MANILA, Philippines — After being taken as war booty more than a century ago, the three Balangiga bells arrived home in the Philippines.
The three historic bells on Tuesday landed at Villamor Air Base in Pasay City aboard a United States Air Force C-130.
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Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana will officially receive the bells from US Ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim in a handover ceremony.
The American envoy said it would be an honor for him to return the bells, which were taken from San Lorenzo de Martir Church in Balangiga, Easten Samar in 1901.
"It has been a long road home for these bells, which were caught up in the aftermath of the tragic conflict that raged across this archipelago at the turn of the last century," Kim said in a column published by The STAR.
President Rodrigo Duterte was supposed to attend the handover ceremony but Malacañang announced on Monday that the president will skip the event.
In his 2017 State of the Nation Address, Duterte demanded the return of the church bells. Two of which have been part of a memorial at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming while the third one was with a US Army regiment in South Korea.
Kim, on the other hand, credited the return of the bells to the efforts of US Defense Secretary James driven by "respect for the Philippines, our friend, partner and ally."
Rolando Borrinaga, secretary of the National Committee on Historical Research of the National Commission on Culture and the Arts, earlier said the campaign to return the bells was more of a veterans-to-veterans effort.
According to the historian, two major war veterans in the US started the campaign to return the Balangiga bells to the Philippines.
"There has been no paper from the Philippines related to this campaign. It seems like a successful legislation in the US to return the bells to us," Borrinaga said in an interview with ABS-CBN's Bandila last month.