War victims assail ‘hell’ in evacuation

SHARIFF SAYDONA MUSTAPHA, Maguindanao—Villagers driven out of their homes by the continuing war by the military on renegade Moro guerrillas are demanding they be allowed to return home, but authorities refuse to give them clearance because of continuing clashes.

“We want to go home,” said Dina Usop, 25, a mother of five.

Usop said evacuees were going hungry in a shelter here because of a lack of food. A school turned into an evacuation center in this town is housing at least 300 villagers who fled the fighting.

“How can we live here?” Usop said. Children, she added, are going hungry.

She said that while she knew that returning home would be dangerous, she preferred to take risks than go hungry in the shelter.

At the evacuation center, she said families subsisted on a ration that was given only once, consisting of 3 kilograms of rice, three cans of sardines and three packs of noodles.

“In our village, we can have root crops and other food for our subsistence, but not here,” Usop said.

The Inquirer learned that one family tried to sneak back home on Saturday but immediately went back to the evacuation center as explosions from artillery fire rocked their village.

“The government should have prepared for our evacuation before this war was waged,” said Malimbay Tumaganta, 36, another evacuee.

Akhmad Abdulkarim, a farmer, said this was the reason he was angry at senators who wanted an all-out war instead of finding ways to end the bloodshed in Mindanao.

“They sit comfortably in their air-conditioned rooms in Manila and blabber about waging war here in Mindanao,” he said. “Why don’t they come here instead?” he added.

“All we want is to have peace so we can have our normal lives back and return to our livelihood,” Abdulkarim said.

Juiaria Pansod, 35, two-months pregnant and a mother of two, said food was scarce in the evacuation center.

Myrna Jo Henry of Humanitarian Emergency Action and Response Team of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao said complaints about the lack of food surprised her.

She said the last time relief was distributed was just on March 5. More than 9,000 families who fled areas in the middle of the war were given the goods, she said.

Col. Arnel de la Vega, commander of the 603rd Infantry Brigade, said at least 5,000 soldiers were now involved in the operation.

The military, he said, could not yet end the operation as “hostile forces are still within and around Maguindanao areas.”

Eric Abdul, another evacuee, said children were traumatized by the war and evacuation.

“Children scream and cry because they are afraid of the loud explosions,” he said.

“It’s like hell here and the children suffer. We want to go back to our house but we have no clearance from local officials,” he said. Reports from Dennis Santos and Jeoffrey Maitem, Inquirer Mindanao