‘Humanizing’ America’s Little War in Mindanao

In Basilan and other parts of the Philippines where U.S. forces are holding war exercises, the game of subterfuge is also ongoing. Lest many Filipinos are forever hoodwinked by this ploy, however, some facts need to be straightened out.

BY BOBBY TUAZON
Bulatlat.com

Faced with a growing opposition to the presence of its forces in southern Philippines, the U.S. military is trying to put a “human face” to its operations. And the mainstream media is giving free publicity to this stunt.

An American military medic treats a patient while other troopers are photographed in a local trade fair buying some native items for their families back home. A group of U.S. soldiers, armed with M-203s and high-frequency radios, walk down a Basilan street with beaming kids following them; another armed pair ascends a cliff after taking a bath down the river. Downtown, local officials mobilize a motley group of residents displaying pro-U.S. streamers, placards and Uncle Sam’s flag.

Scenes like these appear on the front pages of newspapers and are shown on TV everyday. They portray American soldiers as good-natured, friendly and harmless and tend to drive home the point that

Filipinos are grateful for the war the armed visitors are waging against the Abu Sayyaf and other “terrorist groups.” Once again, America’s game of persuasion and disinformation seems to be working.

An American senator, Hiram Johnson, once said that in war, truth is the first casualty. His statement, declared in 1917, is as resounding today. In America’s modern wars, from Operation Desert Storm to the wars in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo and now in Afghanistan, the U.S. global press reports what the Pentagon and field commanders feed to reporters. In the age of satellite TV, it is ironical that no reporter has been present to witness the bombings in these war theaters.

In Basilan and other parts of the Philippines where U.S. forces are engaged in war games, the art of subterfuge is ongoing. Lest many Filipinos are forever deceived by this ploy, some facts need to be reckoned with.

Psyops and civic action

The U.S. Special Forces now deployed on Basilan island to hunt down remnants of the Abu Sayyaf bandit group are not only trained in counter-terrorism (CT) and special reconnaissance (SR). Part of their job is to conduct psychological operations (psyops), civic affairs (CA) and humanitarian and civic action (HCA). CA and HCA include building small-scale infrastructures such as schools and conducting medical, dental and veterinary services and disaster relief.

The goals of these operations are to induce or reinforce attitudes and behavior as well as to influence emotions favorable to U.S. military objectives. Special Forces, composed of officers and NCOs, are also multilingual and are trained to cope with foreign cultural sensitivities. (Often interviewed by Filipino reporters is an American warrant officer who talks in Filipino, suggesting the unique strong bond that the armed missionaries have with the local population.)

But it is not for the love of Filipinos or peace missions per se that such skills and operations are now being used in Basilan and elsewhere. These are part of the special forces’ main job to conduct guerrilla warfare, counter-insurgency, subversion and sabotage, often executed through covert or “low visibility” operations. Skills in subversion and sabotage include fomenting a local “uprising” with the aim of overthrowing a government or for counter-insurgency goals.

‘Human face’

Civic affairs and HCA, which conjure up the appearance of a “benevolent” and “friendly force,” provide the human face to the brutality and atrocities that accompany U.S. wars. In Afghanistan, for instance, the U.S. government has flown in food rations even as American bombers continue to level down entire civilian villages with impunity. In Iraq, however, such “humanitarian” spin devices have been entirely discarded as the U.S. government continues to punish the Iraqis with economic sanctions which include depriving them of food and medical shipments. As a result, hundreds of thousands of civilians including children have died of starvation and diseases.

In the Philippines, recent U.S. war exercises have left a number of civilians mostly children killed. Similarly, American personnel involved in the mauling of other civilians have not been prosecuted by Philippine courts in violation of the Visiting Force Agreement (VFA). Reminiscent of decades past when U.S. military base personnel were shooting to death scores of Filipinos without anyone of them being brought to court, recent war games in Central Luzon including the Crow Valley gunnery range have displaced several Aeta communities. In this region, war exercises are regularly held as hundreds of people are in near-death conditions owing to cancer and other ailments caused by toxic materials abandoned in former U.S. air and naval bases. Several people mostly children have died yet the U.S. government refuses to clean up its bases let alone provide compensation to the toxic victims.

Still, critics in the United States and elsewhere have objected to the continued use of psywar, CA and HCA in U.S. wars and military exercises particularly in Third World regions like Central America and the Philippines. The objection is based not only on the heap of lies that these approaches fabricate but also because they send the message that the military can replace civilian functions and that people can turn to the man with the gun in order “to get things done.”

In Basilan, the message being evoked is that the Philippine armed forces cannot do the job of crushing the Abu Sayyaf and other “terrorist groups” such as the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the New People’s Army without the help of the American Gringo and his war machine. The “American way” was packaged in its most extreme when a group of anti-communist diehards held a rally outside the U.S. embassy in Manila, burned the communist flag and revived the absurd call to make the Philippines the 51st state of the United States.

Just the same, the U.S. special forces’ psywar operations in Mindanao cannot erase from the pages of Moro history the ravages wrought by American might. In 1906, the island’s first American governor, Gen. Leonard Wood, told the Sultan of Sulu in 1906: “Your rights as a nation are nothing…I believe we are here forever, unless some greater country comes and drives us away; we do not know of any such country.”

Wood and other governors who followed him then launched a scorched-earth policy that left thousands of Moro warriors and civilians dead. Entire villages were burned and those captured were tortured and killed in the U.S. campaign to subjugate Mindanao. The dead were part of some one million Filipinos killed by U.S. mercenaries during the Philippine-American War that raged at the turn of the 20^th century. Bulatlat.com

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