Rebels, floods displace NCotabato residents

NORTH COTABATO, Philippines - About a thousand villagers were forced to abandon their homes following an attack by marauding Moro rebels and by rampaging floods that struck different parts of the province Thursday.

Nine low-lying areas in Tulunan town in the second district of North Cotabato have been inundated with up to waist-deep floodwaters following heavy rains early Thursday in surrounding hinterlands, according to Jeric Ardina, of the municipality’s disaster risk reduction and management council.

Ardina said the flooded areas are scattered in Tulunan’s adjoining Barangays Poblacion, Cajelo, New Esperanza, Bagumbayan, Sibsib, Dungos, Popoyon, Bual and Damawato, whose residents rely mainly on rice and corn farming as source of income.  

The flashfloods forced hundreds to relocate to higher grounds, Ardina said.

Just as evacuees moved out from the flooded Tulunan villages, marauding members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) fired at a group of farmers attempting to return to their enclaves in Barangay Manubuan in Matalam town, , also in the second district of North Cotabato.

The beleaguered villagers were earlier driven out of their farmsteads in Barangay Manubuan by MILF rebels from far away, trying to claim ownership of strategic patches of arable lands in the area.

The latest attack dislocated about 400 more villagers, according to local officials.

Sammy Matuguel, 36, one of the farmers the rebels fired at, said he and his companions were to harvest their abandoned crops for them to have food while in an evacuation site at the center of Barangay Manubuan.

“But even before we could get close to our farms, the MILF rebels there shot us with their assault rifles,” Matuguel said in Filipino.

An incumbent barangay councilor in Manubuan, Daud Daud Tigkanan, said the rebels are against the return of evacuees to their farms.

Tigkanan said the rebels have positioned themselves along a road leading to the farmlands of dozens of farmers now housed in evacuation sites.