Benjie Yballe In 1998 I published “Ethnic Cleansing in the Philippines” on the cyberspace under the name Herb Mantawe and revised this in 2005. ( This was on the defunct website Philippiness. com/ColonialRP. ) I have been questioned on several occasions on how appropriate the term cultural cleaning is in respect to state-directed favoritism against linguistic communication groups or cultural nationalities that stand in the manner of the national linguistic communication. Has there of all time been aggregate slaying in the forensic sense? The Yugoslav and Rwandan illustrations educate us that cultural cleaning is achieved by actions that eliminate cultural groups you despise. For a state like Japan to formalise a national linguistic communication is equivalent to cultural cleaning yet so what. they are about wholly Niponggo in the first topographic point. But for the multicultural Philippines to keep a national linguistic communication is a career to acquire rid of all non-Tagalog “impurities. ” Cultural Cleansing in the Philippines The United Nations Convention on Genocide drafted in December 1948 chiefly defines the physical agencies by which authoritiess or rogue reservess weed out cultural or cultural communities.
With slugs or bladed arms. separation of younglings from their seniors. we’ve heard it all before from the intelligence and read it in the history books. But there is one more signifier of race murder or cultural cleaning that we are less familiar with. Article Two of the convention declares genocide “acts committed with the purpose to destruct. in whole or in portion. a national. cultural. racial or spiritual group. ” An illustration stated therein is “deliberately bring downing on the group conditions of life calculated to convey about its physical devastation. ” Should non nonreversible national linguistic communication policies in multicultural states fall into this class? Cases from states with aggressive national linguistic communication policies like mainland China best illustrate this. Let us inquire if the enforcement of sole Mandarin-Putonghua use across China has resulted in diminution of native usage of non-Mandarin linguistic communications.
The totalitarian authorities of China does non hold to round up full communities of the Minnan linguistic communication group and summarily put to death them to carry through cultural cleaning. It merely has to go on enforcing Putonghua or Mandarin. If cultural cleaning means extinguishing an cultural population. the aggressive infliction of one nationalized linguistic communication to the disadvantage and eventual weeding out of other linguistic communications non so privileged should besides be called by the same name. There are grounds why the mainland Chinese authorities labels the linguistic communications it does non prefer as idioms. To demo its disdain for these and to condition everyone into accepting that they are unworthy of being. In the Philippines. the same holds every bit true.
The Filipino authorities has barely of all time wavered in its run to eliminate its nonTagalog population through linguistic communication transition. First it went through the gestures of developing a national linguistic communication deceptively called at nowadays as Filipino. Armed with commissariats in the defect-ridden 1987 Fundamental law that nakedly favor Tagalog. the Filipino authorities busily orchestrates the concluding devastation of all non-Tagalog civilization groups. Its chief undertaking has been to forestall educated non-Tagalogs from being able to read. compose and to make in their ain female parent linguistic communication. To do them bury their ain linguas. the authorities coerces local schools to teach merely in Tagalog and English from the primary up to the third degree. By design this confers an inferior societal position on citizens who are non Tagalog and discourages them from cultivating their local manner of life. their downgraded civilization. In 1903 when there was no mass media dominated by Tagalog yet. the Americans’ nose count of the islands figured the native Tagalog population at merely over 10 per centum of the sum. The last nose count in 2000 by the National Statistics Office counts Tagalogs at 28. 15 per centum of the population.
This surely did non even reflect the greater figure who shifted to Tagalog-Filipino as their primary medium of communicating at place and outside. For person to catch a bigger portion. person else has to worsen. As those unfortunate 1s go fewer and fewer. the Philippines continues on its manner to going a strictly Tagalog state. In that other state. they disguise Mandarin as Chinese ; here the camouflage is Filipino. China and the Philippines have another thing in common. Their capital metropoliss consider outlying states their practical settlements. Television. the films. newspapers and wireless are consistent in their changeless word picture of non-Tagalogs as being less civilized. Modernization is portrayed in footings of thought. moving and talking like a Manila individual. The better it will be so for Manila to command its provincial settlements one time their linguistic communications have been replaced by its really ain Tagalog. Keeping the states hapless and coercively advancing Filipino-Tagalog at that place go manus in manus under the present model of internal colonialism.
But why in the name of chauvinistic bunk are we leting this atrociousness? Even the Soviet Union had non dared enforce an official linguistic communication on its democracies nor does the United States have one today. And those who bother to be just about it have several to suit their internal cultural states – India. Singapore. Switzerland. Belgium and Canada to call merely a few. Hope remains for states like China and the Philippines. All that needs to be done is to change by reversal their national linguistic communication lunacy. Or in clip they will both be like the Middle East where practically merely Arabic is spoken now. Merely through pluralism can the decease of the cultural individualities of non-Tagalogs be averted. The jurisprudence should be based on pluralism in our multicultural state. Not on linguistic communication apartheid. Not on Tagalista supremacism.
