It’s always a little sobering to hear about bombs going off in places I’ve recently been.
Khan al Khalili, January 2009.
Al Hussein Mosque
Al-Azhar area
It’s interesting, though, that because I subscribe to the Jaiku feeds of several Cairo-based journalists and bloggers, by the time I woke up this morning I had more detailed and complete news sitting in my cellphone inbox than was available through the mainstream media.
On February 11, the Philippine Supreme court ruled Daniel Smith, the US Marine convicted in the Subic Bay Rape Case must be handed back over to Philippine Authorities, providing the latest twist in a high-profile case that has dragged on for two and a half years. The US Embassy, which has maintained custody of Daniel Smith, has so far refused to obey the ruling.
While I would be the last person to argue that the justice system in the Philippines is fair, or that prisons there are fit for any human beings, no matter how reprehensible their crimes, I still find the United States’ refusal to hand him over to local authorities indefensable. The American Embassy has happily turned a blind eye to hundreds of political killings and thousands of cases of torture, illegal arrest and arbitrary imprisonment of activists, Islamists, communists and other “enemies of the Philippine state.” As long as the US continues backing the Arroyo government, it has zero moral authority to shield one of its citizens who has been tried and convicted in local courts.
Below is an old article of mine, updated and lightly rewritten to reflect current events:
On December 4, 2006, Philippine courts sentenced U.S. marine Daniel Smith to 40 years in prison for getting a young Filipina drunk, raping her inside a van, and tossing her half-naked onto the street. The guilty verdict was a dramatic victory for people seeking to hold American servicemen accountable for their crimes against civilian populations.
On December 29, 2006, the hopes raised by Smith’s conviction were shattered when the US Embassy removed him from Philippine custody.
Smith remains in the custody of the US Embassy in Manila while he appeals the verdict, causing widespread public outrage in the Philippines. The impulse to prevent Smith from languishing in an overcrowded, under-serviced prison while his case is resolved is understandable. But the “protect our boys” ethic that underlies it, which dictates that U.S. personnel abroad should invariably be shielded from local accountability, needs to be seriously reexamined.
Guess where, and when, the following lines were written (in literal if not literary translation):
This unredeemed people
may perhaps succumb in the struggle,
but only its corpse
can be yoked by alien tyranny.Yankee! If you defeat us
with the powerful weight of weapons,
you will not live happily, because you are hated
even by the air of my native land.Yankee! If my verses
survive me, their words
will echo in the centuries to come
the eternal hate of the eternal outcast.
Is it Afghanistan in 2001? Iraq 2003?
Maybe Vietnam in 1965?
Try the Philippines, 1899 — America’s very first colonial adventure. (Probably not much of a surprise, actually, to anyone who pays any attention to what I normally post here.)
I’m sad to report that the US did not leave the Philippines until 1946 (and even then, not really), and that colonial officials did rather well for themselves. And I’m not sure Cecilio Apostol, the nationalist poet who wrote “Al Yankee,” would be comforted to know that his words do seem to have been echoed, again and again, for more than a century, as the march of U.S. imperialism spread across the globe. [Read more...]