Bells of freedom
Can it be? Is a glaring, long-festering historical wrong about to be made right?
That thought must have gone through the minds of readers with more than a passing interest in our nation’s history when they read the headline of a brief report in this newspaper last March 10: “2 church bells taken as war booty returned.” Can it be, at last, the famed Balangiga bells, the three church bells carted off by the US Army as war booty after its vengeful campaign of extermination against the population of Balangiga, Samar, in 1901? Two of those bells are being kept in a former base of the 11th Infantry Regiment at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in the United States. The third is with the 9th Infantry Regiment at Camp Red Cloud, South Korea. The bells’ repatriation has been the subject of endless—and so far fruitless—negotiations between the Philippines and the United States.
Alas, the two bells in the report are not the ones from Balangiga. But the Philippines can take some measure of comfort in the fact that the returned artifacts are roughly of the same provenance and historical value as the war loot from Balangiga. The two bells turned over by Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario to the National Museum were said to have been taken by US troops from a church in Meycauayan, Bulacan, in 1899. An inscription attached to the wooden block holding the two bells together bears out this history: “Taken from the Church of MEYCAUAYAN, Luczon (sic) Islands after bombardment by Utah Battery March 29, 1899. By PO Thomas, Co. A Battalion of Engineers.”
By some miracle, the long-vanished, undocumented bells resurfaced after an archivist of the Sisters of Mercy in Omaha, Nebraska, in the United States found them in July 2011 among some properties originally in the possession of the nuns’ convent in Red Bluff, California. The archivist, Monte Kniffen, surmised that perhaps a small museum or family that had kept the bells all these years eventually turned them over to the convent after noting they were church paraphernalia. In October 2011, Sister Judith Frikker, the president of the Sisters of Mercy Midwest Community USA, handed the bells to Philippine Consul General to Chicago Leo Herrera-Lim, commencing the artifacts’ journey back to their country of origin.
It took the Meycauayan bells 113 years to be returned to the land from where they were violently taken. Obscure but nonetheless valuable trophies of war, their dismemberment from their organic surroundings—they were not works of art per se, but objects of everyday community ritual and religion—were no doubt meant to further humiliate and subjugate a people who had dared challenge the “Manifest Destiny” of this new colonial power with its modern blandishments, by taking up arms against it.
One hundred and thirteen years, and the generosity of nuns. But better late than never. The return of the Meycauayan bells goes a long way toward helping reconstitute the Philippines’ cultural patrimony, and perhaps providing a good start to mending a long-standing historical injury. It’s quite ironic that the reappearance of the Meycauayan bells and their repatriation happened within the span of less than a year, with hardly a kink complicating the process, and apparently with only the most gracious of intentions at play. Meanwhile, the matter of the Balangiga bells has languished for decades, with the US government still officially dismissive of repeated requests by successive Philippine administrations to return the war relics.
An amendment in the US National Defense Authorization Act that supposedly “bars the return of veterans’ memorial objects to foreign nations without specific authorization in law” has hindered the negotiations’ progress, and the US Congress has yet to pass a pending resolution approving the return of the Balangiga bells. Still, however long it may take, the Aquino administration must keep up the drumbeat. The Balangiga bells represent a singular crucible in the Philippines’ history of heroism and sacrifice, when Samar became “a howling wilderness” under Gen. Jacob H. Smith and about 200,000 Filipino civilians died from the horrors of a war the Americans had precipitated by taking over a country it had only promised to help liberate from the old occupiers.
The Balangiga bells’ rightful place is not in some garrison monument to imperial adventurism, but in the bosom of the very nation whose fight for freedom their tolling had helped unleash.
