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Between Postoccupation and Postcolonial: Framing the Recent Past in the Philippine Treason Amnesty Debate, 1948

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Debating Collaboration and Complicity in War Crimes Trials in Asia, 1945-1956

Part of the book series: World Histories of Crime, Culture and Violence ((WHCCV))

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Abstract

The most extensive public debate on the moral dilemmas of life in the Japanese-occupied Philippines (1941–1945) took place between the first elected legislators of an independent Philippine republic in 1948 over whether to approve a partial presidential amnesty for wartime collaborators. The eventual approval of the amnesty brought an end to a struggling People’s Court system of trying treason cases, abandoned prosecutions for all accused political and economic collaborators, and transferred other cases of military collaboration and informers to regular criminal courts. The chapter explores some of the objections to the amnesty on the grounds of class discrimination that ultimately failed to persuade the majority but argues that, on all sides, participants saw the Philippine experience as deeply integrated in a broader global process of confronting the legacies of brutal foreign occupations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Manila Tribune, January 19, 1948 clipping included in RG59 896.00/1-2848. Philippines Republic: Internal and Foreign Affairs 1945–1949 Confidential U.S. State Department Central Files Film A 575.26 Reel 1 of 35.

  2. 2.

    David Steinberg, Philippine Collaboration in World War II (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 152–63.

  3. 3.

    Ibid ., 162. See also note 42, 207. He lists 229 “political prisoners” in custody by June 1948, excluding the Hukbalahap rebels. Augusto V. de Viana, Kulaboretor!: The Issue of Political Collaboration during World War II (Manila: University of Santo Tomas Pub. House, 2003), 180. The source of de Viana’s count is unclear.

  4. 4.

    Konrad Lawson, “Universal Crime, Particular Punishment: Trying the Atrocities of the Japanese Occupation as Treason in the Philippines, 1947–1953.” Comparativ, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 57–77.

  5. 5.

    Margherita Zanasi, “Globalizing Hanjian: The Suzhou Trials and the Post–World War II Discourse on Collaboration,” The American Historical Review, vol. 113, no. 3 (June 1, 2008), p. 733. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 2.

  6. 6.

    Vicente L. Rafael, “Reorientations Notes on the Study of the Philippines in the United States.” Philippine Studies, vol. 56, no. 4 (2008), p. 485.

  7. 7.

    For example, David J. Steinberg, “Jose P. Laurel: A ‘Collaborator’ Misunderstood.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 24, no. 4 (1965), pp. 651–65. One of the most recent examples of this is Jeremy A. Yellen, “The Two Pacific Wars: Visions of Order and Independence in Japan, Burma, and the Philippines, 1940–1945.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2012.

  8. 8.

    This is not limited to non-Western colonial examples. We might note that similar choices faced Ukrainians in Europe, as well as many other irredentist and minority causes in the European context.

  9. 9.

    The exception was a wartime Minister of Justice and Minister of Home Affairs, Teofilo Sison, who was sentenced to life in July, 1946. Steinberg, Philippine Collaboration in World War II, 136.

  10. 10.

    In the majority opinion by Robert H. Jackson in the 5–4 US Supreme Court ruling of 1944, Cramer vs. U.S. Paul Finkelman, Melvin I. Urofsky, and United States. Supreme Court, Landmark Decisions of the United States Supreme Court (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2003), 219.

  11. 11.

    Steinberg’s Philippine Collaboration provides a good overview of the background of the People’s Court.

  12. 12.

    See Appendix B of Konrad M. Lawson, “Wartime Atrocities and the Politics of Treason in the Ruins of the Japanese Empire, 1937–1953.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2012, 366–70 for a table very close to this number, which was eventually to receive Supreme Court rulings.

  13. 13.

    Proclamation no. 51, “A Proclamation Granting Amnesty.” Official Gazette http://www.gov.ph/1948/01/28/proclamation-no-51-2/ (last accessed 28 November 2016).

  14. 14.

    I have explored these postamnesty trials in Konrad Lawson, “Universal Crime, Particular Punishment.”

  15. 15.

    American Embassy, Manila to Secretary of State, Despatch No. 176, “Concurrence of the Philippine Congress with the President’s Proclamation of Amnesty for Certain Wartime Collaborators” (18 February 1948) RG 59 896.00/2-1848.

  16. 16.

    Republic of Philippines Congressional Record: House of Representatives vol. 3, no. 15 (13 February 1948), 330.

  17. 17.

    Ibid ., 334.

  18. 18.

    Ibid ., 346.

  19. 19.

    In a collection of collaborator profile cards attached to State Department RG 59 896.00/2-747, comment dated July 1944.

  20. 20.

    One harsh critic of the political collaborators counts twenty out of ninety-eight members of the early postwar House of Representatives who had served in the wartime national assembly. Abaya, Betrayal in the Philippines, 70.

  21. 21.

    Congressional Record: House of Representatives vol. 3 no. 15 (13 February 1948), 377.

  22. 22.

    Ibid . A portion of this response by de Gaulle can also be found in “Home Problems of France,” The Times, 28 December 1944, 3.

  23. 23.

    On de Gaulle’s perspective on the trials, see Peter Novick, The Resistance Versus Vichy: The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968), 157. On his conduct in the final stage of the Laval trial, Geoffrey Warner, Pierre Laval and the Eclipse of France (New York; Macmillan, 1969), 415.

  24. 24.

    Armando J. Malay, “Osias Clashes with Pendatun On Amnesty,” newspaper clipping attached to American Embassy, Manila to Secretary of State, Despatch No. 176 (18 February 1948) RG 59 896.00/2-1848.

  25. 25.

    Rafael, Vicente L., White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 110. Congressional Record, vol. 3, no. 15 (13 February 1948), 383.

  26. 26.

    Congressional Record: House of Representatives, vol. 3, no. 12 (10 February 1948), 211.

  27. 27.

    Congressional Record: House of Representatives, 215. Laval and Quisling were shot in October 1945. Karl Hermann Frank was publicly hanged and Mussert shot in May 1946. The wartime Slovakian leader Jozef Tiso was hanged in April 1947. However, Samonte was wrong about Leon Maria Joseph Ignace Degrelle, who escaped capture and fled to Spain.

  28. 28.

    Ibid , 212.

  29. 29.

    Ibid ., vol. 3 no. 13 (11 February 1948), 243.

  30. 30.

    Ibid ., vol. 3 no. 8 (4 February 1948), 86. These numbers are not mutually exclusive. It is not clear how many individuals the cases covered since most individuals were prosecuted on multiple counts of treason that could fall into more than one category.

  31. 31.

    Ibid ., vol. 3 no. 13 (11 February 1948), 242–43.

  32. 32.

    Ibid ., 249.

  33. 33.

    Ibid ., 212.

  34. 34.

    Ibid ., no. 14 (12 February 1948), 286.

  35. 35.

    For work in English on the prosecution of Japanese war criminals in Philippine courts, see Sharon Williams Chamberlain, “Justice and Reconciliation: Postwar Philippine Trials of Japanese War Criminals in History and Memory” (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 2010).

  36. 36.

    “Tañada Blasts Amnesty Move: ‘Unjust, Vauge’: Favors Top Men, Leaves Lowly to Suffer Penalties,” newspaper clipping attached to American Embassy, Manila to Secretary of State, Despatch No. 176 (18 February 1948), RG 59 896.00/2-1848.

  37. 37.

    Santos would later join the Nacionalistas, serve as defense secretary, and run against Marcos for president in 1981. The Huks were declared illegal by Roxas on 6 March 1948. “The President’s Month in Review: March 1948.” Official Gazette http://www.gov.ph/1948/03/01/official-month-in-review-march-1948/ (last accessed 28 November 2016).

  38. 38.

    Congressional Record: House of Representatives, no. 14 (12 February 1948), 293–4.

  39. 39.

    Ibid ., 298.

  40. 40.

    Ibid ., 303.

  41. 41.

    See, for example, Recto’s defense of the wartime collaborators in Claro Recto, Three Years of Enemy Occupation: The Issue of Political Collaboration in the Philippines (Manila: Cacho Hermanos, 1985).

  42. 42.

    Francis Harrison, Diary of Francis Burton Harrison, 13 June 1942 republished on the Philippine Diary Project http://philippinediaryproject.com/1942/06/13/june-13-1942-3/ (last accessed 28 November 2016).

  43. 43.

    Congressional Record: House of Representatives no. 13 (11 February 1948), 262.

  44. 44.

    Ibid ., 263.

  45. 45.

    Ibid .

  46. 46.

    Vicente Rafael, White Love, 111–12.

  47. 47.

    See Florentino Rodao, “Spanish Falange in the Philippines, 1936–1945,” Philippine Studies 43, no. 1 (1 March 1995), 3–26.

  48. 48.

    Congressional Record: House of Representatives no. 14 (12 February 1948), 278–9, 284.

  49. 49.

    Ibid ., 278.

  50. 50.

    The debate would emerge again when Quirino pardoned several hundred collaborators still in prison in 1953.

  51. 51.

    The 1948 cost is quoted by Toribio Perez in ibid., vol. 3 no. 8 (4 February 1948), 84. The 1946 budget for the People’s Court is in Republic Act No. 1 “An Act Appropriating Funds for the Operation of the Government of the Commonwealth of the Philippines Beginning July First, Nineteen Hundred and Forty-Six Until the General Appropriations Act For the Fiscal Year Nineteen Hundred and Forty-Seven Is Approved” http://www.lawphil.net/statutes/repacts/ra1946/ra_1_1946.html (last accessed 28 November 2016). The 1947 revenue estimate is from “Message on the National Budget for the Fiscal Year 1947–1948” (11 February 1947) Official Gazette http://www.gov.ph/1947/02/11/message-of-president-roxas-on-the-national-budget-for-the-fiscal-year-1947-1948/ (last accessed 28 November 2016).

  52. 52.

    Reynaldo C. Ileto, “Orientalism and the Study of Philippine Politics.” Philippine Political Science Journal 22, no. 45 (1 December 2001), 1–32.

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  1. University of St Andrews, St. Andrews, UK

    Konrad M. Lawson

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  1. Heidelberg University , Heidelberg, Germany

    Kerstin von Lingen

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Lawson, K.M. (2017). Between Postoccupation and Postcolonial: Framing the Recent Past in the Philippine Treason Amnesty Debate, 1948. In: von Lingen, K. (eds) Debating Collaboration and Complicity in War Crimes Trials in Asia, 1945-1956. World Histories of Crime, Culture and Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53141-0_6

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