A Roman Catholic Church leader is urging the government to remember the people of Marawi as he lamented the slow rehabilitation efforts in the area.
“It has been three years since the last shots of war were fired in Marawi but nothing much has happened since then,” said Marawi Bishop Edwin Dela Peña in a Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) News post.
“Ground zero is still an image of destruction reminiscent of the early days of the siege,” he added.
The Church leader said the government’s focus has shifted to the recent calamities that hit the country one after the other – the Taal volcano eruption, the coronavirus disease pandemic, and typhoon “Ambo”.
“These relegated us to the backdoor of history… to the point of being completely forgotten from the national psyche,” Dela Pena lamented.
The bishop said, thousands of affected residents living in the main battle area have not returned home to resume their lives. “Many of them still live in temporary shelters,” he said.
Dela Pena said that even he and other residents of St. Mary Cathedral compound in Marawi continue to stay at a village in Lanao del Norte.
“All IDPs (internally displaced persons) from the ground zero are still living in temporary shelters. The future is still uncertain for all of us,” the prelate said.
The Marawi siege was a five-month-long armed conflict in Marawi, Lanao del Sur that started on May 23, 2017, between government forces and militants affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), including the Maute and Abu Sayyaf Salafi jihadist groups.
The battle also became the longest urban battle in the modern history of the Philippines. (Christina I. Hermoso)