Tortur kortet

En meget forhenværende kommunist, men højest nulevende filippinsk journalist og kommentator m.v., Rigoberto D Tigalao, tager i Manila Times fat i gode og grundlæggende spørgsmål om anvendelsen af tortur, brutalitet og undertrykkelse i almindelighed og under Marcos æraen på Filippinerne i særdeleshed.

Den skandinaviske forbindelse til de år består bl.a. i, at den svenske terorrist Stellan Hermansson dukkede op på øerne og bl.a. deltog i et kommunistisk terrorangreb, hvor en politimand blev dræbt. Hermansson blev senere gift med Waffen-SFs nuværende formand, Pia Olsen Dyhr, siden skilt og skulle for nærværende stille sine ydelser til rådighed for den irske fagbevægelse. Mere om ham her.

Blekingegadebande medlemmet, Nicolai Döllner, var ligeledes på filippinsk besøg i 80erne, hvad der kom en artikel i Ingenøren ud af om den danske byplanlægger Aage Christensen, der arbejdede i byen Davao. Artiklen findes i Ingenøren;

Dansk eminence på job i guerillaens bagland : byplanlægger i Mindanaos slum
Nicolai Döllner
Ingeniøren, Årg. 11, nr. 4 (1985), sektion 2, s. 4

Filippinerne indgik i sagen mod Blekingegadebanden på den måde, at et medlem af banden, lægen Kari Havsland Jørgensen, som undskyldning for på kriminel vis at have misbrugt oplysninger, hun lå havde adgang til i kraft af sit betroede job som læge, at hun troede at hendes instruktioner i anvendelse af bedøvelsesmidler var til brug for det filippinske kommunist partis (CPP) væbnede gren NPA, hvilket jo så blot betyder, at Kari Havsland Jørgensen, var parat til at deltage i tortur, ganske vidst by proxy.

Torturlægen Inge Genefke (tidl. Inge Kemp Genefke, Kemp fra ægteskabet med filosofi professor Peter Kemp) kickstartede sin kampagne “mod” tortur på filippinerne i 1980erne. Formodningen om hvad den kampagne reelt gik ud på er, at Inge Genfeke, vidende eller uvidende, blot var frontfigur i en kommunistisk støtte aktion til fordel for NPA. Sidenhen har den kampagne udviklet sig til organisationen DIGNITY, der bl.a. har udgivet en artikel om forholdene i filippinske fængsler. En central figur i DIGNITY er den nordjyske maoist og terroradvokat Thorkild Høyer. Blandt DIGNITYs sponsorere er den i Hong Kong fødte, og for nærværende domicileret i Svejts, milliardæren Alan Parker, gift med dansk fødte Jette, en nær venninde af Inge Genefke. Inge Genefke er i dag gift med brandsårslægen og kommunisten Bent Sørensen.

Fra den yngre generation af venstreekstremister med interesse i filippinske forhold er den RUC uddannede freelance journalist og kommunist Nina Trige Andersen en fremtrædende figur. Andersen har bl.a. rejst de muhammedanske områder på Mindanao tyndt, noget der kun kan lade sig gøre, hvis man har sit sikkerhedsapparat på plads. Her har formentlig NPA været Andersen behjælpelig.

Fra Tigalaos klumme i Manila Times:

After all, for almost the entire period of martial law, Juan Ponce Enrile (now a senator), served officially as Martial Law administrator and Defense Secretary in charge of all the armed forces’ services during that time. Fidel V. Ramos, who later became President of the Philippines, was director of both the Philippine Constabulary (PC) and Philippine Integrated Police (PIP) during the Martial Law days. The two of them commanded the soldiers and police, who allegedly committed horrible human rights abuses during that regime.

But then we elected Ramos as President, and Enrile for five senate terms, didn’t we? And now President Aquino says we shouldn’t elect Ferdinand Marcos Jr. for vice-president?

I’ve never heard of death squads directly under Marcos. If Enrile and Ramos weren’t in control of army and police killers and torturers, and even of the feared anti-Communist Gen. Rolando Abadilla, then why didn’t they resign early? But would you really believe these two strong-willed men didn’t control the organizations under them?

If there were human rights abuses that President BS Aquino 3rd is now blaming Ferdinand Marcos Jr. for, they were undertaken by the armed forces under Enrile and by the PC under Ramos. In fact, I’ve never heard allegations of human rights violations by operatives of the National Intelligence Services Agency, the unit which the alleged Marcos factotum Gen. Fabian Ver headed.

Take my case. The arrest orders against me and my late wife, Raquel, were issued by Ramos, who was, would you believe, PC Chief from 1970 to 1986. It was the PC’s top anti-subversive unit, the 5th Constabulary Security Unit (which also  captured Communist chief Jose Sison and most of the Party’s leaders) that arrested us, with one of their tall burly soldiers beating me up.

We were incarcerated for nearly two years, early 1973 to Christmas 1974,  in  Camp Aguinaldo and Fort Bonifacio special prisons that were under the supervision of Martial Law administrator Enrile, so I should blame him for the scars of the boils I got on my body because of the malnutrition and unhygienic conditions in those prisons. In the end it was Enrile who officially ordered our release, “in the spirit of reconciliation and Christmas,” to quote the release order.

…

If the human rights violations during Martial Law were so horrible, Cory either set aside all moral decency and closed her eyes to these, or she was such an opportunist that she decided to use Ramos to defend her from the seven coup attempts against her, and then relied on him to watch her back when she stepped own from power.

Even if Ramos defected – really in the last “five minutes” of the dictatorship – and became an EDSA I hero, she could have just asked him to retire quietly as his way of apologizing for the alleged human rights abuses by his officers and soldiers. But he gave the former Marcos PC chief an entirely new and glorious career, as one of our best Presidents ever.

And if the human rights violations during Martial Law were so horrible, why did President Aquino, who had loyal supporters among the senators, allow Enrile to become Senate president, the second most powerful man in the country?

…

There were indisputably human rights violations during Martial Law, even the most despicable ones. Many of my close friends were killed by the military or the constabulary in their mid-twenties. However, I would blame Communist chief Jose Ma. Sison for many of those deaths because he deployed those men who were barely out of their teens to foment unrest and revolt in the countryside, telling them that the masses had been roused to revolution because of Martial Law. They were very poorly armed, and were killed not even by the military but by police and militias who thought they were bandits.

…

I’m sure Enrile and Ramos can tell us if there was such a policy or not. If indeed, there was such a policy, I don’t think these two would have allowed themselves to be its executioners.

What complicates an objective assessment of human rights violations during Martial Law is this, and most Filipinos aren’t aware of it: There were two internal bloody wars raging during the entire Martial Law period.

The first was the Republic against the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), which, with Libyan and Malaysian backing, was rallying the Muslims to fight for an independent state. The second was the war declared by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), the protracted people’s war as the rebel group called it, plagiarizing Mao Ze Dong – when it was established in 1969, before Martial Law. Even the CPP flag emphasized it: The hammer-and-sickle communist logo, with an AK-47 across it.

It wasn’t an empty threat of war. China was set to deliver 10,000 M-14 rifles to the NPA, which they especially manufactured solely for that purpose. The CPP bungled the first two deliveries so much that Mao Ze Dong aborted the plan. Communist chief Jose Sison, as early as 1971, was boasting that Isabela was becoming his Yenan.

…

Take the case of a former comrade who has been a poster boy for human rights violations during Martial Law. His tale goes: he was just a student activist and a writer in a student-newspaper when the 5th CSU operatives arrested and tortured him. That’s true, and I sympathize with him, but the tale is only half the truth. That guy was a top Communist cadre, in charge of what was then called the “Explosives Movement” directly operating under the Politburo. That was the group in charge of manufacturing what are now called IEDs – improvised explosive devices.

Again, take my case. I can claim to be a human rights victim, that I was jailed for two years because I was student activist at the Ateneo and a labor organizer in factories in Marikina.  That’s true, but not the whole truth. I was a firebrand Communist, believing in my heart that only through the dictatorship of the proletariat could humanity end man’s exploitation of man. I headed the party’s organization in the metropolis when we were arrested.

We were also organizing the first armed urban guerillas called romantically the Armed City Partisans. While we were pathetic, really kids playing soldier with untested World War II vintage carbines and pistols, those units would later evolve in the 1980s as deadly assassination squads, called the Alex Boncayao Brigade.

I don’t like to be called a “human rights victim,” as that makes me look like a wimp and it is inauthentic. We were revolutionaries of that era, but we lost. If we had won, we would have put Ramos, Enrile and all the Marcoses – as well as the landlords like the Cojuangcos and Aquinos – in prison, or most likely in front of firing squads.

And if there were a proletarian heaven, my departed comrades peeking down at us would be so angry at being used by Aquino in his anti-Marcos propaganda and portrayed as pussies, “Martial Law victims.” They would prefer to be called Revolutionary Martyrs.

 

 

 

 

Søndagsfilm “The Real Glory”

Via en post ovre hos kollega Hodja blev jeg opmærksom på en krigsfilm, som udspiller sig i moro området på den filippinske ø Mindanao og Sulu øerne. Hodjas take på historien er myten om, at Amerikanerne begravede muhammedanske terrorister indpakket i svineskind.

Det er en myte og forskellige kommandørere tilskrives den. Et eksempel her, hvor myten også afdækkes:

Once in US history an episode of Islamic terrorism was very quickly stopped. It happened in the Philippines about 1911, when Gen. John J. Pershing was in command of the garrison. There had been numerous Islamic terrorist attacks, so “Black Jack” told his boys to catch the perps and teach them a lesson.

Forced to dig their own graves, the terrorists were all tied to posts, execution style. The US soldiers then brought in pigs and slaughtered them, rubbing their bullets in the blood and fat. Thus, the terrorists were terrorized; they saw that they would be contaminated with hogs’ blood. This would mean that they could not enter Heaven, even if they died as terrorist martyrs.

All but one was shot, their bodies dumped into the grave, and the hog guts dumped atop the bodies. The lone survivor was allowed to escape back to the terrorist camp and tell his brethren what happened to the others. This brought a stop to terrorism in the Philippines for the next 50 years.

Snopes næver også forbindelsen til The Glory.

Klippet med svineskinds scenen:

Snopes skriver om filmens læge, Bill Canavan.

In the 1939 film The Real Glory, Gary Cooper portrays Dr. Bill Canavan, an American Army doctor in 1906 Manila who “tries to protect the native population from ruthless invaders” (i.e., “Muslim fanatics”). At one point in the film, the Dr. Canavan character drapes a captured Muslim in a pigskin and proclaims that henceforth all slain Muslim rebels will be buried in pig skins, thereby discouraging their “savagery” by threatening to prevent their entry into paradise. And, of course, the above-cited anecdote about General Pershing’s handling of terrorists in the Philippines has circulated widely on the Internet ever since 9/11 even made the rounds at the top levels of U.S. government:

[Drogin, 2001]

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham (D-Fla.) cited as an example a dinner he attended last week with people who work on intelligence issues and have connections to the intelligence community.

Her på Hotellet mener vi, at have et bud på hvem lægen Canavan er modelleret over, nemlig Dr. Najeeb M. Saleeby.

I en bibliografisk oversigt, omhandlende moroproblemet, fra 1974 udgivet af  Asian Studies forfattet af Mohammad Fatthy Mahmoud hedder det:

One of the earliest and comparatively more reliable books written about the Muslims in the Philippines is The History of Sulu by Dr. Najeeb M. Saleeby, a christian Arab from Souk el Gharb, Lebanon, who came to the Philippines in 1900 as an American Volunteer and who, in later years, became an active participant in the American administration of the Philippines in various important positions.

Saleebys bog kan bl.a. læses gratis her og på Gutenberg.

På wiki beskrives polttet i filmen således:

In 1906, Alipang (Tetsu Komai) and his Muslim Moro guerrillas are terrorizing the people of the Philippine island of Mindanao, raiding villages, killing the men, and carrying off the women and children for slaves. Instead of maintaining garrisons indefinitely to protect the Filipinos, the U.S. army tests out a new tactic at Fort Mysang. The army detachment is replaced by a handful of officers – Colonel Hatch (Roy Gordon), Captains Manning (Russell Hicks) and Hartley (Reginald Owen), and Lieutenants McCool (David Niven) and Larsen (Broderick Crawford) – who are to train the native Philippine Constabulary to take over the burden. Army doctor Lieutenant Canavan (Gary Cooper) is sent along to keep them healthy. They are welcomed by a skeptical Padre Rafael (Charles Waldron).

Alipang starts sending fanatical juramentados to assassinate the officers and goad them into attacking before the natives are fully trained. Hatch is the first victim, leaving Manning to take command. Manning’s wife (Kay Johnson) and Hartley’s daughter Linda (Andrea Leeds) arrive for a visit at the worst possible time; a horrified Mrs. Manning witnesses her husband’s murder. Hartley takes charge, but Canavan disagrees with his by-the-book, overly-cautious approach. Disobeying orders, Canavan sets out for Alipang’s camp guided by Miguel (Benny Inocencio), a young Moro boy he has befriended. “Mike” (as Canavan calls him) infiltrates the camp and learns that Alipang has sent another assassin, this time for Hartley. Canavan and Mike intercept the man and take him back a prisoner.

Linda and Canavan fall in love, much to the disappointment of McCool and Larsen. When Hartley insists she leave Mysang with Mrs. Manning, she refuses and helps out at the hospital.

Alipang then dams the river on which the villagers depend. Hartley refuses to send a detachment into the jungle to blow it up (he is concealing the fact that he is slowly going blind from an old head wound). The people have to rely on an old well, but the contaminated water causes a cholera epidemic. Finally, Hartley has no choice but to send Larsen and some men to destroy the dam. They do not return.

The Datu (Vladimir Sokoloff), a supposedly friendly Moro leader, offers to guide Hartley and his men to the dam, but he is actually leading them into an ambush. Canavan learns of the Datu’s treachery from Mike, the sole survivor of Larsen’s detachment, and races to warn Hartley. Canavan forces the Datu to take him to the dam. The Datu is killed in a booby trap, but Canavan manages to dynamite the dam anyway. Then, he and the men raft back to the village, which is under attack by Alipang’s men.

McCool is killed leading the defense, but Canavan and the rest return in time to turn the tide. Alipang is killed by Filipino Lieutenant Yabo (Rudy Robles). Their mission accomplished, the Hartleys and Canavan depart, leaving the village in Yabo’s care.

Den del af plottet, der går på at det meste af garnisonen dør er ikke i overenstemmelse med historiske fakta, og skal måske tilskrives en propaganda vinkel som man har ønsket med WWII i horisonten. Og Colonel Hatch figuren er snare modelleret over Tasker H. Bliss end Joesph “Black Jack” Pershing. De Amerikanske tab på Mindanao under denne indsats var små, Philippine Constabulary en smule højer, og Moroerns massive pga af deres sucidiale måde, at lave oprør på.

Og så må vi vidst heller se filmen:

 

Tillæg

Det viser sig, at filmens manuskript forfatter, Charles L. Clifford er selvstændigt interesant. CLC var et pesudonym for Gerald V. (Victor) Hurley (1898 – 1978). Han var en intet mindre end en rigtig helt og åbenbart en skribent som bl.a. var indstillet til Pulitzer prisen. I modsætning til såkaldte kulturpersonligheder, såsom Carsten Jensen (modtager af Oluf Kvalme prisen, opkaldt efter en eller ande svensk statsminister) og Jacob Holdt (modtager af statens hvile legat) og berygtet for at lyve sine historier frem, så vidste Hurley faktisk hvad han skrev om. Udover det, så var han sportsmand i eliteklasse, gjorde han tjeneste i den Amerikanske hær i WWI, hvor han som artellerist deltog bl.a. ved Verdun og Belleau. Sidenhen var han officer i  Philippine Constabulary og under WWII deltog han som efterretningsofficer i Stillehavskrigen med fokus på Filippinerne. Foruden filmen ovenfor, så var der en forløber, Army Girl. Begge film er baseret på de ti år, hvor Hurley boede på Filippinerne, fra cirka 1925 til 1935, og som han beskrev i nogle bøger. Fra wiki posten om ham:

Hurley was born in St. Joseph, Missouri on October 6, 1898.^[1] He grew up and graduated from high school in the remote Eastern Washington community of Davenport and was introduced to the broader world through his Army service in World War I. He enlisted in the Army in 1916 and saw action with one of the first field artillery units sent overseas. He and his unit were engaged in every major battle of the war including Verdun and Belleau Wood. He suffered a lifelong chronic illness resulting from a mustard gas attack.

At the University of Washington, on his return from service in the early 1920s, he became a track star, setting records, some of which were not broken until 1984.^[2] He competed against Charley Paddock, the American Olympic star, in the early 1920s. Hurley was an All-American track star, placing fifth in the 1921 NCAA championships in the 100-yard dash.^[3] His record at UW was finally bested by Phil Shinnick after 42 years.^[2] In 1923 he was recruited by the Illinois Athletic Club for their track team and was employed by American Express in Chicago for two years.

In 1925 he traveled to the Philippine Islands, earning passage as a stoker on a steamship. He and a partner began a coconut plantation in the jungle interior of Mindanao Island in 1926. His partner soon abandoned him and left him, a solitary white man, in the jungle, to pursue this enterprise which after a year failed. When he recovered his health he stayed in Zamboanga for another seven years as an expatriate manager for American companies. While there he married. During that time he became an honorary Third Lieutenant in the Philippine Constabulary, the Philippine national police force. Hurley and his wife returned to the U.S. in 1935.

On the recommendation of a college friend, Max Miller—the author of I Cover the Waterfront (1933), Hurley recounted his plantation adventure and its failure in Southeast of Zamboanga, (1935) .^[4] Subsequently he described his life as an American expatriate in the tiny occidental enclave in Zamboanga, Men in Sun Helmets (1936), his experience with the native Islamic Filipinos, the Moros, and their history in Swish of the Kris (1938), and the genesis and history of the Philippine Constabulary in Jungle Patrol .^[5] All of Hurley’s Philippine books were published by E. P. Dutton.

From 1935 until the early 1940s he was a prolific author under his own name and under several pseudonyms. During this time he also was a radio personality and the writer for other radio programs. In the late 1930s he wrote the stories or screenplays for two produced movies, Army Girl and The Real Glory, which was based loosely on his Philippine books, under the pen name of Charles L. Clifford.^[6]

During World War II Hurley was a Navy officer attached to the Pacific theatre as an expert on the Philippines and Southeast Asia and wrote instruction booklets for the U.S. invading forces together with assault plans. In 1960 his novel The Parthian was released, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.^[6]

The Washington State University received, from Hurley, his research and drafts of the books The Parthian and Missiles of Victory, later retitled Arrows Against Steel (1975) in 1961 and 1962. They are collected in the Vic Hurley Archives. In 1967, 1976, and 1978 he donated his collection of Philippine artifacts and photographs to the Thomas Burke Memorial Washington State Museum at the University of Washington. They are archived in the Vic and Betty Hurley Collection. He gave the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma, Washington his collection of World War I military paraphernalia, World War I original photographs, magazine articles, and copies of his books The Parthian and Men in Sun Helmets. Also included is a file of his wife’s personal correspondence. This material is archived in the Vic and Betty Hurley Collections. The University of Oregon Libraries’ Special Collections and University Archives holds two linear feet of G. Victor Hurley papers: book-length manuscripts including Blades In the Sun, The Coronado Island Adventures, Jungle Patrol, Men in Sun Helmets, and The Three Bachelors; articles and short stories, miscellaneous items, memorabilia, and correspondence.

In 1978 he took his own life, having been predeceased by his wife and having no issue.

Guide til hans arkiv her.

Hans bøger er genudgivet af familien, kan købes bl.a. her.