Auckland to Invercargill. From east to west they stretch over 682 miles. But the fact that the group contains 7,091 islands is more important to navigators than to the 16,000,000 Filipinos who live on them,

since any piece of rock that projects above water at high tide is called an island. Indeed, only 462 of the islands have an area of one square mile or more, and two of them — in the north and Mindanao in the southcontain 77,000 square miles of the total Philippines area of 114,000 square miles, a few thousand square miles larger than New Zealand. Another nine islands— Negros, Palawan, Panay, Mindoro, Leyte, Cebu, Bohol, and —account for a further 33,000 square miles. Through the islands there runs brokenly from north to south a volcanic mountain range in which about twenty volcanoes are active at intervals. Neither earthquakes, which are comparatively frequent, nor eruptions greatly disturb the life of the Filipinos, however, since most of the houses are bamboo and rattan and the reinforced-concrete buildings in Manila are built to withstand earthquakes. Trade winds bring heavy rain to the lands east of the range for eight months of the year, and the monsoon rains drench the lands to the west for three months, but the rains seldom last for long periods at a time. The climate is pleasant, with cool nights and few oppressively hot days. The Philippines are a commonwealth linked with the United States. They were acquired after the Spanish-American War of 1898 in which America engaged to free Cuba where the. people were in revolt against Spanish rule. In declaring war the United States Congress announced that it wanted no territory and would take none in the event of victory. During the war, which lasted only from the end of April to the beginning of August, Admiral Dewey destroyed a Spanish squadron in Manila Bay in one afternoon without losing a single man, and the Americans, when peace came, thus found themselves with an unexpected problem. In the face of their statement that they wanted no territory, what were they to do about the Philippines ? President McKinley wrestled with his conscience, and, after walking the White House “ night after night until midnight ” and praying for “ light and guidance,” late one night reached, in his own words, this decision :— “ (1) That we could not give them

back to Spainthat would be cowardly and dishonourable : (2) That we could not turn them over to France and Germany would be bad business and discreditable : (3) That we could not leave them to themselves —they were unfit for selfgovernment, and they would soon have anarchy and misrule there worse than Spain’s was : (4) That there was nothing left for us to do but to take all the islands and to educate the Filipinos and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could for them as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died. “ And then I went to bed and went to sleep and slept soundly.” The President’s decision was not quickly accepted by Spain, by the United States Senate, or by the Filipinos. Spain gave up the islands only after the payment of £4,000,000 for the public works built during her four hundred years of occupation from their discovery by Magellan in 1521. The Senate ratified the treaty by the necessary two-thirds majority after a long and heated debate. And the Filipinos, who had begun their struggle for freedom before America intervened, set up their own republic, and for three years carried on the fight. Even

after their defeat they continued to demand “ Complete, Absolute, and Immediate Independence.” And so, more by accident than design, America gained an overseas possession of 7,000 islands with 10,000,000 people. These Filipino people are of two main races—the great majority of Malay stock with typical mongoloid features, straight, coarse, black hair, a smooth brown skin and with no beard. The second group is very small; it consists of the Negritos, pygmies under 4 ft. 9 in. in height with black skin and fuzzy hair. There are

also a good number of Filipinos with mixed blood, the Mestizos, who have provided many political leaders. The first President of the Commonwealth, Manuel Quezon, who died in the United States in 1944, was a Spanish-Filipino; his successor, President Osmena, is a ChineseFilipino. Of the total population of the islands in 1940, which by then had reached nearly 16,500,000, only 170,000 were foreigners, including 118,000 Chinese holding key positions in the wholesale and retail trades, 30,000 Japanese settled in Davao and engaged in the hemp and

fishing industries, and, excluding the members of the American Services and their wives, 9,000 Americans. Although there are only two main racial types, eighty-seven different languages and dialects are used, but this problem is likely soon to disappear since the Filipinos recently adopted Tagalog, the language of an important group, as the language of the future. In a country where half the people are literate in the sense that they can read and write in one language, the change-over should not take very long. One result of Spanish rule is that nine out of ten Filipinos are Christians, the great majority Roman Catholics. The Moros, who live on Mindanao and on the Sulu Islands, form a Mohammedan minority of 4 per cent., while the Pagans, another minority of 4 per cent., live in the mountains of Luzon. Under American rule the condition of the Filipinos improved greatly. Epidemics of cholera, bubonic plague, and small-pox, once frequent and severe almost disappeared. Infant deaths were reduced. In 1900 four out of five babies died ; in 1940 fourteen out of fifteen babies lived. Commerce flourished. Free trade with the United States brought a market for the main crops— coconuts, tobacco, and abaca hemp for ropemaking. About four-fifths of all exports out of in 1938 went to America ; the rest to Japan. They brought the Filipino worker a wage of about 3s. a day in our money, much higher than the ordinary level in the Far East. This meant more rice for his family than ever before, a few American-made shirts for himself, and, perhaps, on easy terms, a sewing-machine for his wife. The resources of the islands were not however, fully developed ; even by 1940 only £56,000,000 of American money was invested in them. Nor did agriculture prosper, although in 1940 it still provided £57 in every of the national income. The Filipinos, as a result of concentrating on the crops which gave them profitable exports, were forced, even in good times, to import much food from South East Asia. The old vicious system of landholding continued. Political and economic power

remained largely with the. great estate owners, who rely mainly on share-croppers, tenants who share the crops. In many cases the big landowners let small leaseholds to individuals, who lease them again to peasant farmers so that the owner, the leaseholder, and the farmer must all share the proceeds of the crop from one piece of land. Even the small peasant holdings become split up amongst families. A man and his wife begin by farming 20 acres ; in time the same area is perhaps farmed by four sons in four holdings of 5 acres ; four families live where one lived before. As a result, share-croppers are usually heavily in debt to their landlords. They are lucky, according to some authorities, if £lO in cash passes through their hands in a year. The uneven distribution of the population does not help the position. The big southern island of Mindanao contains nearly a third of the area of the whole 7,000 islands, but holds only one-tenth of the population. Its valleys are rich and fertile—and nearly empty. Other islands are crowded. It is however, hardly possible to expect a peasant in Luzon, bound by debt to his landlord, to

know that there is rich land for him in Mindanao. And even if he knew, how could he break away from his landlord, and where could he get the money to move his family and pay the small homesteaders fee ? Some reforms have been made. To remedy the position of a few thousand share-croppers the Quezon Government, following the example of the American Administration in 1900, bought from the Roman Catholic Church in 1938 its 67,000 acre Buenavista Estate. The Government also entered into negotiations with the Church, a very large pro-perty-owner, to purchase other properties and began a resettlement policy, but it has been estimated that, at the existing rate, it will take the Filipinos two hundred years to take up the available land. With agriculture in this position, compelled to import food even in good times, and with their resources still not largely developed, the Filipinos will face another problem when they are given the complete independence for which they have so long agitated and which has been promised to them by the United States. So long as the islands were part of the same political system as the United States —as they were until 1935 —goods passed freely between the two countries. Many Americans were opposed to this. The growers of cane-sugar in Cuba and beet-sugar in the United States found it hard to compete in the American market with the dutyfree Philippine sugar. Other groups opposed the importation of coconut products lest they should compete in certain manufactures with dairy products. It was the same with ropemakers, and so on. Labour unions claimed that it was difficult for them to maintain standards against cheap Filipino labour. All supported independence for the Philippines because it would enable America to impose the same duties against goods from the Philippines as against goods from any other foreign country. This agitation in the United States, as well as in the Philippines, frightened investors, who did not care to put their money into enterprises in the islands because of the uncertainty about how long the free American market would be available. For this reason the resources of the islands were never fully

developed, and the Philippines are not well equipped to compete in other markets if the American market is closed to them. By 1940 the Filipinos had by successive stages received much of the independence they had demanded. From control in 1901 by an American Governor-General assisted by eight Commissioners five Americans and three Filipinos—they had advanced to almost full control of local affairs in 1925. Progress was not smooth. In 1916, for instance, the administration was changed abruptly under the Jones Act from a Government by Americans with Filipinos in the minority to a Government by Filipinos advised by Americans. The Governor-General had the power of veto, but avoided interference. In 1920 the results were investigated, and it was reported that “ the Government was top-heavy in personnel and enmeshed in red-tape,” that the Civil Service was being demoralized, that hospital and health measures had been relaxed, and that the Philippine National Bank had been mismanaged. Still the cry for independence persisted, and in 1934 the United States Congress passed the Act by which in 1935 the Philippines became a commonwealth and the Filipinos took full control of their own affairs at home. The Act provided that after ten years the Commonwealth of the Philippines should become the completely independent Republic of the Philippines, and that the United States should keep only the naval bases needed for defence. The Filipinos adopted a constitution giving equal civil and political rights to all. The real difficulty facing the Filipinos, lies in the parts of the 1934 Act which provided that during the ten years between the creation of the Commonwealth and the creation of the Republic the amount of Philippine goods imported into the United States should each year grow less and that the taxes on these goods should each year become higher, so

that in 1946 when full independence was granted the Philippines should lose all the advantages of free trade with America, Even by 1940 the Filipinos were not so sure that they wanted independenceat that price— and a “ realistic examination ” of the Act was suggested. Since then amendments to cushion the shock to trade and to give the United States air as well as naval bases have been made to the act, but America still promises independence as soon as possible. Meanwhile the Philippines have suffered severely under Japanese rule. Their industries have been ruined and their people have been starved. Yet as they begin to rebuild they must face new difficulties of trade and old difficulties of agriculture. The future holds many problems for the 16,000,000 people of the 7,000 islands.