(2006)
One hundred years ago this past week, on March 7, 1906, the American military’s first sustained incursion into the Islamic world reached a climax of sorts. At Bud Dajo, on an island in the southern Philippines, US troops massacred as many as a thousand Filipino Muslims.
In the conventional narrative of America’s rise to greatness, Bud Dajo hardly qualifies for a footnote. Yet the events that occurred there a century ago deserve their own chapter. For those hankering today to use American power to transform the Islamic world, Bud Dajo offers a cautionary tale.
The US troops had arrived on a mission of liberation, promising to uplift the oppressed. But the subjects of American beneficence, holding views of their own, proved recalcitrant. Doing good required first that the liberators pacify resistance and establish order. Before it was over, the Americans’ honor had been lost, and uplift had given way to savagery.
Although it had seized the Philippines in 1898 during the course of its war with Spain, the United States made little immediate attempt to impose its authority over the Muslim minority—known as Moros—concentrated in the southern reaches of the archipelago. Under the terms of the 1899 Bates Agreement, American colonial administrators had promised the Moros autonomy in return for acknowledging nominal US sovereignty. But after the US suppressed the so-called Philippine Insurrection of 1899–1902, during which US forces defeated Filipino nationalists led by Emilio Aguinaldo, authorities in Manila turned their attention to the Moros. In 1903, they abrogated the Bates Agreement and ordered Major General Leonard Wood to assert unambiguous jurisdiction over what the Americans were now calling the Moro Province.
The imperious Wood, President Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite general, viewed his new charges as “nothing more nor less than an unimportant collection of pirates and highwaymen.” He did not bother to disguise his intentions: the Moros would either submit or suffer harsh consequences. As one of Wood’s subordinates noted approvingly, “We are going after Mr. Moro with a rough hand, we are holding him up to all the high ideals of civilization.”
A rough hand it proved to be. Personally offended by the Moro propensity for blood feuds, polygamy, and human trafficking, Wood set out to render Moro culture compatible with prevailing Western values. Doing so meant first creating a new political order.
Certain that a generous dose of American firepower would make the Moros amenable to his program of reform, he arrived at his new headquarters in Zamboanga hankering for a fight. As he assured the president, “one clean-cut lesson will be quite sufficient for them.”
Wood miscalculated. Neither one, nor a dozen, nor several dozen such lessons did the trick. His efforts to root out offending Moro customs—issuing edicts that declared ancient Moro practices illegal, demanding that Moro tribal chiefs profess their fealty to Washington, and visiting reprisals on those who refused—triggered a fierce backlash.
An ugly war ensued, pitting poorly armed Moro warriors against seasoned US Army regulars. The Moro weapon of choice was the kris, a short sword with a wavy blade; the Americans toted Springfield rifles and field guns. As in present-day Iraq, the Americans never lost an engagement. Yet even as they demolished one Moro stronghold after another and wracked up an impressive body count, the fighting persisted. The Moros remained incorrigible.
At Bud Dajo, a volcanic crater on the island of Jolo, things came to a head. In late 1905, hundreds of Moros—determined to avoid paying a US-imposed head tax, which they considered blasphemous—began taking refuge on the peak. Refusing orders to disperse, they posed, at least in the eyes of nervous American officials, an intolerable threat. In “open defiance of the American authority,” the district governor on Jolo complained, the Moros of Bud Dajo were setting themselves up as “patriots and semi-liberators.”
These would-be revolutionaries had to be crushed. So Wood dispatched several battalions of infantry to Bud Dajo with orders to “clean it up.” On March 5, 1906, the reinforcements arrived and laid siege to the heights. The next day, they began shelling the crater with artillery. At daybreak on March 7, the final assault commenced, the Americans working deliberately along the rim of the crater and firing into the pit. Periodically, “a rush of shrieking men and women would come cutting the air and dash amongst the soldiers like mad dogs,” one eyewitness reported, but the results were foreordained. When the action finally ended some twenty-four hours later, the extermination of the Bud Dajo Moros had been accomplished. Among the dead lay several hundred women and children.
Differing in scope but not in character from countless prior “battles,” the incident at Bud Dajo would have gone entirely unnoticed had word of it not leaked to the press. When reports of the slaughter reached Washington, a minor flap ensued. Indignant members of Congress—chiefly Democrats hoping to embarrass the Republican Roosevelt—demanded an explanation. Perhaps predictably, an official inquiry found the conduct of US troops beyond reproach. When the War Department cleared Wood of any wrongdoing, the scandal faded as quickly as it had begun. For his part, Wood remained chillingly unrepentant. “Work of this kind,” he wrote privately to Roosevelt, “has its disagreeable side, which is the unavoidable killing of women and children; but it must be done.”
The president concurred. And yet the bloodletting at Bud Dajo accomplished next to nothing. The nameless dead were soon forgotten. Wood moved onward and upward, soon thereafter becoming Army chief of staff and eventually returning to the Philippines as governor-general. The American self-image as upholder of civilization’s high ideals emerged a bit the worse for wear, but still intact, at least as far as most Americans were concerned.
In the Moro Province, the US campaign of pacification ground on, lasting several more years. Other atrocities followed. In short order, the incident at Bud Dajo and soon thereafter the entire American encounter with the Moros slipped down the hole of vanished memories, eclipsed by other, bigger, less ambiguous wars.
With the United States engaged today in an ambitious effort to transform large swathes of the Muslim world, the campaign against the Moros warns against the dangers of misreading the subjects of one’s kindly intentions. Viewing the Moros as weak and malleable, Wood underestimated their determination and capacity to resist. This history also reminds us of how easily righteousness can kindle contempt. Wood’s soldiers saw themselves as bearers of civilization, but when their exertions met with hostility rather than gratitude, they came to see the Moros as beyond saving and hence as disposable.
Above all, however, the results of the campaign to pacify the Moros suggest that pacifying Afghans, Iraqis, or others in the Muslim world today will require extraordinary persistence. The Moros never did submit. A full century after Leonard Wood confidently predicted that “one clean-cut lesson” would bring the Moros to heel, their resistance to outside rule continues: the present-day Moro Islamic Liberation Front, classified by the Bush administration as an al-Qaeda affiliate, carries on the fight for Moro independence. For advocates of today’s “long war,” eager to confer on Muslims everywhere the blessings of freedom and democracy, while preserving the honor of the US military, the sheer doggedness of Moro resistance ought to give pause.