The Philippines is entering the peak of its annual typhoon season. Last week, Typhoon Gaemi brought mass flooding to Manila, killing dozens and causing the vessel Terra Nova to capsize off its coast, spilling its cargo of industrial fuel oil into the ocean.
In a normal year, Jazmin Jerusalem would be traversing communities, distributing money and providing training. She’s the executive director of Leyte Center for Development Inc. (LCDe), an NGO dedicated to disaster preparation and relief in the country’s eastern islands of Leyte and Samar – the most vulnerable areas to powerful typhoons coming off the Pacific Ocean.
Jerusalem had a lot planned for this year. The Philippines experiences around 20 typhoons in a given year, and these storms are becoming stronger due to human-caused climate change, bringing economic, public health, and other humanitarian challenges to Samar and Leyte. In one programme, funded by the humanitarian organisation CARE, LCDe educated local health workers in preventing diseases after a typhoon and distributed more than 300 glucometers and blood pressure monitors.
“In the event of a disaster, it’s not going to be the government who responds first. It’s not even going to be us in the NGO. It’s going to be your neighbour,” Jerusalem said. “It’s really [enabling] the vulnerable communities to absorb the effects of disasters and rise up.”
In November 2013, Leyte and Samar were devastated by Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest typhoons ever recorded. The storm killed at least 6,300 people – which Jerusalem believes is a significant undercount – and destroyed cities and towns throughout the region, including LCDe’s offices in the town of Palo, directly in Haiyan’s epicentre. “We weren’t able to save anything, except of course our lives,” Jerusalem said.
Haiyan also became a case study in community-based disaster response. LCDe had helped rural stores stock vegetables and nonperishable goods, allowing them to provide food to areas cut off from aid workers. “We proved that communities can be the first responders,” Jerusalem explained.
This year, however, her work has ground to a halt. In April, the country’s Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) ordered banks to freeze LCDe’s accounts, along with the personal accounts of Jerusalem, her son, and three staffers, accusing the NGO of financing terrorism. On 2 May, the banks complied, immediately severing LCDe’s access to transfers from foreign funders, including the money CARE planned to send for the community health programme.
“It wasn’t even half the amount yet,” Jerusalem said. “It was really so abrupt.”
The Philippines passed a controversial anti-terrorism law in 2020, giving a newly created Anti-Terrorism Council the power to designate groups as terrorists, detain them, or freeze their assets without charges. The AMLC, a separate entity, is responsible for countering terrorism financing.
At the time, the government promised the new law would not be used against civilian activists. Since its passage, however, rights groups allege it has been used solely for that purpose – and its weaponisation against organisations providing disaster relief puts millions of Filipinos at risk.
Last year, bank accounts belonging to the Indigenous group Cordillera People’s Alliance were frozen after four members were designated by the Anti-Terrorism Council as being “terrorist” suspects. Since then, charges of financing terrorism were filed against members of CERNET, a Cebu-based development organisation, and the Paghida-et sa Kauswagan Development Group, or PDG, a land rights group in the central island of Negros, leading to fears their accounts will also be frozen.
And in June, the Citizens Disaster Response Center, or CDRC, had its own bank accounts frozen because it had received money from LCDe, which it said were excess funds being returned from LCDe’s relief operations after a typhoon in 2022.
In July, a group of rights defenders asked four UN Special Rapporteurs to review the “weaponisation” of counter-terrorism laws against humanitarian workers.
Out of the blue
“We didn’t see it coming,” said Jerusalem, who said LCDe chooses the recipients of its funds by collaborating with local governments and, as a nonprofit, carefully tracks its finances, making it impossible to funnel money to terrorists.
Jerusalem knew she had government critics – but figured she had many more friends. In 2021, military men had accused LCDe, without evidence, of funding communist rebels fighting a decades-long insurgency against the Philippine government, a practice known locally as “red-tagging”. The military even organised a rally outside LCDe’s office, recruiting farmers to participate.
But Jerusalem brushed it off as bluster from members of former president Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-communist task force, which was known to make wild, unsourced allegations against critics. After all, LCDe had received awards from the Philippine government’s national defence, economic development, and social welfare bureaus, and Jerusalem herself was recognised by the National Anti-Poverty Commission in December for her 15 years of service on the panel. “That was the reason we were so trusting,” she said.
Many NGOs hoped for a reprieve when President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., elected in 2022, promised human rights reforms including exploring an end to “red-tagging”. But he left intact the Duterte-era anti-communism task force, despite a call last year from UN Special Rapporteur Ian Fry to abolish it. This task force has continued to make unsourced allegations against progressive groups, giving credibility to other efforts to detain or arrest their leaders – or freeze their funds.
“They’ve been freezing funds of anyone without giving substance to their accusations. They are judicially harassing us.”
Some affected NGOs are familiar targets. PDG, the group in Negros, has found itself at odds with the military for years; its executive director, the human rights attorney Benjamin Ramos, was killed by motorcycle-riding gunmen in 2018 days after reporting military harassment.
In rural areas, such progressive groups are often closest to vulnerable communities in need of humanitarian aid. But in April, two current PDG staffers and two former staff, including the widow of Benjamin Ramos, were charged with financing terrorism. Their funds haven’t been frozen yet, but they worry they will be next.
“They’ve been freezing funds of anyone without giving substance to their accusations,” said Felipe Levy Gelle, one of the charged former members. “They are judicially harassing us.”
Gelle and other PDG members have faced dubious criminal charges in the past, which they believe were efforts to stop their work. And while the group was founded to help farmers locked in land rights struggles, PDG has more recently faced retribution for its disaster response work.
After Typhoon Rai hit Negros in 2021, PDG delivered sacks of rice and building materials to affected communities throughout the island. “PDG gave the first response,” said Joselito Macapobre, a member of a local fishermen's association in Cauayan, a town in the southwest of Negros.
Soon after the typhoon, however, the military established a presence in his community, warning people not to associate with PDG. Macapobre described the campaign as intimidating. “Some people left out of fear,” he said.
Aid paralysis
PDG’s entire budget currently consists of about $51,000 it receives annually from the Luxembourg-based NGO Action Solidarité Tiers Monde. “If they’re not delivered to us, PDG would be paralysed,” said Isidro Genol Jr, a member of the group’s management committee.
CDRC operates on a larger scale. Since being founded in 1984, it has served more than 11 million people in nearly every region of the Philippines and was the first organisation in the Philippines to introduce a model of community-based disaster response, said Susana Balingit, its longtime leader.
Balingit never expected to be targeted by the government. She has quite literally rubbed shoulders with politicians as a practitioner of traditional medicine at The Farm at San Benito, a five-star resort and self-described “holistic medical sanctuary” two hours south of Manila, where her clients have included several presidents and their families. Balingit said this work acted as her “shield from red-tagging” when, in 2021, she was one of 27 petitioners who challenged the constitutionality of the Anti-Terrorism Law in the Supreme Court. All but a few provisions were upheld.
But CDRC’s work was stopped in June when the AMLC abruptly ordered its funds be frozen, citing the money that had been returned from LCDe. To Balinget, the notion her NGO would sponsor terrorism was absurd. “We’re so legitimate,” she said. “We have internal audits. We have external audits. Every [cent] we get is accounted for.”
Balingit wonders if her group was targeted for spreading a message of “harnessing people’s power”, building sustainable communities rather than relying solely on large-scale government efforts to prevent disasters and provide relief.
The country’s highest appeals court has already ordered the AMLC to either unfreeze CDRC’s accounts or ask for an extension, but the AMLC has yet to respond, meaning the CDRC may have to hire lawyers to fight the order in court.
In the meantime, the group is still active, but it is struggling to work with local NGOs dependent on its technical and financial support – NGOs such as LCDe, which will also likely have to sue to unfreeze its bank accounts.
Jerusalem laughed while recalling that, just weeks after her accounts were frozen, she travelled to Rhode Island to attend a conference held by Brown University and the US Naval War College, where she spoke alongside three members of the Philippine military – hardly an event that would host a terrorist.
Jerusalem has saved cash that she estimates will last LCDe until September – but that’s only if Samar and Leyte are lucky enough to avoid a major storm. In an average typhoon season, Jerusalem estimates LCDe serves about 20,000 people in the path of disasters.
“So we can say that 20,000 people will be deprived of the help we could have given them,” she said. “We are immobile.”
Edited by Ali M. Latifi.
