We join the Filipino people today in recalling the tragedy wrought by supertyphoon Yolanda ten years ago, mainly to the people of Tacloban City, where thousands of people died in the flooding caused by the storm surge. Thousands of people in other Visayas islands also suffered death and destruction as the supertyphoon swept across their communities and homes.
Supertyphoon Yolanda underscores the grave impact of climate change which has induced increasingly powerful and devastating weather events in the Philippines and around the world. Almost every year, the country suffers from more powerful cyclones, landslides and widespread flooding that bring tragedy to millions of people.
An equal if not bigger tragedy suffered by Yolanda survivors, however, is the gross neglect by successive governments since 2013. Corrupt bureaucrats mulcted calamity funds and donations that should have went directly to the people. Tens of thousands of urban poor dwellers and fisherfolk in the coastal areas have yet to completely recover from the destruction of their homes and livelihood.
The reactionary government has been using the Yolanda tragedy as pretext to remove survivors from their land and deprive them of their livelihood, to pave the way for reclamation and other infrastructure projects that serve the interests of foreign big business, their bourgeois comprador partners and bureaucrat capitalists. Worse, survivors who have organized themselves to collectively voice out their plight have been subjected to surveillance and fascist suppression to silence them.
The Party is one with all Yolanda survivors and survivors of all calamities in their demand and struggle for just recompense, and in their fight for their economic and political rights to be respected.
