TACLOBAN CITY—When President Duterte visits the historic town of Balangiga on September 28 for the commemoration of the Balangiga Massacre during the American occupation of the area during the last century, there will be no banners and streamers that will demand accountability on the sloppy implementation of the housing program for Supertyphoon Yolanda (international code name: Haiyan) survivors.
But officials at the regional office of the National Housing Authority (NHA) are not taking chances.
A civil-society organization monitoring the issue on shelter for residents displaced by Yolanda in Eastern Samar accused NHA of attempting to gag shelter beneficiaries from raising the problem of substandard housing to the attention of Duterte.
In a statement sent to local media, Uswag Este-Katarungan said it “condemns the latest antics of the National Housing Authority in Region 8 to silence and censure the residents of Balangiga to raise the issue of substandard housing to Duterte’s attention.”
The President is due to arrive on September 28 in the town of Balangiga to join the commemoration of the 116th anniversary of the Balangiga Massacre. In his second State of the Nation Address (Sona) on July 24, the President called on the US government to return the bells the American soldiers carted away in 1901.
The bells, taken from the Saint Lawrence the Martyr parish here, were used to signal the attack on the American soldiers who were occupying Balangiga. In retaliation, the American soldiers launched a campaign to kill all male residents 10 years old and older, which became known as the Balangiga Massacre. The successful attack by the Filipino insurgents against the American soldiers has always been celebrated by the local folk every September 28. Duterte is the main guest in this year’s commemoration.
But in recent months, the town of Balangiga also figured prominently in newspapers for a different reason—it has been on the center of a congressional inquiry by the House Committee on Housing and Urban Development following reports that houses being built for survivors of Yolanda are of substandard quality.
The congressional investigation also came after an audit of the National Economic Development Authority regional office showing that some of the housing units in Balangiga were “poorly built” with a “shallow wall footing” and using “brittle hollow blocks”.
Earlier this year, hundreds of women from the coastal villages of the town marched to the regional office of NHA to serve a “notice of refusal” for the houses due to questions on its structural integrity.
A statement of Uswag Este-Katarungan said officials from the regional office of NHA gathered residents from three villages of Balangiga in the morning of September 25 and told them not to raise the issue on the housing with Duterte.
“It seems that the NHA is too afraid that they pooled residents from Barangays 1, 6 and San Miguel to request them to keep quiet about the issue being investigated by the Congressional Committee on Housing and Urban Development—that of substandard housing units in the Barangay Cansumangkay relocation site,” the statement said.
“If anything, this establishes the guilt of the persons/units involved in the construction of the Barangay Cansumangkay relocation site,” it added.
Uswag Este-Katarungan also denied they were planning to disturb the activity, saying it “respects the solemnity of the event, and will not attempt cowardly acts, such as displayed by the NHA, to take away the focus from the commemoration of the Balangiga Massacre anniversary.”
The group also called on NHA General Manager Marcelino Escalada “to investigate the units already constructed and those with ongoing construction in the entire Yolanda corridor to prove these units are suitable for Yolanda survivors to live in.”