Impatience over return to homes grows in Zamboanga

ZAMBOANGA CITY—Residents displaced by the three weeks of fighting between government security forces and a faction of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) are growing impatient over being kept away from their homes long after the crisis has ended.

Military and police authorities continued to bar people from returning to their communities, flattened by fighting between soldiers and followers of Moro leader Nur Misuari, as the search for remnants of the MNLF faction continued.

One of the residents eager to return home is Saida Maru, 55, of Barangay (village) Sta. Catalina, one of the villages occupied by Misuari’s men.

Maru said she could not understand why clearing operations were taking too long.

Hadja Mina Jahari, 45, who lives near Sta. Barbara Elementary School, said she had been constantly seeking information on when residents could return to their homes, or what were left of them.

“We know it is razed, but we want to return,” she said. “It has been days now and we are still being barred from returning to our houses,” she added.

Jahari said she once tried to return to the site of her house and was blocked by soldiers.

Other residents said the military announcement that 90 percent of Sta. Barbara had been cleared did not jibe with the continuing ban on residents from returning to their homes.

“They had declared that most of the village had been cleared but why is it that we are not allowed to even take a peek at what happened to our houses?” said Carmela Tandih, also of Sta. Barbara.

Colonel Johnson Jemar Aseron, head of the Army’s 32nd Infantry Battalion, the unit tasked with securing Sta. Barbara, said clearing operations had not been completed.

Aseron said it was possible that Misuari’s men were still in the area. Unexploded bombs could also endanger residents’ lives, he said.