The recent filing of criminal charges by the police authorities in Compostela Valley province against some survivors of Typhoon “Pablo” and leaders of people’s organizations who protested the lethargic relief operations in the devastated areas of Mindanao is nothing but a shameless, insensitive attempt to cover up sheer government incompetence. Worse, it is tantamount to criminalizing the hunger and misery of typhoon survivors.
Two weeks after supertyphoon “Pablo” battered and forever changed the landscape of southern Mindanao and the lives of millions of its inhabitants, the full magnitude and extent of the devastation it left behind and the crisis it triggered are yet to be fully grasped, as its effects are only being discovered, agonizingly, “piece by piece” and “part by part” with every passing day.
His name may not be familiar, but the tragedy that befell Gregan Velez Cardeño more than two years ago, as far as his relatives and supporters are concerned, is closely linked to the presence of American military troops that started arriving in Mindanao 10 years ago, ostensibly to open a “second front” in the “war on terror” and to help defeat the Abu Sayyaf.
It is an agonizing disquiet unmistakably etched on the faces of the thousands of evacuees, mostly cramped inside soiled evacuation centers in the different “Sendong”-devastated parts of Northern Mindanao, that cannot be easily forgotten or ignored. Sendong’s fury did not only steal their merrymaking for the season, the tragedy also destroyed the lives of many, the dead and the survivors alike. To some, even an entire family, an entire future generation was totally washed away. They shared the unfortunate fate of a million others before them who suffered the same grief and endured the effects of the devastation caused by a deadly combination of humanity’s greed and nature’s wrath.
