RAPPLER | 'China threatening status quo' - Aquino on China carrier: Not a threat

BY RAPPLER.COM
POSTED ON 11/27/2013 6:05 PM | UPDATED 11/27/2013 7:16 PM



BEHAVE. Foreign Affairs Spokesman Raul Hernandez issues a statement following China's deployment of its aircraft carrier to the South China Sea, some parts of which are disputed territories. File Photo by Carlos Santamaria

MANILA, Philippines – The Department of Foreign Affairs slammed China's move to send its aircraft carrier to the South China Sea.

In a press briefing on Wednesday, November 27, Foreign Affairs spokesman Raul Hernandez said that the aircraft carrier's deployment raises tension and violates the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC) and warns that it must not violate international law – particularly that of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

Hernandez added that the deployment should only be for "peaceful purposes."

"Its deployment does not contribute to regional stability," Hernandez said. "Instead, [it] serves to threaten the status quo."

Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported on Tuesday, November 26, that Beijing's sole aircraft carrier departed for its first ever sea trials in the South China Sea.

The aircraft carrier was accompanied by two destroyers and two missile cruisers which make up a standard aircraft carrier battle group.

China's sole aircraft carrier is a a refurbished vessel purchased from Ukraine and named "Liaoning." It went into service in September 2012.

Such developments follow Beijing's recent establishment of an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) over the East China Sea, an area that contains disputed islands known as Diaoyu in Chinese and Senkaku to its Japanese claimants.

US, Japan say no

Beijing is requiring all international aircraft passing through the ADIZ to make themselves known to Chinese authorities and issue a flight plan – an order that Japan immediately rejected. (READ: Japan's Abe calls air defense zone dangerous)

On Tuesday, two US B-52 bombers flew over a disputed area of the East China Sea without informing Beijing, challenging China's bid to create an expanded air defense zone. (READ: US challenges China's air defense zone)

Australia also expressed concern on the matter and summoned the Chinese Ambassador to Australia for an explanation.

The White House, meanwhile, denounced China's move, calling it "unnecessarily inflammatory."

The US went on to provoke China's move to assert sovereignty over the disputed areas by letting two of their B-52 bombers fly over the zone.

The two bombers reportedly took off from the Anderson Air Force Base in Guam as part of an ongoing training program the US called Coral Lightning Global Power Training Sortie.

The US government said the exercise was planned way before China's establisment of the ADIZ.

Aside from the Daioyu/Senkaku dispute with Japan, China is engaged in territorial disputes with several other countries.

China claims virtually the whole of the South China Sea where the Spratlys, the Paracel Islands, and the Macclesfield Bank are located, earning the ire of the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Brunei which claim some of the island territories and land features included in the three areas. – Rappler.co

In another article:
Aquino on China carrier: Not a threat

BY PATERNO ESMAQUEL II
POSTED ON 11/28/2013 3:01 PM | UPDATED 11/28/2013 5:10 PM


THREATENING PH? China's first aircraft carrier, the 'Liaoning' sits berthed at the naval base in Dalian, northeast China's Liaoning province on Sept 25, 2012. File photo by AFP

MANILA, Philippines – Echoing his softened tone toward China, President Benigno Aquino III on Thursday, November 28, downplayed the rising superpower's move to send an aircraft carrier to the disputed South China Sea.

“Let's not play it up,” Aquino told reporters, when asked if the aircraft carrier poses an “immediate threat” to the Philippines.

He said the Chinese, after all, admitted that the aircraft carrier is “not yet fully operational.” It will take up to 3 years for it to run in full steam, he said.

For the President, this means “they're learning carrier operations, both the crews onboard the planes and also the pilots who will be flying the planes. So they are transiting here.”

Aquino said, “Why should anybody consider it a threat?”

Escorted by missile destroyers and frigates, China's first aircraft carrier went on a training mission in the South China Sea last Tuesday, November 26.

The newly-commissioned Liaoning left its home port of Qingdao accompanied by two missile destroyers, the Shenyang and Shijiazhuang, and two missile frigates, the Yantai and Weifang, the official Xinhua news agency said.

The Philippines' Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) on Wednesday, November 27, said the aircraft carrier's deployment “serves to threaten the status quo.” (READ: 'China threatening status quo' – DFA.)

'Infringes on air freedom'

The deployment came after China stirred tension over another body of water.

Over the weekend, China announced an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea.

The air defense zone requires aircraft to provide their flight plan, declare their nationality and maintain two-way radio communication, or face “emergency defensive measures.”

The zone covers Tokyo-controlled islands – known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China – where ships and aircraft from the two countries already shadow each other.

In a statement on Thursday, the DFA said the ADIZ "transforms the entire airzone into its domestic airspace, infringes on the freedom of flight in international airspace, and compromises the safety of civil aviation and national security of affected states."

"The Philippines calls China to ensure that its ADIZ preserves regional security and stability," the DFA added.

Threat to PH, too

In an interview on ABS-CBN, Philippine Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario said the ADIZ also poses a threat to the Philippines. Del Rosario said he fears China "will control the air space" in the South China Sea.

China has been steadily increasing its military and coast guard presence in the South China Sea in recent years to assert its claim.

This caused diplomatic tensions to rise and stoking concerns in the Philippines about perceived Chinese bullying.

The Philippines filed a historic case against China over the dispute, while Aquino softened his tone.

In October, for instance, Aquino declined to explicitly tell China to back off from the disputed Panatag (Scarborough) Shoal, the site of a Manila-Beijing standoff in 2012, as well as the Ayungin (Second Thomas) Shoal.

The President said the international tribunal, in the end, will seal the fate of what he calls the “sea known by many names.” (READ: Aquino won't tell China to leave Panatag.)

He said his country, too, is helping craft a Code of Conduct (COC) on the South China Sea, a binding document to ensure peace in the disputed sea.

“The bottom line is, we are undergoing arbitration. We are pursuing the second track with the COC. And at the end of the day, either or both will seek to clarify everybody's entitlements with regard to this body of water,” Aquino said. – with reports from Agence France-Presse/Rappler.com

Pinoy Weekly Mga Larawan | Kabataang Makabayan, naglunsad ng iglap-protesta bilang pagpapatuloy ng rebolusyon ni Andres Bonifacio

Posted: 28 Nov 2013 10:55 AM PST Kasabay ng ika-150 anibersaryo ng pagkabuhay ng lider-rebolusyonaryo ng Katipunan na si Andres Bonifacio sa Nobyembre 30, inagdiriwang din ng Kabataang Makabayan (KM) ang kanilang anibersaryo ng pagkakatatag. Para sa KM, ipinagpapatuloy nila ang naantalang rebolusyon ni Bonifacio. Aktibong ipinapanawagan ng naturang grupong underground ang armadong pakikibaka para mapalitan umano ang sistemeng pampulitika at pang-ekonomiya na nagpapahirap sa mayorya ng mga mamamayan habang nakikinabang ang iilang miyembro ng naghaharing mga uri. Narito ang ilang larawan ni Pher Pasion ng lightning rally ng KM: Nagmartsa ang mga rebolusyonaryong kabataan sa ilalim ng Kabataang Makabayan sa Quiapo, Manila para ipagdiwang umano ang anibersaryo ng KM at ika-150 araw ng pagkakapanganak kay Gat Andres Bonifacio, ang ulo ng unang rebolusyong Pilipino. (Pher Pasion) (Pher Pasion) (Pher Pasion)

www.migrante.eu | Typhoons, aid corruption, and the arrest of Professor Kim Gargar

Submitted by Plaridel on Wed, 11/27/2013 - 22:38

Press Statement

27 November 2013

Reference/s:
Rev Barry Naylor, Honorary President, CHRP-UK
Rafael Joseph Maramag, Secretary, CHRP-UK, 07958482753

While thousands of people continue to suffer from the destruction caused by typhoon Haiyan and with the emotional speech of the Philippines representative at the COP 19 climate change talks, it has been easy to overlook how the Philippines government treats its own citizens concerned both by climate change and by the way that the government conducts disaster relief. Today friends and colleagues of Professor Kim Gargar will be gathering outside the Department of Justice in Manila to protest against their colleagues arrest by the military last October.

On 4 December last year Typhoon Bopha hit the Southern Philippines with winds of more than 160 mph causing nearly 2,000 deaths. At the time there were many reports that the death toll was far higher due to landslides and flash floods that were triggered by deforestation from mining and logging concessions in the area. Complaints accompanied government relief efforts which arrived too little too late and which became a feast of corruption with shelters for victims being costed at vastly inflated prices and aid funds for evacuation equipment putting money into the pockets of local police and government officials. Community leaders complained that scarce aid supplies were distributed along political lines as local elections approached. The UN refugee agency UNHCR told reporters “perception of inequitable distribution is creating tensions”.

One local councillor, Cristina Jose protested about officials refusing to distribute relief goods, being held in a government warehouse, to her community. In January, 5000 local residents barricaded the national highway to protest against the government’s “selective” relief delivery system. The government brought in soldiers. On 4 March this year councillor Cristina Jose was shot dead on March 4 this year, by unknown gunmen aboard a motorcycle.

In April this year, Professor Kim Gargar, a scientist, and teacher at the University of the Philippines, who works for the Centre for Environmental Concerns, and who sometimes works for the Asian Development Bank, was a member of a mission to the area which was shocked to find the level of militarisation by soldiers whose presence seemed to be more about dealing with dissent and government concerns about communist insurgency than to assist with any relief efforts. The mission also interviewed witnesses on the assassination of Cristina Jose and about abuses by the 67th Infantry battalion in the area.

In late June this year, Professor Gargar returned on another mission engaged in a six-month resource mapping programme for the rehabilitation of the devastated areas and in particular for the recovery of rainforest environment. On 1 October government troops got into a fire fight with a local unit of the rebel New People’s Army (NPA). Later in the day they came across Professor Gargar who was working in the same area. The soldiers arrested the scientist claiming he possessed explosives, firearms and ammunition. The troops were from the 67th Infantry battalion. They further claimed that Professor Gargar joined the NPA in 2012, whilst Kim was clearly in Europe completing his PhD.

The arrest of Professor Gargar is providing some uncomfortable lessons about how disaster relief works in the Philippines, and about how the government deals with those who raise their voices on behalf of the disaster victims. His case is becoming a symbol of impunity for government aid corruption and human rights abuses.

To add your name to the campaign to free Professor Kim Gargar go towww.freekimgargar.org

http://www.chrp.org.uk/2013/typhoons-aid-corruption-and-the-arrest-of-pr...

www.migrante.eu | EUROPE'S DEADLY BORDER

EUROPE'S DEADLY BORDER

Submitted by Plaridel on Mon, 11/25/2013 - 00:00

By David Bacon
Boston Review, web edition, 11/25/13
http://www.bostonreview.net/world/europes-deadly-border-immigration-medi...

On the night of October 3 a beat-up, unseaworthy freighter left a dock in Tripoli, on the Libyan coast, carrying a human cargo of 500 migrants. Almost all had made an arduous overland journey from Eritrea and Somalia, through North Africa. This trip across the Mediterranean Sea was the last leg that would bring them to Europe.

The ship limped across the strait towards the southernmost piece of Italy, Lampedusa -- a small island closer to Libya than to Sicily. It never made it. In sight of the islet of Conigli its engines quit and it began to take on water. Passengers panicked. One set a blanket on fire to signal for help from shore or a passing boat. But the flames spread to the engine's spilt fuel, which exploded. People ran from the blaze, and their shifting weight capsized an already old unsteady vessel. They were thrown into the sea.

Most couldn't swim. They could see the lights of Lampedusa, but they couldn't get to them. Only 155 were able to tread water long enough to be finally picked up. The other 359 people drowned, many of them children.

The migrants on the capsized ship are part of a huge wave of people trying to cross the Mediterranean to Lampedusa, many of whom die in the attempt. In October alone, the Italian coast guard rescued 200 migrants from another boat on the 7th. Thirty-four more drowned when their boat capsized on the 11th. On the 15th the Italian navy pulled 290 from the water, while a Panamanian merchant vessel picked up 80 from a large raft. And on the 24th Italian navy and coast guard ships took in 705 people from five boats. Malta's prime minister, Joseph Muscat, exclaimed to journalist Gwynne Dyer that "we are building a cemetery within our Mediterranean Sea.”

On Lampedusa, the shipwrecked survivors felt far from home, having faced death in a world that hardly knew their names. They met with Italian authorities and applied for asylum. But their first request was to identify the bodies of the dead, and then to return 40 of them to their families in Eritrea. The Italian government promised funeral services for the rest, but they were quickly buried in Sicily without them.

The reputation of the Mediterranean over the past decade as a "sea of death" is not unlike that of the U.S. Mexico border, which people also die trying to cross. An NGO that tracks the drownings, Fortress Europe, says 6,450 died in the channel between Sicily and North Africa between 1994 and 2012. According to the U.S. Border Patrol, 5,570 people were found dead in the desert between Mexico and the U.S. from 1998 to 2012.

The similarity in numbers highlights the global nature of migration and its often-deadly consequences. And as in the U.S., a hot debate in Italy over immigration policy has grown even more polarized in the wake of these tragedies. Many Italians express sentiments like those of Woody Guthrie, who sang of the migrants falling from an airplane deporting them to Mexico when it exploded over Los Gatos Canyon in 1942: "Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves? ?The radio says, 'They are just deportees.'"

Lampedusa residents, outraged at the continuing deaths, protested outside city hall when Italian and EU officials visited after the latest tragedy, shouting "Assassins!" and "Shame!" Lampedusa mayor Giusi Nicolini said islanders had offered to open their homes to the survivors, and were angry at the scarcity of resources given to rescuing and sheltering them. "I got there two days after the drownings," said Italian journalist Vittorio Longhi in an interview later in October. "The reception center was built to hold 250 people, but there were over a thousand living there.” He found many sleeping outdoors on the ground, with no water.

But Lampedusans and survivors also told him another disturbing fact, one that highlights a hotly debated issue in migration policy -- the criminalization of the migrants themselves. When the burning ship was sinking, survivors say they saw two fishing boats pass by without stopping. " This isn╒t a surprise," Longhi charges. "Since the criminalization of illegal immigrants was introduced in 2009 fishermen fear being accused of aiding and abetting them. They used to help people in trouble out in the ocean, but often they don╒t any longer."

The migrants themselves were terrified, he recalls, that they would be turned away and deported: "They knew the law says they might be prosecuted as illegal immigrants." When Italy had an earlier left wing government, under the "Olive Tree" coalition at the end of the 1990s, it passed a law saying that people with a sponsor could come to Italy and search for work. After only four years, however, the left lost power and the "Bossi Fini" law repealed that provision in 2002, and cut quotas for legal migration. Then under the government of Berlusconi and the Northern League in 2009 illegal entry into Italy was made a criminal offense.

As Guthrie's song goes, " Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted..."

It's no wonder, then, that the shipwrecked migrants, if they are granted asylum, want to leave Italy. Many have families in Sweden, which offers more help and tries to integrate them into Swedish society. In addition, unemployment is high in Italy, so migrants try to go further north where finding jobs is easier. But to do that, they have to gain entrance into the EU. Lampedusa is their chosen gateway, the place where they therefore apply for asylum.

Under the Schengen Agreement, people can move freely from one country in the EU to another. There are no internal border controls. But boats and planes continuously patrol the EU's periphery, like the Mediterranean Sea, to keep non-EU citizens from entering without permission. Those caught at the border can be detained and sent back, if they apply for asylum and are rejected.

Each EU country has its own asylum application process, and can decide who is allowed to live and work legally within its borders. Legal residence is required to hold a normal job in almost all of them. As in the U.S., millions of people without papers therefore sell things in the street to survive, or work in low paid jobs under the table.

Despite the danger, Longhi is sympathetic to the Eritrean migrants' motivation in leaving home. A part of his family left Eritrea after 1993, after the country became independent. "Our liberators became our oppressors," he recalls. "The repression got worse and worse, and free thinkers had to go. I have cousins now in Sweden -- other journalists who were also forced to flee."

Migrants from Eritrea and Somalia shouldn't really be seen as strangers, Longhi says. ╥We owe something to these people,” he asserts. "They╒re mostly coming from former Italian colonies - Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and Libya. Their colonial status may have ended a long time ago, but the connections forged then did not disappear."

Italian businessmen, he says, have extensive ties to the Eritrean government. Italy's previous Berlusconi administration encouraged companies, including the Berlusconi family business, to invest in a new harbor in Massawa on the Red Sea. Their support helps a repressive government stay in power, and repression and poverty are major reasons why people leave. "Economics and politics are connected," Longhi says. "People are fleeing food crisis, drought, impossible economic conditions, especially high unemployment. They have no hope for the future and see no chance of development. Where there╒s no development, dictators have more power. They govern with more repression, which then produces more asylum seekers.”

Most refugees are young, fleeing compulsory military service that starts at 17. By the time they're 25 or 26 years old many have been in the army for 5 or 6 years, caught in a grinding decades-long war with Ethiopia. Ethiopian refugees have been fighting in Somalia, and Somalis against them, or against the militias in that country's civil conflict. "Almost all say there╒s no end to military service," Longhi reports.

Laura Boldrini, speaker of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, believes "this problem [of migration and drownings] has to be solved in their countries of origin. Young people leave because there╒s no safe life for them, no rights or freedom. Because of these huge problems, an entire generation is being forced to leave. When you╒re fleeing war and the abuse of human rights, you╒re not scared of the repercussions in the countries you╒re going to. You feel you have nothing to lose.”

In other words, the fact that they might die crossing the sea, or have their asylum claims denied and face deportation or an illegal status in Italy, is not a deterrent to hundreds of thousands of migrants who have come seeking work and greater freedom. Italy, with almost 61 million people, has 4,463,413 migrants, up from 1,428,219 in 1990. Conservative estimates say that about a million have no legal status.

The Italian debate over making lack of legal status a crime echoes the debate in the U.S. over similar proposals, as well as over the value of building walls on the Mexico border and deporting 400,000 people a year. These haven't deterred migration either. From 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, to 2008, the number of Mexicans living in the U.S. rose from 4.6 to 12.6 million. Heavy immigration enforcement didn't stop young people who were unable to survive in Mexico because of the impact of economic changes and trade agreements, any more than it stopped young people fleeing war and unemployment in Eritrea.

Boldrini, who was the spokesperson in Italy of the U.N. High Commission on Refugees before being elected speaker in parliament, noted in an interview in early November that the migration by boat across the Mediterranean is only part of the flow of migrants into Italy. She estimates that over 80% of those lacking legal status come on tourist, student or other visas, and then stay after they expire. Because they can't work legally, they're forced into the underground or informal economy.

"Based on my previous experience," she says, "I think our law has to be reconsidered. The position of the Northern League [the primary party in the previous Berlusconi government] was to make irregular migration a crime, and to cut drastically the permits for legal migration. But if the objective of criminalizing people was stopping migration, it has failed. It wasn╒t a deterrent. People keep coming."

Migration is linked to globalization, she emphasizes. "The Bossi Fini law doesn╒t allow anyone to enter without having already been hired. That just encourages illegal immigration, where people enter with tourist visas, start to work, and wait for a moratorium. It╒s not realistic."

She suggests other changes as well in European policy towards amnesty applicants. In the last ten years, the EU has subcontracted border control to transit countries, mostly in North Africa. Many have set up detention centers and camps to prevent people from launching themselves in boats across the ocean. "We need to make sure that in transit countries the right to asylum is enforced," she says. "The EU countries should take part in the UNHCR resettlement programs, offering asylum to a number of refugees already screened by the UN agency in North Africa transit countries. Such a system would prevent deaths at sea and allow sharing and distributing refugees more fairly among EU member states."

In 2012 about 330,000 people applied for asylum in the EU, 30,000 more than the year before, but they had to get there to do it. Two thirds of the applications were made in Belgium, Britain, France, Germany and Sweden. On the other hand, the EU countries on the Mediterranean bear the costs of rescuing and housing the migrants crossing it. At the last European council meeting, held after the October 3 disaster, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Malta and Spain (all suffering the impact of EU austerity policies) demanded help in meeting those costs.

They didn't get a very sympathetic reception. JosÄ Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, told the press: "We must all do more to prevent tragedies like this [but] there are no magic or immediate solutions, and we need to be realistic.” Nicolas Beger of Amnesty International responded, "Not one single measure mentioned in the council conclusions will prevent further loss of life in the Mediterranean Sea. Instead, the proposed measures focus yet again on enhanced border surveillance, which will simply lead to people taking riskier routes to reach Europe.”

With the number of migrants growing, Italy and the European Union need to take into account the realities faced by immigrants, rather than criminalizing their status or treating their movement as a security threat. Meanwhile, "Lampedusa will keep doing its part,” the island's mayor Giusi Nicolini told reporters, after the survivors of the capsized ship were plucked from the water. "But we need to think of new ways for migrants to seek asylum before they get on the boats.”

Guthrie's song ends in a recitation of the deaths of the migrants of his era:

"We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes"

And if he'd lived on Lampedusa today, he might have changed his last line a little:

"Out there in the ocean, we died just the same."#

RAPPLER | NATION | Corpses still scattered across parts of Tacloban

BY PATRICIA EVANGELISTA

POSTED ON 11/27/2013 5:05 PM  | UPDATED 11/28/2013 1:34 PM

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THE BODY HUNTERS. Volunteers of Village 88 say they would do more if they had the means. Photo by Carlo Gabuco

TACLOBAN CITY, Philippines – Nearly 3 weeks after Super Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) ripped into Leyte province, bodies still lie uncollected along the inner villages of this city.

In Paradise, Village 83, a short walk from the Tacloban Leyte Ice Plant, a man’s body bobs in the water, everything but his clothes bleached a powdery white. Feather strings of skin trail in his wake, small clumps of fish gnaw away at the stumps of his arms. On the coast another corpse lies sprawled on debris among pink bottles of baby powder, his swollen body bursting the seams of his blue baseball jersey.

The children of Village 83 point to the center of the bay, right where the steel edges of half sunken container trucks are visible. There are men out there, say the children, drivers sitting inside the cabs of their own trucks. Fishermen repairing their boats along the port say more bodies are caught in the grass along the edge of the coast.

Just by the trucks, in clumps in the water, more bodies float in piles, caught on wooden markers.

Waiting for burial

In Village 88, a hamlet named Timex remains among the worst hit after the storm. As of publication, a number of bodies are scattered along the coastline. Some lie face down in shallow water, others are caught under fishing nets.

In the mangroves, near where children are playing, the corpse of a woman hangs impaled in a tangle of branches, her legs spread, her arms akimbo, thigh and ankle pierced by twigs. Her naked torso is a yellow bag of little more than bones. What is left has turned the color of wood.

Village 88 chief Emelita Montalban says she encouraged residents to help clear the bodies. She does not yet have a final count of the dead, but says that out of a constituency of 11,000, at least 1,000 were killed in the storm. She says most of those who died are residents living along the coast, most of them fathers and young men who sent their families to evacuation centers and stayed to protect their homes.

Montalban and the village council spent the 3 days before the storm ferrying residents to the Astrodome.

“We couldn’t have done it in a day,” she says. “We didn’t have enough vehicles, and there were so many.”

Many dead here

A number of families still refused to leave their omes, including two village councilors who died after insisting their houses could survive the typhoon. Several families chose to evacuate to the elementary school in a hamlet called Fisherman’s Village.

“They didn’t want to go to the Astrodome,” Montalban says. “They said there were too many people there, and that the Astrodome might collapse and kill them.”

DEAD HERE. The Fisherman's Village Elementary School. Photo by Carlo Gabuco

On the morning after the storm, Montalban saw the bodies of at least 20 children sprawled inside the Fisherman's Village classrooms.

“I couldn’t look,” she says. “I saw them and turned around.”

Josephine Lapid, whose 4 children evacuated with her to the elementary school, says they broke the jalousies of the first floor classroom windows to escape the rising water.

“I thought I would die,” she says. Her husband had brought her to the school, had even visited to bring her and the children rice to eat. He returned to their Timex home befor the storm. He remains missing.

Montalban says the village had hoped a clearing team would come to recover the bodies. When none came, she asked for body bags instead. It took 5 days for the first batch to arrive, the next came two days later, and more in the days after.

Today, there is a painted sign over the roof of the elementary school, visible from the sky.

Help, it reads. There are many dead bodies here.

The volunteers

Toding Apan leads the team of Montalban’s volunteers who are retrieving bodies from the debris of Village 88. They collect the bodies from where they lie, pack them into body bags, then place whatever identification they can find on the victim's chest before zipping the bag and carrying them out to the highway.

Apan says he is worried about the children and the elderly who are forced to live with the stench of rotting corpses. Many believe the stench is poison.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) says otherwise.

"The belief that dead bodies can cause epidemics," says the ICRC manual, "is wrongly promoted by the media, as well as some health and medical professionals." The point of rapid retrieval is to "aid identification and reduce the psychological burden on survivors."

Community members argue they will not wait to become ill, they will do what they can instead.

None of the men who volunteered to pack the bodies are elected officials. They ask for body bags from scene of the crime (SOCO) operatives who pass by to pick up bagged corpses from the side of the road. Yesterday they asked for more.

“They gave us 18." says Apan. "We think there are more bodies, but we couldn't ask for more because they said we might use the body bags to sleep in.”

Fisherman Jose Olesko estimates there are between 30 to 40 bodies still scattered across Village 88. Some are caught among the branches of mangroves, others under fishing cages.

“There was some United Nations team who was here yesterday,” he says. “We don’t know from what country. They told us we had to pick up the bodies. How could we? We don’t have boats to go into the water, or even saws to cut them out of the roots.”

Apan points to a tree fronting the highway.

“There’s a body under that,” he says. “The head is sticking out. We can’t get the rest out.”

Waiting for Cecilia

In Village 88, along Timex St. in Calubian, there is a square hectare where residents say over 50 bodies were recovered.

William Cabuquin says he lived beside the corpses of his friends for 14 days before body bags came in.

“We bagged 6 of them,” he says. One of them was the young daughter of his best friend.

William is one of several men who continue to live in Timex. Most of his neighbors have left for the Astrodome, or have chosen to build shanties along the San Jose Highway.

He does not want to live with the noise of evactuation centers, he says. It is quiet where he is.

WILLIAM WAITS. William Cabuquing stands on the foundation of his house along Timex in Village 88. Photo by Carlo Gabuco

William sent all 4 children of his children away before the storm. He tried to send away his wife Cecilia away as well, but she insisted on staying with him to watch their house.

The couple tried to outrun the storm when Yolanda hit, but they were caught in the surge of water with 20 other people, all of them clutching a bundle of bamboo. When the bundle reached the other side of the bay, only 6 people were left, including William.

William wishes he had forced his wife to leave with his children. He looked for her body among the corpses, but he couldn't find her in the hundreds he saw.

He does not know if she is still alive. He admits the doubt is the reason he chooses to live in Timex, in spite of the stench and the dead.

He hopes Cecilia will return safe. If she does, he will be waiting at home. – Rappler