Waiting Game for North Cotabato Refugees
Outside the Buisan warehouse, a “tent city” has sprung up: chickens, goats, carabaos, cows and horses brought by the evacuees wander and feed off the neighboring grasslands.
Home right now for Samira Abas, 20, a mother of three, is a cart covered by a tarpaulin.
“We bought the tent at the market so the children and our belongings would not get wet when there would be rains. My husband would sleep outside our covered cart because it could not longer accommodate him,” Abas said.
“We are really very pitiful. We really want to go home but we are afraid because the situation is still dangerous,” she said, almost in tears.
In response to the complaints of the evacuees that some did not receive assistance, Yusop Usman, a Pikit social worker at the Buisan evacuation center, maintained that aid workers merely asked for a master list of evacuees from local social welfare officials.
“They run the relief operations themselves,” he said.
There is no immediate sign of the refugee centers closing down or emptying of people and the August 18 fighting North of here that left a reported 40 civilians dead will only heighten concerns that the fighting is far from over.
Before the latest fighting, Senior Inspector Elias Dandan, the local police chief told a local congregation celebrating mass on Sunday that it was “already safe to return home.”
Clad in fatigue uniform, he also apologized to residents for their being affected by “a small conflict that resulted in a massive evacuation.”
And yet like others, Nancy Macagba, from the village of Kolambog, does not want to take any risks regardless of any assurances by Dandan.
“Our four-hectare farm of corn and coconuts is waiting but our village is a hot spot. We are still afraid to go home,” the 39-year old mother said.
“How I wish peace will reign in our midst. We are tired of being displaced,” said Macagba. Philippine Human Rights Reporting Project
(The author is a Mindanao journalist and a correspondent for the daily BusinessWorld. He also reports for a string of Mindanao-based news outfits.)
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