Balangiga bells arrive
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.
Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana received the bells from US Ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim in a handover ceremony.
The American envoy said it was 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 would 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 a 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 Mattis 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 veteransto-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.
Presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo says Malacañang welcomed the United States' return of the Balangiga bells to the Philippines but said it will withhold any further comment on the matter "until the last bell has been properly delivered to the country."
"In the words of the president himself: 'It ain't here until it's here,'" he says as quoted by the state-run news agency PTV.
The three bells were taken by American soldiers as war booty more than a century ago.
Ties of the Philippines with its longtime ally, the US, have soured after criticisms on human rights violations in Duterte's war on drugs.
Duterte had similarly raised rights violations committed by the United States, particularly the killing of Moros at Bud Dajo in 1906.