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BEING commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the President is
necessarily responsible for every military or police strategy
utilized in their counter-insurgency or crime control programs. The
military and police commands must take their orders from the Chief
Executive and follow the chain of command down the line. When the
President orders that there should be no human rights violations, no
torture, no extralegal killings, no enforced disappearances, then
there should be strict enforcement by the military and police
command of such directives from their superior—He who gives an
order is held to be the doer (Qui mandat ipse fecisse videtur). If
there is a violation, then the insubordinate can be held fully
accountable. There is no justification for violation of the
directives of the highest superior. However, if the President takes
no action whatsoever to hold the insubordinate fully accountable for
his deeds, then there is ratification by tolerance. Ratification is
equivalent to an express command (Ratihabitio mandato aequiparatur).
Thus, the President becomes the individual responsible for the acts
of her inferior officials. It is what international law set as a
precedent in many cases—the principle of command responsibility.
During the Second World War, Gen. Tomoyuki
Yamashita, now enshrined at the Yasukuni Jinja shrine in Tokyo
together with other war criminals, earned the sobriquet “The Tiger
of Malaya” when his 30,000 fierce frontline soldiers, in his
invasion of Malaya and Singapore, captured 130,000 British, Indian
and Australian troops, the largest surrender of British-led
personnel in world history. But his campaign included war crimes on
captive Allied personnel and civilians, such as the Massacres of
Alexandra Hospital and Sook Ching. Although he failed to prevent
these massacres, Yamashita executed the officer who instigated the
hospital massacre and some soldiers caught looting for such grisly
acts. He personally apologized to the surviving patients. His
responsibility for the massacres stopped when he took action on the
mass murderer albeit his subordinate official.
However, during Yamashita’s command of the
Fourteenth Area Army in the Philippines, he retreated from Manila to
the mountains of northern Luzon. Almost immediately, Rear Admiral
Sanji Iwabuchi re-occupied Manila with 16,000 sailors, with the
intent of destroying all port facilities and naval storehouses. Once
there, Iwabuchi took command of 3,750 Army security troops, and
against Tomoyuki’s specific order, turned Manila into a
battlefield; which resulted in the deaths of more than 100,000
Filipino civilians, later known as the Manila Massacre during the
fierce month long street-fighting for the capital. In the course of
the campaign, Iwabuchi’s men tortured and slaughtered Filipino
civilians suspected of being collaborators or members of the
guerilla army. Yamashita took no action against Iwabuchi’s Manila
Massacre although evidence suggested he was unaware of atrocities
committed by Japanese naval forces. After his surrender to Gen.
Arthur Percival, the man he had humiliated after the fall of
Singapore, Yamashita was tried for war crimes relating to the Manila
Massacre and he was sentenced to death.
Thus, this case of Yamashita v Styer became a
precedent regarding command responsibility for war crimes, now known
as the Yamashita Standard. Evidence showed that Yamashita did not
have ultimate command responsibility over all military units in the
Philippines, such as the Imperial Japanese Navy units at the Battle
of Manila, but this was not allowed in court. In failing to
discipline his subordinates, Yamashita was deemed ultimately
responsible for any act of an inferior military official in his
chain of command. Thus, on February 23, 1946, at Los Baños Prison
Camp, Tomoyuki Yamashita was hanged. Even his chief of staff, Akira
Muto, was executed in December 1948, after having been found guilty
of war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far
East. Many Japanese officials were executed for the grisly crimes
committed by the Japanese Imperial Army, among whom were Yamashita’s
predecessor General Kuroda, and Japanese Prime Minister Hideki
Tojo, on the principle of command responsibility.
But during the course of military proceedings,
Yamashita was profoundly affected when he listened to an estimated
two hundred victims and witnesses giving their detailed accounts of
Japanese atrocities. It must have been excruciating for Yamashita to
listen day after day to painful stories of the victimization of many
men, women and children. He denied responsibility for these crimes
committed by those under his command. But in his personal will, he
humbly acknowledged his failure as commander to discipline his
soldiers and punish those who committed crimes against Filipinos.
Moreover, he appears to have internalized the pain of the victims of
Japanese atrocities, displaying remorse for the war crimes of his
troops, somehow overcoming his own old-fashioned militarist ideology
and replacing it with remarkable self-criticism. His last words,
dictated to Buddhist prison chaplain Morita Shokaku, shortly before
he was hanged, comprise a sincere apology to the Filipino people and
manifested remorse for the atrocities his troops committed.
In view of the Yamashita Standard, the President
should require all Cabinet secretaries, and all military and police
generals, to immerse themselves and personally listen to the
grievances of human rights victims in special commissions such as
the Melo and Alston Commissions.
ericfmallonga@yahoo.com
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