America’s burden: Return of the Balangiga bells

THE nation should welcome the statement on Saturday of the US embassy in Manila that the United States will return to the Philippines the church bells of Balangiga, Samar. The bells were seized by US troops as trophies during the US-Philippine war of 1898-1902.

many years of diplomatic pressure and negotiations over this issue between the two governments.

What lends credence to the US announcement is the fact that no less than the US Secretary of Defense, Jim to return the Bells of Balangiga to the Philippines at a date yet to be set.

In the past, plans for the return of the bells were repeatedly aborted because of the objections of military units in Wyoming and the intervention of Wyoming politicians in the US Congress.

The reasons for the prolonged contention over the bells are rooted in history. In 1901, US soldiers killed thousands of Filipinos, including women and children in the central Philippine town of Balangiga, in response to the death of 48 US soldiers at the hands of rebels during the war between the two countries.

US troops took the town’s church bells. Two of the bells are stationed today at the Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, while the third has become part of a traveling museum.

The accession to the presidency of then Davao mayor Rodrigo Duterte gave fresh impetus for the return of the bells as the new President took a strong stand that they should be restored to their rightful place in Balangiga.

The cordial relations between Manila and Washington under presidents Trump and Duterte have contributed much to this recent meeting of minds.

bring closure to the Balangiga issue.

In a new book, The True Flag, Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain and the Birth of American Empire( St. Martin’s Grif-provides a fresh perspective to the end of the Philippine-American war on July 4,1902, as follows:

“After the Philippine debacle, the United States reduced the scope of its imperial ambition. Its attempt to take a distant archipelago, though ultimately successful, had been traumatic. Anti- imperialists had warned that any attempt to annex the islands would set off rebellion. They were proven right....

“By pushing the question of overseas expansion so insistently to the center of national debate, anti-imperialists led many Americans to doubt the idea of conquest. Their movement, it turned out, had not completely failed....

- annexation would be the last.”

Theodore Roosevelt himself tired of the idea of conquest. He came to recognize presciently that annexing the Philippines might have been a mistake because the archipelago could be a “heel of Achilles” for the United States.

Instead, after a half-century of US occupation, the Philippines became a steadfast ally of the US.

The alliance has endured and been proven many times since the Second World War.

It is unworthy of this alliance for the US military and US government to keep war trophies of the Philippine-American war.

Filipinos will never forget the bells of Balangiga and how they were violently taken from their homeland. Our people and government will never stop asking for their return.

Perhaps under US President Donald Trump, who desires and the heart to return the bells to Philippine soil.