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 Before dawn on Saturday, more than 5,000 people holding white
balloons and candles mournfully walked around the regional capital
Tacloban City, passing through areas flattened by Haiyan's 250 kph
(155 mph) winds and seven-metre high storm surge.
Church bells peeled and sirens wailed at the start of a Roman
Catholic mass at the city's almost half-hectare mass grave site
where nearly 3,000 people storm victims are buried. Hundreds are
still unaccounted.
"It’s important that we make it meaningful, so for the next
generations people will remember this," the city's mayor, Alfred
Romualdez, told Reuters.
Typhoon Haiyan wiped out or damaged practically everything in its
path as it swept ashore on Nov. 8, 2013, destroying around 90
percent of the city of Tacloban in Leyte province.
More than 14.5 million people were affected by the storm in six
regions and 44 provinces. More than four million people still remain
homeless.
Hundreds of people, most of them fishermen, staged protests in the
city on Saturday, demanding the government provide new homes and
jobs, and accusing officials of diverting aid and reconstruction
funds.
"We have felt a year's worth of the government's vicious
abandonment, corruption, deceit, and repression, and have seen a
year’s worth of news and studies that confirm this situation,"
Efleda Bautista, a leader of People Surge, a group of typhoon
survivors, said.
The protesters, some covered with mud to dramatize their plight, say
they will burn a nine-foot effigy of the president later on Saturday
in protest.
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The government estimates it needs almost 170 billion pesos ($3.8
billion) to rebuild the affected communities, including the
construction of a four-meter high dike along the 27-km coastline to
prevent a repeat of the disaster.
President Benigno Aquino, in a visit to nearby Samar island on
Friday, unveiled a plan to relocate Tacloban airport away from the
coastline and the building of more than 205,000 permanent homes to
resettle displaced families.
"This is not politics," Aquino told reporters, defending his
government against criticism it was slow to respond to the disaster,
citing reports showing reconstruction work was moving at a faster
pace than the 2004 tsunami in Aceh.
"I would hope we can move even faster and I will push everybody to
move even faster, but the sad reality is the scope of work you need
to do can really not be done overnight."
(Reporting by Roland Ng; Writing By Manuel Mogato; Editing by Jeremy
Laurence)
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