Angelo de la Cruz: A Victim of an Unjust War

If the Arroyo government reneges on its promised troops pullout from Iraq, more blood would be on her hands.  We must keep up the pressure on the government so that Angelo de la Cruz would be safely reunited with his family as soon as possible. 

By Paul Quintos
Bulatlat

The Arroyo government must make good on its pledge to pull out Filipino troops from Iraq “as soon as possible” or reap the fury not just of Iraqi resistance fighters holding Angelo de la Cruz captive but also the de la Cruz’ family along with the rest of the Filipino people who have kept vigil with them.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq had no moral justification to begin with. The 51 Filipino soldiers, policemen, and health workers deployed in Iraq can hardly qualify as a “humanitarian” mission, being part of the U.S.-led colonial occupation force in Iraq that is quite understandably reviled by the Iraqi people. 

Though abductions of civilians and beheadings of non-combatants by Iraqi fighters are unjustifiable – whether in the name of God, Allah or liberty – the bigger injustice is the U.S. imperialist invasion of Iraq that killed over 7,000 civilians in less than three weeks to May 1st 2003, and its continued

colonial occupation of Iraq since then which has so far resulted in another four to six thousand civilian deaths.  This is on top of over 150,000 Iraqis killed during the 1991 Gulf War and another 1.5 million Iraqi men, women and children who died due to the economic embargo imposed by the U.S. for over a decade thereafter according to UNICEF estimates.   

It is not just these genocidal killings that have inflamed the Iraqi people to resort to armed resistance – with some resorting to more vicious acts such as beheadings.  It is also the systematic torture of Iraqi prisoners of war, the sexual degradation of Iraqi women and men, the arbitrary arrests and beatings of Iraqi youth, the brutish  intrusions into neighborhoods and mosques and homes – the daily humiliation,  brutalization and rape of their once proud and sovereign land by an invading force.   

And for what?  In order to seize control of the world’s second largest oil reserves for U.S. oil supermonopolies, channel public resources to monopoly capitalists in the military-industrial-complex through war spending and fat contracts for “reconstruction”, undermine the OPEC, circumscribe the access to oil of rival powers, and fortify U.S. imperialism’s capacity for military intervention in the region.  Not even Americans are willing to believe the pretext of weapons of mass destruction or the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection any longer.   

This is the “humanitarian mission” that the Arroyo government was so eager to support and promote – even at the risk of placing the thousands of Angelo de la Cruzes in harms way.  Aside from the Filipino troops, there are at present about 3,800 (as of May) Filipinos working in “reconstruction” activities in Iraq, mostly as cooks and technical maintenance personnel in U.S. military bases.  At least three Filipinos -- Rodrigo Reyes, Raymond Natividad, and Raul Carlos Flores -- have already been killed in Iraq over the last three months according to Migrante International.  Another 940,000 Filipinos are working in Saudi Arabia where alleged Al Qaeda operatives have stepped up their attacks against U.S. targets and those perceived as supportive of the U.S. and Israel.   

They are the millions of Overseas Filipino Workers caught between a rock and a hard place, between fending off hunger in the homeland and dodging bullets in a  war-torn host country.  At home they face the most severe unemployment crisis this country has recorded. In the middle east, they risk becoming potential targets of imperial America’s enemies. Both risks are engendered by the Arroyo government’s continued subservience to U.S.-prescribed neoliberal economic policies and neoconservative political and military objectives. Arroyo’s boot-licking stains her regime with the blood-soaked boots of U.S. imperialism.   

If the Arroyo government reneges on its promised pullout from Iraq, more blood would be on her hands.   
We must keep up the pressure on the government so that Angelo de la Cruz would be safely reunited with his family as soon as possible.  Bulatlat 

Back to top

We want to know what you think of this article.