Yolanda survivors
outraged over government’s dirty moves, puts them on trial by ordeal –
People Surge
Press Release
March 8, 2014
TACLOBAN CITY – The
People Surge alliance from Eastern Visayas today scored the Aquino
government for putting the Yolanda survivors through a trial by ordeal
as evinced by Department of Social Welfare and Development Sec.
Corazon “Dinky” Soliman trying to sow discord among the Typhoon
Yolanda (Haiyan) survivors.
“It seems the Aquino
government wants to make the Yolanda survivors prove themselves by
forcing them to go through a trial by ordeal,” said Sr. Edita Eslopor,
People Surge spokesperson. “The Yolanda survivors have already
launched a mass demonstration of 12,000 last January 25 as well as
presented a petition signed by 17,000 survivors. What more does the
government want, that people will start dying in the thousands as they
bound to do if the government does not intervene?
“Dinky Soliman stoops so low
as to inveigle some Yolanda survivors into saying that they are happy
with the government's handling of the Yolanda humanitarian crisis. How
can the survivors be happy when even the government data from DSWD
show otherwise? The DSWD has not been able to feed the survivors for
the past more than 100 days, who have been forced to make ends meet
just so they could survive on a subsistence level. The DSWD's
“cash-for-work” program benefitted only some 16,000 survivors out of
hundreds of thousands looking for livelihood, and for ten days only at
that.”
Eslopor added that Soliman
took the trouble to fly to Leyte and make some survivors sign papers
in haste praising the government and the DSWD, when representatives of
the survivors were already in Manila to bring their plight to
President Aquino. In another case, some victims are being bribed for
as much as P1,200 in exchange for their signatures signifying
satisfaction over services of the DSWD.
“We think Soliman is trying
to save her career to the detriment of the Yolanda survivors. We
remind the public that this is not the first time that Soliman and the
DSWD, the entire Aquino government, have been called to account for
their miserable performance. Do we remember typhoons Pablo and Ondoy,
not to mention the Bohol earthquake? How people languished under the
heat of the sun and under the rain, while the DSWD and the Aquino took
their perversely procrastinating time to deliver emergency services to
the people? People are suffering and dying out there, and here is
Dinky Soliman, waving papers to say everybody is happy. What exactly
does she want except to save her own skin and not the lives of the
people?”
The People Surge alliance
called on Soliman to stop using the Yolanda survivors to save her
political career. “If Dinky Soliman cannot do it, she must resign.
That is the honorable thing to do and it will give somebody else the
chance to make up for the lost opportunities the DSWD had to attend to
the people. But if Soliman must resign, the pressure is much greater
on President Aquino and his government. Soliman is only one
functionary of the Aquino government, but is her negligence the sum of
its parts? President Aquino must do something quickly to salvage the
government's credibility or he will face the wrath of the people.”
