Spain claimed to have sovereignty over Mindanao, Palawan, and the Sulu Archipelago, even though it had not conquered the whole area. Based on this claim, the Spanish sold the Muslim regions to the Americans. After buying the Philippines for USD 20 million under the Treaty of Paris in 1898, the Americans concentrated their forces in Luzon and the Visayas to put down the Philippine Insurrection. Instead of involving the Muslims in the American-Philippine war, they initially preferred dealing with them diplomatically. In 1899, Sultan Jamalul Kiram II of Sulu signed the Bates Treaty with the American negotiator General John Bates. The agreement was based on the 1878 treaty the Sultan of Sulu had signed with the Spaniards. It accepted the sovereignty of the Americans over the sultanate; the sultan had to hand over criminals who had acted against non-Muslims, and help in the suppression of piracy and slavery. In return, the Americans guaranteed religious freedom, gave autonomy to the sultan in internal affairs of the sultanate, and provided monthly payments to the royal datus. Verbal assurances of America's
peaceful intentions also neutralized Muslim leaders in Mindanao.
After the Americans succeeded in ending the Philippine Insurrection in 1901, they established a civil government under US Army General William Taft. In Mindanao, General George Davis became the first Proconsul (1901-1902). In his report of 1902, he compared the Muslim areas to Indian reservations in the USA and the Moros to Native Americans; like them, they had to be civilized (Gowing 1981-1982: 12). Davis wanted to stop slavery, polygamy, and piracy, “as well as to weaken the rule of the Dato over their subjects” (Yegar 2002: 214). The initial American policy toward the Muslims was peaceful. General Davis ordered his men to be kind to the natives and not to interfere with their religious or cultural practices. At the same time in the Lake Lanao region, the Americans built wagon roads between Iligan and Marahui to the north of Lake Lanao and on the “Ganassi trail” (from Malabang to Ganassi) to the south of the lake Lanao. These infrastructures were described by Magdalena (2002) as “a key to the military campaign and successful governance of the Moro region” (p. 39; see also Gowing 1981-1982: 13). Those plans were disturbed by several violent incidents, which provoked the Americans to send out a punishment expedition.61
One of these incidents happened in March 1902. An American private was killed by some Maranaos near Parang-Parang, close to Cotabato, and the killers were identified as followers of the Sultan of Bayang. In response, a detachment of soldiers was sent on the trail from Parang- Parang to Lake Lanao to “open the trail to the divide” (Magdalena 2002: 9).62 Some Maranaos
attacked them and forced the detachment to leave their horses and equipment behind; one soldier was killed. Shortly after this incident another soldier was “cut to pieces by a bolo” at Malabang. The reaction of Colonel Frank Baldwin, who later on led a punishment expedition against Bayang, represented a change in American policy toward Maranaos:
As soon as this occurrence was reported I was so convinced that there was an element that would carry on a warfare of this character that I presented again to the department that I did not believe anything of a lasting and satisfactory solution of this question, and establishing the supremacy of the United States over the island and the people, could be accomplished in any other way than to advance the
61 One incident was described by Gowing (1983). About 1900 Maranaos from Malabang under Datu Udasan raided
the town Callalanuan, “looting property and carrying away slaves” (p. 83). The commanding officer Brett in nearby Parang-Parang went to investigate the datu, accompanied by 25 soldiers. With him came 100 Moros who were followers of Datu Udasan’s rival Datu Piang of Cotabato. While the talks were going on, fighting between Datu Udasan’s and Datu Piang’s followers broke out and 14 people were killed. Datu Dacula, whose son died in the fighting, wrote a letter to General William Kobbé in Zamboanga, asking him how the Americans could have tolerated such an attack, accusing them of having supported Datu Piang (ibid.: 83).
troops to the lake, peaceably if possible, otherwise if necessary; and that this would be the only way to stop this assassination of soldiers or American citizens and insure peace . . . by adopting only peaceful measures we would soon have our little garrisons along the seashore menaced by the lake Moros if we did not force our way to the lake. (ibid.: 9-10)
Soon after the bolo incident, a message was sent to leading Maranaos to surrender the assassins and to provide compensation for the stolen goods (Magdalena 2002: 3; Saber 1986: 12). The chiefs refused to hand over their kinsmen and the Sultan of Bayang wrote that he would “recognize nobody but the Sultan of Turkey” (Magdalena 2002: 3). The colonial rulers departed from their policy of diplomacy and sent 1,800 American and Filipino soldiers from Parang- Parang to Malabang and then against the Maranaos in the southern lake region. They first attacked several smaller kotas like Pualas and Binidayan, and finally arrived at Fort Pandapatann — Padang Karbala to Maranaos — in Unayan, where 600 Bayang warriors and their allies defended themselves. The Americans won the battle, due to superior numbers and weapons. They established Camp Vicars to maintain their victory. Since Baldwin had been promoted, John Joseph “Black Jack” Pershing became the new Commander-in-Chief. Under his administration, military operations as well as diplomacy were employed. He adopted “some Maranao as his brothers, sons, daughters, etc.,” and he was even given a honorary title of Datu (Saber 1986: 13). However, there were other areas near the lake like Bacolod Grade, Butig, Calahui, Masiu, and Taraka, where the people were still hostile toward the Americans. Saber explains:
During that time, most nativistic Maranao, outwardly or inwardly, discriminated against both Spaniards and Americans whom they considered as kapir or “infidels”, and whom they challenged for coming to their land. Such was the built- in attitude towards strangers created by their war experiences and the long period of isolation from other peoples. (ibid.: 14)
Saber quotes a letter of the Sultan of Bacolod, whose sultanate lay to the east of the lake, that was sent to Pershing containing the following challenge: “You get out of Ranao because you are not fit to live among civilized Moros since you are uncircumcised. If you do not come, we will come to fight you” (Saber 1986: 14). The American Press criticized the repression by the colonial government of the kotas in the hostile areas as a massacre. Captain Pershing made a tour around the lake, pacifying one rebellious chief after the other, either with diplomacy or with force of arms. He was promoted from Captain to Brigadier General; later on, he became the Military Governor of Moro Province (Magdalena 2002: 29; Saber 1986: 14).
Moro Province was established in 1903, containing the Muslim areas in Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago and excluding the northeastern parts of Mindanao, which were Christianized. It became the only province that was ruled by the military; civilian Filipino governors headed the others. The province was divided into five districts: Cotabato, Davao, Lanao, Sulu, and Zamboanga, each of which had an Army officer as District Governor. According to Gowing (1981-82), the main purpose of the province was “to provide a framework wherein traditional Moro political and social structures could be gradually changed into the structures adopted generally in the other provinces of the Archipelago” (p. 17). Infrastructure, telecommunications, schools, and hospitals were established and taxes collected. The Bates Treaty was abandoned in 1904, thus removing the authority the Sultan of Sulu still had over the internal affairs of his sultanate as well as the subsidies the sultan and the datus received. Further, anti-slavery measures were undertaken and the Americans rejected the Muslim legal code, except sharia laws regarding personal status and inheritance (Yegar 2002: 215, 217). To enforce these rules, General Leonard Wood, Governor of Moro Province from 1903 to 1906, undertook punitive attacks “to teach the Moros some [sic] lesson for not renouncing slavery, slave-catching, theft and other ‘uncivilized’ practices” (Magdalena 2002: 29). Under Wood's administration, 3,000 Muslims were killed, “while the number of Americans killed was less than seventy” (Gowing 1981-1982: 18).
The next governor, Tasker Bliss (1906-1909), installed at a time when most Muslims had already submitted to American rule, focused on education in order to “civilize” them. This involved the institution of compulsory education. Scholarships were given to Muslims, and scholarship recipients were sent to Manila or the United States. The Muslim elites were pressured to send their children to school. However, only the children of slaves went to the school, while the elite kept its children at home or sent them to traditional religious schools. Consequently, Brigadier General Bliss also started to support the education of local teachers, the use of the local language as a medium of education, and even the traditional Islamic schools, to which he sent books, and whose curriculum was limited to the “reading and writing of Arabic and the Arabic rendering of Moro languages.” His goal was to initiate a transition from the traditional school to public school (Gowing 1981-1982: 22; Yegar 2002: 218). Generally, it can be said that the American policy was quite friendly toward Islam under a constitution of secularism and religious freedom. The schools the Americans supported were not confessional, but they sponsored trips to Mecca in 1911 (Gowing 1977: 65; Saber 1981-1982: 200). Gowing summarizes the American policy toward the Muslims in the Philippines:
The Americans came to Moroland with a “holy mission,” the mandate. The Americans wished to Americanize and Christianize the Moros. “To develop, to civilize, to educate, to train in the science of self-government” meant to accomplish these changes in terms of American values. In short, they sought to impose a western civilization suffused by the Judeo-Christian ideology upon an Asian (Filipino) society suffused by Islam . . . While setting aside Moro legal codes and judicial procedures, the American government scrupulously avoided any interference with the freedom of the Moros to worship and practice their religious customs. Americans believed that they were respecting the religious liberty of the Moros. Again, it must be emphasized that the Americans were unaware [of] or indifferent to the fact that religion and culture were intermingled in Moro society. (Gowing 1977: 329-330)
In 1911, Governor John J. Pershing (1909-1913) ordered the disarmament of the Muslims, which led to resistance in Cotabato, Lanao, and Sulu. In Sulu, there were reports of mujahida (female Islamic warriors) being in the battle of Mount Langkuasan in 1912, where Muslim women fought under the lead of Princess Asda Shariful Hashim against American soldiers. They rolled down logs to crush the American attackers, and thereby, before the male and female fighters were overrun, killed twenty American soldiers (Lucman 2000: 282). The battle of Bud Bagsak in Sulu in 1913 was the last large-scale battle between American soldiers and Muslims in the Philippines. Its consequence was the Carpenter Agreement in 1915, signed by Governor Frank Carpenter and Sultan Jamalul Kiram II of Sulu. The Sulu sultanate had to recognize the American colonial government; the sultan lost his major prerogatives, except his religious duties, and was awarded an annual pension of USD 6,000.
Even though the Muslims had officially been defeated and disarmed, military clashes between Muslims and American soldiers continued. In 1914, the Department of Mindanao and Sulu (1914-1920), which had a civilian government under Frank Carpenter (Gowing 1981-1982: 26, Lucman 2000: 284), replaced the Moro Province. In 1916, the Jones Law (Act No. 240) gave the Philippine Legislature control over Mindanao and Sulu and Muslims the right to representation. As an immediate outcome, Governor-General Francis Burton Harrison appointed two senators and five assemblymen. In 1917, the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes was established, aiming to “bring the non-Christian communities into the national process” (Tan 1981-1982: 61). Under the Department of Mindanao and Sulu, based on the conclusion that elite Moro women were an influence in their society a boarding school for girls was established in Sulu in 1916 and financed by women from New York. Its goal was to educate the girls to be future leaders among their people (Angeles 1998: 213). Carpenter even sent one Muslim woman, Tarhata Kiram from Sulu, to the USA to be educated there. Conversion of these Muslim women
to Christianity was not part of the program since this would have destroyed their status and value among their people (ibid.: 213).
American rule had special consequences for the distribution of land in the Philippines. In 1902, the Land Registration Act (Act No. 496) was introduced, instituting the Torrens system63 of
land ownership. The next year, Act 718 passed; it “made void land grants from Moro Sultans or Datus, or Chiefs or non-Christian tribes, when made without government authority or consent” (Lucman 2000: 272). Act No. 926, in the same year, declared as belonging in the public domain and open for homesteading all land to which no title according to the new registration system had been claimed. Magdalena describes the consequences for the traditional system of land ownership:
the natives were dispossessed of their rights to the land, which were defined by customary laws based on kinship membership. Traditional and suspicious as they were, the Moros did not realize the value of the modern concept of legal ownership of lands, and naturally did not bother themselves to have their lands surveyed, classified and covered by Torrens title. To them, it was enough that they lived by their own rules, which later ran inconsistent with modern law. (2002: 49) Many Muslims lost their land because their traditional rights were not recognized. On the other hand, some Muslim leaders profited from this situation by claiming vast tracks of land as their own, sometimes selling parts of them to the government, settlers, or others (Yegar 2002: 226). Land to which no title was claimed was mainly sold or leased to plantation owners, foreign enterprises like Goodyear, or immigrants who came from Luzon, the Visayas, America, or Japan (Kreuzer 2003: 10). It was easy for influential people to possess lands that before had belonged to Muslims. This situation eventually led to countless land conflicts and can be seen as one of the root problems of today’s conflict situation (Yegar 2002: 226). In 1919, as a result of Act No. 2874, non-Christians were prohibited from possessing more than 10 hectares of land for each male family member over 18. Other citizens of the Philippine Islands or of the USA over the age of 18 years, however, could possess a homestead not exceeding 24 hectares (Che Man 1990: 24).
In the framework of relocation programs from 1913 to 1917, several agricultural colonies64 were formed in the Muslim areas. During this time, about 8,000 settlers arrived.
Officially, the purpose of these colonies was to increase agricultural production, to balance the population distribution in the Philippines, to begin the cultivation of fallow land and to enable
63 The Torres system is based on a register of land holdings maintained by the state which and guarantees a title to
those included in the register.
64 The colonies were created in Glan, Pagalungan, Paidu Pulangi, Pikit, Silik, and Talitay in the Maguindanao area,
poor farmers to become landowners (Yegar 2002: 223). According to Werning (1983), at this time there was no overpopulation in Luzon or the Visayas, but areas that were controlled by oppressive landlords were defined as overpopulated. In order to ease the growing social problems in these regions, the US government started a re-settlement program for the poor, granting them advantages in order to up-grade their social and economic standing, mainly on the backs of the Moros in Mindanao (p. 47). Rodil (2003) writes that in Cotabato it was Datu Piang — the most respected Muslim leader in Buayan at the time — who was responsible for the coming of the first Christian colonies to the province (there were eight in Cotabato). Two of his sons served in the management of these colonies (p. 185). Christians as well as Muslims were among the colonists, which was intended so as to facilitate the assimilation of the Moros (see also Eder and McKenna 2004). The religiously mixed colonies were not very successful because of the threat of malaria and a lack of services. In 1918, the government decided to support only those that had their own means, a plan that also failed.
In 1935, 30,000 to 35,000 people lived in government agricultural colonies in Mindanao (Yegar 2002: 224). In 1939, the National Land Settlement Administration was established; it aimed to include army veterans. It bought land from the government and private sources to organize settlements. In some cases, Muslim ancestral land was declared to be public domain and sold (ibid.: 232). Even though there had been warnings by Muslims that the land issue might lead to violence, these programs were enforced. Yegar reports that between 1936 and 1941, especially in Lanao, there were numerous minor military clashes between armed forces of the Philippine government and local Muslims (ibid.: 232).
Some business elites in Mindanao were interested in a territorial break away from the Philippine entity. In 1910, the Zamboanga Chamber of Commerce requested of the American President that the southern islands be separated from the rest of the Philippines and become American territory, referring to their rich natural resources (ibid: 223).65 In the 1920s, some
American businessmen, plantation owners, and government officials supported Moro petitions to the US President and Congress warning that Philippine independence, bringing with it the rule by Christian Filipinos over Muslims, might result in violence (Magdalena 2002). The petitions resulted in 1926 in the Bacon Bill (HB 12772), proposing the annexation of Mindanao and Sulu by the Americans instead of giving independence to the whole Philippines (Magdalena 2002:
65 The number of Americans settlers in Mindanao had been about 5,000 during the time of the Moro Province, most
of them connected to the army. Majority left already after a few years. In 1907 there were only 100 American plantation owners in Mindanao, part of them left when the army withdraw in 1913 (Yegar 2002: 223).
51ff.). The Bill was neglected and in 1934, the Tydings-McDuffie Bill established an autonomous Commonwealth under which the Philippines was granted full rights in internal matters.66 In
reaction, the Dansalan Declaration was signed in 1935 by 121 datus from Lanao and sent to President Franklin Roosevelt and Congress. It demanded that the Muslims remain under American administration until they were able to govern themselves. It warned that, in the event of the inclusion of the region in the Philippines, there would be “troubles between [the Muslims] and the Christian Filipinos because from time immemorial these people have not lived harmoniously together” (Lucman 2000: 291, quoting the Dansalan Declaration).
In 1920 the Department of Mindanao and Sulu was closed down. Direct rule by the American Mindanao and Sulu ended. Instead, the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes was in charge while Christian Filipinos took over control of the administration and legal matters in the Muslim areas. “The majority of officeholders in public service in the southern Philippines were Christians; giving rise to Muslim complaints that the real meaning of ‘Philippinization’ was ‘Christian Philippinization’.” (Yegar 2002: 220). The Muslims were not treated as a separate group anymore but as a minority in a predominantly Christian state. This attitude resulted in riots