Four years after the siege: Media zoom in on Marawi with various frames of plight and fight

NEARLY A third of the estimated 300,000 people have yet to return home; 330 bodies retrieved from ground zero buried unidentified in cemeteries; 3,000 families displaced continue to live in crowded temporary homes. 

May 23, 2017 marked the beginning of a traumatic five-month battle between ISIS-linked extremists and the Philippine military. It has been four years since the Maute terror group laid siege to the city in Lanao del Sur, which ended in October 23, 2017. But much of Marawi still remains in ruins and residents have not been allowed to rebuild their homes.  

The anniversary of Marawi’s fall cued the media to recall the prolonged agony, with more suffering wrought by the pandemic. News accounts provided diverse angles with which to revisit the story. 

CMFR monitored six print organizations (The Philippine Daily Inquirer, The Philippine Star, Manila Bulletin, The Manila Times, Manila Standard, and The Daily Tribune,) four primetime news programs (ABS-CBN’s TV Patrol, GMA-7’s 24 Oras, TV5’s Frontline Pilipinas and CNN Philippines’ News Night), including their online counterparts; Rappler and Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) for a week, from May 23 to May 30, 2021.

Most media accounts focused on faces, stories of families, individuals recording, their feelings of loss and frustration still poignant after four years. Despite varying lenses, journalists captured the dominant theme of prolonged crisis, the endless waiting. 

TV Patrol went back to clips of the battle, the gunshots fired and the bombing of the city that destroyed its famed religious sites; following this with footage of still ongoing rehabilitation, flashing before and after shots of destroyed infrastructure such as the Banggolo bridge, Grand Mosque, and Disomangcop Mosque.

TV Patrol and Frontline Pilipinas interviewed residents, describing their situation years later and hoping for the quick passage of Marawi compensation bill. Different versions of the bill propose P30 billion to P50 billion in total compensation to benefit some 27,000 families displaced from the former battle area, yet the bills remain pending in both chambers of Congress.

Frontline Pilipinas and Rappler turned to those who have had to live in temporary shelters and their resilient ways to move forward, their lives as they knew it in the past now mere memory.

Special reports of GMA News, CNN Philippines and ABS-CBN showed the pain of not knowing, interviewing those who had not been able to locate the missing members of family, their search coming up only with dead ends. 

Print took the deep dive into the issues of government failure. Philippine Daily Inquirer and Philippine Star selected Marawi residents who urged government to prioritize reconstruction. Both cited Drieza Lininding, chairperson of the Moro Consensus Group, who complained that the actual pace of rebuilding was not the progress that government claimed. 

Inquirer and Star also published their respective editorials that referred to collated data highlighting the slow rehabilitation of the city, along with the calls of the residents to hasten the project. Inquirer crunched numbers that showed the rehabilitation will not be finished by its announced target of completion by the end of 2021. “For one, of the P70 billion earmarked for the city’s reconstruction, only P17 billion was included in the national budget from 2018 to 2020,” the editorial read. This means government will have to wait for another annual budget for the work to move forward. 

Other broadsheets, namely Daily Tribune, Manila Times, Manila Standard and Manila Bulletin depended more on the Palace, Task Force Bangon Marawi (TFBM) and officials like Mayor Majul Usman Gandamra who said the rehabilitation is ‘65% complete.’ The reports cited promises and target projects by the national and local government. The major projects include the construction of the Marawi maritime outpost, bridges, parks, museums, schools, a central fire station, road networks, and a traffic command station. The Bulletin also published an editorial on Marawi, consistent with its news reports, referring only to officials and their statements, mostly fixed on the aforementioned projects.

The four newspapers missed out completely the plight of displaced residents. They did not include among their sources the civic leaders who have been working on the same issues. The articles echoed the officials’ statements as Bulletin’s editorial called on the communities to “trust and and respect authorities” adding with no touch of irony “so that the children and younger generation may nurture hopes for a brighter future.”

Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) covered a wider angle in its in-depth report titled ‘Buildings rise 4 years after Marawi Siege, but few residents allowed back,’ which gave detail on the rehabilitation and its impact to displaced residents. More than a general note, it tackled specific issues worsened by the government’s slow progress in rehabilitation: the COVID-19 pandemic, continuing indigence, illegal demolitions by TFBM, struggle to secure permits, and food and water scarcity. Other than the residents, it also cited Lininding who said that “Rebuilding homes should be the priority instead of “ornamental” projects that TFBM had been funding.” Lininding was referring to the prioritization of museums that will only “bring pack pain” rather than solve actual problems.

Despite the numerous interviews, only Rappler documented the role of a hero, Maranao leader and peace activist Agakhan Sharief who died of a lingering illness on Tuesday, May 25. Sharief saved hundreds of trapped civilians during the siege “by brokering a shaky ceasefire between the military and the Maute group.”

Manila-based media did well to remind the nation of the unfinished work in Marawi four years after. But perhaps, media should be doing this even between milestones when news coverage has largely relied on the occasional government updates, mostly positive, and recorded straight from official statements that claim progress of reconstruction and rehabilitation.

Beyond producing special reports to mark the dates of the Marawi siege and the city’s liberation, the media must make this issue a regular part of the news agenda, even after the city rises yet again. 

CMFR had monitored the coverage which picked up early the number of times the administration missed its own scheduled dates, with the president missing his own appointments to be in Marawi and kick-off the massive reconstruction. Again, the government floundered, seemingly clueless about how to address the issues of property lines and other questions, and not knowing how to resolve some of the complex questions that arose with rebuilding what had been a long and historic settlement. 

Unfortunately, media did not continue to keep watch over the process as closely as this tragedy deserved to be reported. Perhaps, journalists can do better and not wait for the fifth year.